In the first lesson, God reveals herself and makes her glory manifest through her redemptive love for her people, expressed here through a marriage metaphor. God will lead her people and her land and be their protector. It is a patriarchal construct, particularly when read with the original masculine grammar. However, just as we have grown in our understandings of the ways in which hearts bind to each other and commit to love and nurture, support and protect each other the metaphor can expand with our understanding. While salvation is most often a corporate endeavor throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Psalms it is frequently an individual’s plea or testimony. In this Sunday’s psalm a single soul tells the story of her miraculous deliverance and the awe inspiring revelation of God that she encountered, one that is more theophany than epiphany. The community receiving the epistle waits for such a moment of redemption with God’s saving presence made fully known in their midst. The Baptizer proclaims the day has come, the One has come and bearing witness, God comes down like a dove in thundering love for an only begotten beloved holy child.