|
SERMON
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." The pastor reads
the familiar words at a funeral service and in all likelihood even
people who seldom attend church know exactly what he is reciting – and
probably know at least a few of the psalm's lines by heart. Can you
remember a time when you were not familiar with this ancient Hebrew
poem? It is undoubtedly the most famous of all 150 psalms. Psalm 23 is
probably as well known as "Roses are red, violets are blue" or
"Happy birthday to you." Hear just a few words of such a well-known
poem or song, and your mind fills in the rest automatically.
It was probably 1948, in my first grade Sunday School class, when I
first saw Psalm 23. My homework assignment was to memorize the words.
Since then, I've seen the lyrics chiseled onto headstones, set in
stained glass windows, printed on greeting cards, embroidered on wall
hangings, and set to any number of tunes. Punch "Psalm 23" into the
Google search engine on the Internet and you will come up with no less
than 1,210,000 references to websites that mention or quote that psalm.
That's remarkable, considering the fact that the pastoral imagery is
really quite foreign to our everyday life. I can understand why the song
"Happy Birthday" is so well known. We all have occasions every year to
sing it for someone. But Psalm 23 is about a shepherd and sheep, and I
suspect few of us have even met a shepherd. We certainly don't have
regular contact with sheep (wool sweaters notwithstanding). For myself,
my primary contact with lamb is immediately associated with some sort of
mint sauce. In terms of imagery, Psalm 23 doesn't seem to have any
natural connection to us in the modern world. Most of us are far more
familiar with lawyers and doctors and plumbers and mechanics than we are
with shepherds. We've had more experience with police officers directing
traffic than with sheep being directed along by a shepherd.
And yet the popularity of Psalm 23 hangs on. Why? Our lack of contact
with most things pastoral makes these lyrics seem anachronistic. It's
like talking about your high-speed Internet connection being so far
superior to a dial-up connection. That's a curious expression: "dial
up." I think you would be hard pressed to even find a rotary phone with
a dial on it. We don't "dial" phones anymore – we punch the numbers in.
Yet the old language persists.
By all rights Psalm 23 should fall on our ears like a foreign phrase.
Imagine something going wrong with your child's CD player, prompting you
to suggest that maybe it needs a new needle on the tone arm. The kid
would look bewildered. In our laser-driven age of CDs and iPods, talk of
records and turntables and needles is archaic. So in our day of fast
cars and cable TV, what is it about a song that speaks of a shepherd
that still manages to mean something to people? Is it just nostalgia, or
is there something more here that is worth pondering?
Psalm 23 has another strike against it. In this culture of self-made
individuals – where everyone is encouraged to become his or her own
ethical referee, taking life as it comes and making up the rules as you
go along – what interest would we have in an ancient psalm that talks
about being led around by someone else? We live by the consumer
mentality in America. I want it my way right away (and while we're at
it, I will be the one to determine what my way is).
Many churches have been affected by this wider cultural mentality. Those
called to lead are still referred to as "pastors" (which, of course,
means "shepherd"). But more and more seminaries are training pastors not
so much to be leaders as facilitators. Too often, I fear, these
latter-day shepherds of God's flock are all-too-eager to take surveys to
find out what people's felt-needs are and then design services and
programs to meet the people where they are. In some places today pastors
don't lead their flocks beside the quiet waters. Instead they check
first to see what body of quiet water the people have already settled
next to, then the pastor goes there to perform a ministry that above all
else must not trouble those same waters.
In any big bookstore you'll find whole sections devoted to books on
leadership. But nobody publishes much these days on followership. Go to
Amazon.com and ask for books currently in print that have to do with
leadership; you'll get a list of over 14,000 titles. If you then check
on titles having to do with followership, you'll get 19. And it turns
out that many of those books on followership give advice on how to work
from a subordinate position to exercise a peculiar kind of leadership.
When you get right down to it, Psalm 23 should seem foreign to people
today not only because of the outdated language but also because of the
outmoded philosophy behind it. And yet Psalm 23 endures. Why is that? I
think it's because, in the deep places of our souls, we all sense that
everybody needs a shepherd. Way down deep in places we usually don't
talk about – even with those closest to us – we long for someone bigger
and wiser and stronger to take care of us. In these days when we think
so much about Homeland Security, we realize again how much we hunger for
more security than we usually have.
Psalm 23 evokes this in us. Maybe that's why we expect to hear it at
most any funeral we attend – because we all know that there comes a
point when even the strongest among us have to face the experience of
death. And it's at that point, even if never before, that we know we
need a guide, someone to shepherd us beyond the grave to whatever comes
next. Even the richest, most self-reliant, most powerful people cannot
avoid that fate.
The wise ones among us know this. Yet we sometimes forget that at a
funeral Psalm 23 does not apply to the person who died. The psalm
doesn't talk about passing into the "valley of death." It refers to
walking through the "valley of the shadow of death." That's where
all of us are: even when we are alive and healthy. When someone close to
us dies, we suddenly come face-to-face with our own mortality. And it's
when we pass through that shadow that is cast on us by death that we're
reminded of where every last one of us is headed.
It turns out that everybody needs a shepherd because none of us has a
map detailing what comes after death, and the mortality rate is still
100%. We could really use a guide. But if we need a shepherd in this
ultimate sense, it seems only natural we would want to start being led
by this shepherd as soon as possible. Here in the valley of the shadow
of death we need someone who can restore our often-troubled souls.
Psalm 23 starts out with what seems an uncommonly comfortable picture.
The images of green pastures, still waters, and righteous paths sound
very nice, but it is not necessarily an accurate description of an
average day. Similarly, the banquet imagery to which the psalm turns
near the end certainly doesn't apply to every moment of our lives, does
it? Sometimes our cups overflow and we have a table prepared in the
presence of our enemies. But there are also times when our cups dry up
and it seems like our enemies are feasting on us.
Psalm 23 does a good job of covering the spectrum of our lives from good
times to bad, from sunny seasons to death's darker valleys. But it
reminds us that the constant in life needs to be the presence of that
shepherd. The statement of faith contained in verse 1 does not deny that
sometimes we experience hardship, fear, loss, and even death. The point
of that opening verse is that in good times and bad, in times of great
gain and great loss, if the Lord God is our shepherd, we have what we
need.
In fact, the Hebrew of verse 1 is left intriguingly open-ended. The verb
"to want" doesn't have any object. Newer translations say, "I shall
not be in want." But the old King James Version may have been
closer to the original Hebrew: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
want." "Want what?" you might ask. If someone were to say to
you, "I think I'm missing…" you wouldn't say, "Well then I'd
better report it to the police so they can go look for you." No, the
logical thing to ask would be, "You think you're missing what?"
So if the psalmist says that he is not wanting, you might wonder what
specifically he's talking about. But instead he leaves it open-ended, as
if to say: If the Lord is with me, then whatever else in life I may wish
I had, the bottom line is that I'll be fine as long as I'm under this
shepherd's care.
Hebrew poetry is fascinating stuff. I suspect most people think a poem
consists of lines that rhyme. "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep /
but I have promises to keep." Ancient Hebrew poetry, however, did
not rhyme alternating lines; it put them in parallel. Hebrew poets would
say the same thing two different ways, and let the second version add a
deeper perspective to the first. We do the same thing when we use
parallel lines like: "My son just turned thirteen. Now he's a
teenager!" In a sense, both lines mean exactly the same thing.
But the baggage gets loaded onto that word "teenager" in the second
line, deepening the meaning behind the number "thirteen" in the first
line. The second line lets everyone know you're announcing more than the
chronological age of your son. He's not just thirteen; he's a
teenager, encumbered with all the baggage that goes with it.
The opening verse of the Psalm does the same thing. "The Lord is my
shepherd" gets mirrored by the parallel line, "I shall not want."
The poet just said the same thing twice, but the second line now fills
in the meaning of the first line. What kind of a shepherd is our God?
He's the one in whose presence we will never finally be lacking. In his
presence and under his guidance, we'll never be alone, never be
abandoned, never travel down a path he cannot cover with his goodness
and love. So what is it you will not lack? You will never lack for a God
who loves you, who cares for you, and who has prepared a place for you.
That is who your shepherd is.
Earlier I mentioned that, despite the popularity of Psalm 23, the fact
is that most people know next to nothing about the pastoral life of
sheep and shepherds. Because of that, we've probably all heard sermons
in which the preacher tries to re-educate the congregation on the nature
of sheep. A key item that usually gets highlighted is that sheep are
dumb. That's not true. It's just that sheep require a different kind of
handling than other animals. Most kinds of cattle, for instance, prefer
to be driven from behind; the way you see in all those old Westerns
about cattle drives with horses galloping behind the herd to keep the
cows moving. "Git along, little dogies" – and all that.
But sheep prefer to be led. Sheep apparently have an uncanny ability to
form a trusting relationship with their shepherds. I read once that a
sleeping flock of sheep will not stir if their own shepherd steps
gingerly through their midst. But let a stranger so much as set foot
near the flock, and the sheep will startle awake as though a firecracker
had gone off. In fact, in the Middle East to this day, you'll see three
or four Bedouin shepherds all arrive at a watering hole around sundown.
Within minutes these different flocks of sheep mix in together to form
one big amalgamated flock. But the shepherds aren't bothered by this
mix-up because each one knows that when it's time to go, all he has to
do is give his own distinct whistle or call, or play his shepherd's
flute in his own unique fashion, and his sheep will separate themselves
from the mixed-up herd to follow the shepherd they've come to trust.
Is it any wonder that the Lord Jesus who entered death ahead of us in
order to blaze a trail to eternal life, picked up on this pastoral image
to say, "I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know
me... and I lay down my life for the sheep." Jesus is the one who
has revealed that if, in this world, death has been casting a kind of
shadow all along, it's because there is a brighter light that has been
shining beyond death all along. That is, after all, what makes a shadow
– a light that shines beyond something in the way. Jesus promises us
that he is the good shepherd. And he is the way through death to get to
that light.
The world and our culture have changed much since that era when Psalm 23
was composed thousands of years ago. But we still love it. We love it
because we need it. Everybody needs a shepherd. And the good news of the
gospel is that we now follow that most remarkable of all shepherds: the
One who is himself one of us, a Lamb – a Lamb who looks to have been
slain at that. And this Shepherd-Lamb walks with us. With his shepherd's
crook, now in the shape of a cross, he leads us on; prodding us,
protecting us, and taking us home at last. When we were young and the
teacher had us memorize these words, our childish voices sweetly intoned
that line about a banquet table "in the presence of mine enemies." The
truth is that, back then, most of us didn't really know what an enemy
was, and we probably didn't have any real ones.
But we're older now. Now we know that we do have enemies, and sooner or
later we will all become intimately acquainted with that final enemy
named death. Now more than ever we need a shepherd to guide us through
death's chill shadow in this dangerous world. Face it; life is not easy.
It's not all green pastures and still waters. We wish it were, and we
long for the day when maybe that will describe our every waking moment.
But until that day comes, we need to know, and we need to remind
ourselves again and again, that the Lord has promised to be our
shepherd. And with this good shepherd caring for us we lack nothing,
because with him we already have everything.
|
