February 5, 2023 – Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Psalm 23
John 10.11-18
Out To Pastor
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Does anyone remember having to memorize the 23d psalm in Sunday School lo these many years ago? I know I do. My church school teacher made us recite it over and over again until we had it down cold. And I can remember that most of it was pretty straightforward and to the point, even with all that King James language, the leadeths and the preparests, it was all pretty routine except when we came to the very last line and chanted together, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” Goodness and mercy I knew about, but who exactly was this Shirley, and why was she going to follow me all the days of my life? Come to think of it, there was this cute girl in my class, Shirley Martin, and she did follow me all the way through elementary, junior high and high school, since we had a lot of classes together, but I don’t think the palmist was writing about her. Nevertheless, I memorized it anyway, and left what I didn’t understand for another day..
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” How bucolic. How idyllic. How pastoral. And how out of touch with the most of the rest of the world. I wonder how many people can honestly say life is such a pastorale experience? I mean, if we feel like sheep, it’s more likely because life herds us in six different directions at once, not all of them at the hand of a benevolent shepherd. And even though this is arguably the best-known and most beloved chapter of the Bible, have you ever noticed how nearly everyone reads it as though it were the least familiar. The typical cadence goes something like this: [read first vv]. Does that sound like I really mean any of it? Which leads to the question, how much of Psalm 23 do we mean? It doesn’t matter whose favorite this psalm is: are we serious when we say, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want?”, or is it just another pleasantly incongruous sentiment from the Bible?
In fact I would suggest that the 23d psalm is much more radical and counterintuitive than we tend to give it credit for. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Oh, really? I shall not want… what? I shall not want a better job, a bigger salary, a secure retirement? I shall not want a second opinion, supplemental insurance, a clean bill of health? I shall not want a new spring outfit, a second car, take out twice a week? Turns out there is a lot that we want, psalm or no psalm. When I sang in the college choir, we did an arrangement of the 23d psalm that went, “Because the Lord is my shepherd, I have everything that I need.” How many of us are willing to make that assertion? I’m not certain I am. And here is the rub; not many of us are willing to put a period at the end of the very first verse of the psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Period. No comma there; end of sentence. No exceptions. Are we ready for this kind of radical dependence on God? Are we ready to say that the only thing we need in life is God, and anything else is gravy? No wonder we tend to trot this passage out mostly at funerals; at a funeral there is at least one person in the room who doesn’t want or need anything any more. Very few of the rest of us in the congregation are ready to say, “Because the Lord is my shepherd I have everything that I need.”
And this is only the beginning “[God] makes me lie down in green pastures.” Wait a minute – makes me? God makes me, forces me, compels me? This is very un-UCC of God, don’t you think? In our church we prefer the softer verbs: we are much more comfortable with a God who recommends, or suggests, or proposes, who gently reminds us of what God might prefer – but make? Give us the God who offers us options and choices and the exercise of our God-given free-will; we are not at all certain we’re ready for a God who makes us do anything, whether it;s in green pastures or anywhere else!
But one of the things we know about Hebrew poetry is its fondness for parallels, and we can’t separate “God makes me” from the next group of similar phrases: “God leads me beside still waters, God restores my soul and leads me in paths of righteousness.” What the psalmist is saying here is that if there is any compulsion from God, if the Lord who is our shepherd makes us do anything, it is to our own benefit, to the restoration of our soul, to the rebalancing of our spiritual equilibrium, and helping us stay on the right path. Now I recognize we might hear in this echoes of our parents when we were growing up telling us that something they were about to make us do was, well, for our own good; a familiar line in the Froggatt household was, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you!” But then again, when Jesus reinterpreted this vision of the 23d psalm, he said, “I am the good shepherd, and the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” so perhaps it really did hurt him more than it would ever hurt any of us.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” I imagine that there are some in the congregation this morning who can honestly say we are not afraid of death. After all, if people who expect eternity can’t laugh in the face of death’s empty threats, then who can? It is worth noting that the writer does not say “Even though I dwell in the valley of the shadow of death,” but rather “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” The valley is not the place where we live, but rather a place we pass through. The topography of life inevitably leads us to and through death, of some of the people we love, and eventually, our own. But it is not our place of permanent residence; it’s just a mile marker along the way.
And yet we still have difficulty shedding the fear of evil. But the psalmist reminds us evil is not something that is worthy of our fear. In fact the psalm declares it is our faith which prepares a place at the table in the presence of our enemies. Twenty two years after he wrote his best selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a meditation on the 23rd psalm he titled The Lord is My Shepherd. In an interview shortly after the books’ publication, Kushner said,
“The psalmist is not saying, ‘I will fear no evil because evil only happens to people who deserve it.’ He’s saying, ‘This is a scary, out-of-control world, but it doesn’t scare me, because I know that God is on my side… not on the side of the illness, or the accident, or the terrible thing that happened. And that’s enough to give me the confidence. Some things happen in the world that God does not want to happen. God is good. Nature is not good. Nature is blind. Nature is amoral. Fire burns and bullets wound and falling rocks injure and germs and disease infect everybody… and the only answer is, when we used up all of our own strength and love and faith, there really is a God, who replenishes our love and our strength and our faith.”
But does the world really want to hear this? Can our refusal to be governed by the fear of what we call evil ever make sense to anybody else? Can our willingness to sit down and eat in the presence of our enemies, in much the same way that Jesus ate with sinners and tax collectors and dared the Pharisees to do something about it, can the words say anything sensible to those who cannot or will not believe thenm? Well yes, it can; it can say that we trust God. Let others place their trust in Homeland Security or the Federal Reserve Board or our nuclear arsenal or the accumulation of human wealth and wisdom or the wonders of medical science; each of these has its place in making this a livable world. But the psalmist will continue to sing of the trust in God that trumps them all.
On this communion Sunday, I think it is apt for us to be talking about the image of the shepherd and the sheep. After all, just what is it that sheep do pretty much all day while under the shepherd’s watchful gaze? They eat! It is what gives us the word “pastor,” because the shepherd pastures the flock, which is another way of saying the pastor feeds the flock, and it is at this table that you and I are well fed by the one who said “I am the good shepherd.” Now this sometimes can be a mixed proposition. The comic on the back of this morning’s bulletin was drawn by Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Marlette; it comes from a strip called Kudzu. The minister is none other than the Rev. Will B. Dunn, who is actually based on the Rev. Dr. William Willimon, a gentle southern pastor who went on to be Dean of Duke Divinity School and himself the author of multiple books and articles. But in Marlette’s comic, the Rev. Will B. Dunn is pastor of a humorously unruly congregation, but retains the wit to admit that sometimes the sheep can get on the shepherd’s nerves. This of course would never happen at the United Church of Chester. But on this communion Sunday, it remains true that when we come to Christ’s table, we know this is the place where we can say no to the fear of evil, where we still find freedom in God’s compulsion and where we can confess that the only important thing we could ever want or need in life is something we already have. Everything else really is gravy.