This collection of writings is all about God's love for humankind, for each and every one of God's children, regardless of whether they've been good or bad this year. It's about God's faithfulness- come rain or come shine. But then again, it's also revealing about how we get along, or don't get along with our Maker and with our brothers and sisters in this same human condition.

Today we turn to Psalm 89 in our story, a special prayer song of Ethan the Ezrahite. This was not a family name familiar to me. I had to look him up in the genealogy. Sources say he was likely a sage or a court musician, and a Maskil- this song so to speak, either is meant as an artistic work or a teaching song of sorts. While I pondered the words of this prayer this week, I found that it offers great insight into the family story, so much so that I've started to think of it as the family therapy song of scripture.

It begins with love. 'Your love' God, is my song. The singer waxes on about this faithfulness, this love, this admiration and adulation of God's great deeds. The intended flattery is apparent - big time. But then it jumps track to recall the family pledge, the promise to David and his descendants forever. God's words are echoed back - You said - the singer muses. You pledged really, perhaps with your hand on a stack of Bibles - that Everyone descending from David's family line is guaranteed life, and power, and happiness, and blessings, and cookies and milk every night before bed. YOU PROMISED….

Ethan sings on some more - praising God with more eloquent words, with all kinds of allusions to both God's power and God's beauty. Then we get back to this promise. The singer wants to make sure that the promise is true, not just for his time but for all time; that God is good for God's word, not just to David himself, but really and for true to everyone who follows him. But we also know from our own varied experiences with our own kin that family promises sometimes stand on shaky ground. Human parents promise that kid #1 will be loved forever, that he will be special and always meriting one's full attention. Then kid #2 comes along and she has infantile needs that must be met. Then kid #3 arrives and kid #2 gets the highly maligned position of middle child. And on it goes. Well, with Kings and their descendants - who really knows what kind of spoiling, and cajoling, and bribery is going on there? What's an exasperated parental God figure to do? You promise blessings and favor, and the kids get a little sassy about it. In fact, these kids start to spit on God's direction, tear up God's rules, and God may have to turn to punishment to keep them in line - which doesn't feel much like the reward that was promised. It hurts to be reprimanded, especially by the ones who love us most dearly.

Unfortunately God offers us no special exception. God offers us human children correction as well as favor, justice as well as mercy. God still keeps the holy promise to look on David and his family throughout the generations, but they don't always like how it goes. Being in God's watchful eye all the time seems, as the lyricist shares it, as inescapable as the weather.

Were we to read on in the text, the next verses switch abruptly from glowing praise of God's faithfulness to go on to question if God has gone off and left us. Ethan wonders with his audience if God has left the Davidic line for good. Even God's beloved David himself had moments of great humiliation before his enemies. He was embarrassed that God's promises didn't always wear so well. So the disgruntled kids confront the absent parent by breaking into chords of rebellion. Just who is at fault when we mess up? Is it all on the disobedient kids? Does King David get blamed forever for the poor attitude of his descendants - even the ones he never met? Or is God, the divine parent at fault for making - as Mary Poppins might say - a pie crust promise, easily made, easily broken? It's not all that popular to admit to these days, but the strongest advocates of a "Family Systems Theory" say that family members pass along multiple traits from one generation to the next with relatively little change taking place. We'd like to think that there's no way that we'll end up a crusty curmudgeon like dear old Dad, or a closet alcoholic like mother. However, the theory proposes that even though the expressions of our bad behaviors may change somewhat, the anxiety beneath them will be repeated over, and over, and over again until we find a truly better way to relieve the pain that comes with living with the very same people who hurt us.

Our bard, Ethan is starting to get there. "Your love, God, is my song, and I'll sing it!" he says. I love this love story, and especially this love song precisely because of all its twists and turns. But honestly, God might have picked a better candidate in which to start the family line that would save the world. Truth be told - King David certainly had his faults - arrogance, lust, deceit. He was a conspirator to murder, for heaven's sake. It makes one wonder, were his kids really all that different? Most likely not! The kind of change that leads to growth and new possibilities for a family such as his always seems to come because an important member of the family is able to remain faithful to the greater good even in the midst of wildly fluctuating anxiety and all sorts of problematic outcomes. He or she does not bend to the chaos of the dysfunctional family set-up. She or he stays connected and loving even while allowing the rest of the tribe the pain of learning from its own mistakes.

So God patiently waits, and in God's good time, sends Jesus to the human family. Again, it seems like a mistake. Joseph is the relative in the Davidic line, not Mary, and Joseph is Jesus' father by adoption alone so it seems. Amazingly, God remains true to the promise, connected to this flawed family over multiple generations. God does not walk off and leave us. God continues to bless us with new possibilities. And strangely enough, God fulfills this promise through nothing less than the tangled web of human relationships.

But isn't this how families are - even God's family? We make promises. We renege on those promises. We lose faith. We fight. We grow apart. We yearn for closeness. We come back together. We get hurt again. We are drawn to the same familiar patterns. We intellectually reject those patterns. We look for love in someone else's family and find ourselves connecting to people whose families are most like our own.

Oddly enough, Christmas fills us with a longing for family togetherness. We get nostalgic for Christmases past, and like a woman with childbirth, we forget all the pain, and only remember the joy, and warmth, and epidural like state of carbed-up, sugar-filled bliss. It's no wonder we ramp up the gift-giving and the expectations, and then ultimately reap more disappointment than ever when the advertisers' promises don't deliver. What will it take to get us off this crazy treadmill? Is there redemption, even for a consumer saturated Christian 2,000 years past the birth of David's promised descendant, who truly is our Savior? Is there room for shepherd-like wonder? Is there room for "wiseman"- like reverence? Can we get past the need to please, and the re-opening of old wounds long enough to marvel together at the honest and conscientious life of our Savior?

Jesus saves. It's part of his God-given name. But we've made the mistake of thinking that Jesus saves only individuals. If that were the main point of the story, it would be a sad story indeed. But this is good news! Scripture teaches us that the saving power of Jesus stretches back multiple generations toward his ancestor David and into a future in which our lives are touched and forever changed because he was able to put his trust fully in God's promises. Ethan sings about God's faithfulness, and guarantee of everlasting life. Jesus lives it to show us that it can be done.

I'll close with the words of Gabriel, Mary's angel, who reminds us, "Nothing is impossible with God."

Amen.