Tainted Legacy

​This month in worship, as we continue through the narrative of scripture, we are going to be looking at four stories that could be tied together by the phrase tainted legacy.

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The first story will be the Golden Calf incident.  It’s probably not the story the people who followed God in the wilderness want to be remembered for.  But so it is with our lives.  It is filled with moments of faithfulness and good works but also with moments of mistakes and failures.  The legacy of the wilderness people began with an amazing start, followed mostly by moments of great faith and accomplishments, yet still tainted with their struggle to fully trust and follow God.  Still, we must ask, ‘Which of us can really claim to have fared any better?’  That our struggle mirrors theirs might just make their story all the better a teacher.

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The next story is a double legacy story.  It starts with a baren mom bargaining with God for a son whom she would dedicate to God.  God hears her and gives her Samuel, who becomes the spiritual leader for all his people.  Though he is remembered most for picking the first two kings of Israel, he largely considers this a compromise that lead the people to follow a king instead of God alone. As we think about this story, are there things we have done that we have later regretted?

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The third story is about a famous chapter in the Hebrew Bible that is known as the Davidic Covenant.  The story of God’s promise to always raise up someone from the line of David to rule over the people.  David’s legacy, even marred as it will become, is still tied up in this promise to be the origin of the true line of Israel’s kings— something the New Testament writers clearly tie to Jesus as Son of David. So it is that David becomes the prototypical King to whom all kings get compared.  And we see in him, that even those labeled the best of us can or have done harmful, even terrible things.

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We will close out the month with the story of Solomon’s greatest legacy: building the first temple of Israel.  Finally, a great symbol of God living with God’s people is established.  Ironically, however, heavy taxation, forced labor, and even weapons sales to build this temple will eventually lead to God’s chosen people dividing into two kingdoms.

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Sometimes, the question is posed, ‘What will your legacy be?’ The idea is usually implied to mean that we should strive to live our lives in such a way that we leave behind something we want to be remembered for—hopefully, even something that ultimately makes the world better.

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In truth, we probably, at best, leave multiple legacies to different people.  And I’m sure that they are mixed without exception.  Still, that doesn’t mean the bad should outweigh the good we do or vice versa.  Perhaps the best we can say is that we weren’t perfect.  This is who I am—the whole of it.  Take my legacy and learn from it.  Indeed, that is what we will try to do this month

 

Be well,
The Rev.