Article Man*

The Episcopal church has this on its marquee this week:

BLESSED IS THE NATION WHOSE GOD IS LORD

I saw it as I drove by, then circled the block and drove by again, then wrote it down to make sure I remembered it correctly. I puzzled over this for the 15 minutes it took me to get to Google™.
I took it that, since this church was situated in a midwestern farm town, the God of whom they spoke was the God of Benedict and DeMille. But the text leaves some wiggle room here. I read it as:

"Blessed is the nation which puts its God first."

Am I wrong? Is this not the reading? Of course, there are many gods to choose from. We can assume that in the US (or the West, even), that protestants, Catholics, Jews and others can all get behind Yahweh as its Lord. But is this sign saying that the nations who put Buddha or Allah first are equally blessed? It's a very PC-sounding idea, but not one I thought these particular Episcopalians were advancing.

After these musings, I check out biblegateway.com. I quickly found that the sign was (almost) quoting Psalm 33:12:

Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people he chose for his inheritance.

And there it is. The missing article the. This helps quite a bit. Now I know that it's not any-old god. It's not "whose god is lord", it's "whose God is The Lord. Now, it's clear that the blessed nations are the ones who follow a very specific God. Whew. Now I can get back to thinking about Amazing Race 8.

Now Playing: Good Morning Beautiful, The The

*I really wanted to title this Articles of the Confederation of Dunces, because I liked the wordplay. But it sounded like I was making fun of the church... so it's an asterisk.