PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Psalm 23                                                                                 The Shepherd’s Psalm
Sermon April 25, 2010:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

            Has there ever been a more beautiful expression of God’s care than this Twenty-Third Psalm?  Has there ever been a prayer that touches our hearts more deeply, moves us to greater love, heals us when our spirits are broken—more than this Shepherd’s Psalm?  I read this psalm at almost every funeral, not because it’s about dying and losing, but because it’s about God’s care for us in the face of everything.  How often have we wished we could live our lives out of a continuous consciousness that “the Lord is my shepherd”?  If we could live in this consciousness, half our sins would vanish; because our fears and our angers would disappear:  we could simply be, as God has made us.  Buried here in almost the very middle of the Bible is this most beautiful of all the Psalms, this most refreshing of all prayers—“The Lord is my shepherd.” 

            The great Swiss theologian of the last century, Karl Barth, loved the music of Mozart, not only for its form and power, but for something no classical musician before him understood.  In the music of Palestrina, Percell, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Haydn—in all early classical music the composer re-made the world in perfection:  nothing was out of place, and there were no limits to the human spirit.  All was good, all was fair—and this is true in the work of the classical painters and sculptors, too, from the Renaissance right down to 1800:  they made the world in their own image of perfection.  But Mozart recognized that the world just isn’t perfect.  He introduced into his music the shades and edges that evoke the limits of human freedom, the riddle to the life we experience, and the presence of evil that cloaks itself in things that look so good.  Mozart’s music, Karl Barth said, is “theology,” because it sees the reality of the world we really live in.[1]

            But twenty-five hundred years before, the psalmist who sang this prayer already knew that we can recognize the gift of God’s shepherding care only as we see life’s “shadows.”  This psalm is full of “shadows.”  They are the “shadows” of our living in the world, hidden darknesses that cross our path as we go. 

            He sang, “I shall not want,” because he and we know want—that is, need, the failure of supply.  In the Great Depression President Roosevelt set as his political goal the fulfillment of the Constitution’s “Four Freedoms,” and one of them is “the freedom from want.”  Men able to work were standing in bread lines because of want.  Young men left school and home and jumped on freight trains to places far away because of want.  The full force of government was brought to bear against human want in the 1930’s; and yet, in the 1950’s Michael Harrington could write that book titled The Other America—the America of people still in want.  The central issue of the Civil Rights Movement was to enable African American poor to have the opportunity to get employment that would free them from want.  Even Jesus said, “The poor you always have with you,” and it’s true.  Want!  It’s a shadow that falls across the ages of the human race.  The psalmist sings:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

And with this prayer the shadow fades before our eyes, the sun warms the meadows, and we are sustained.  “I shall not want.” 

            There is another shadow in this psalm:  “enemies.” 

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

It’s said that “a person is known by the quality of their enemies,” but it’s also said:[2]

How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity.

There is Rodney King’s plea, “Can’t we all just get along?”  and there is Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; and we all live somewhere in between them.  Do you have enemies?  People who oppose you?  People whom you can’t persuade to peace, if not friendship?  Many of the Psalms offer prayers about conflict with our enemies.  Even Jesus made enemies—just by being who he was.  If you read carefully, you discover that one of the Apostle Paul’s enemies was the writer of the Gospel of Matthew![3]

            How could God create a world that’s good, and in it we have enemies?  Why is there this limitation on your life, this antagonism you wouldn’t choose—an antagonism that’s laid on you.  And sometimes our enemies have real credibility:  several enemies of America have criticized us for being a godless, self-indulgent country that wants all the oil and all the profits and all the goodwill too.  There is truth here:  we can’t have it all!  And we don’t like that truth.  What does a good person do with enemies?  How do you learn from your enemies the things you need to know?  The psalmist, instead of calling for war, sings of a banquet “in the presence of my enemies.”  What does he mean?

            First of all he means that you are safe—it is God who gives you your life’s meaning and your value.  Second he means that maybe your enemy, or at least some of your enemies, may share your love of God—and so if God is the mediator, you are okay—even “in the presence of my enemies.” 

            I could go on and talk about other “shadows” that arise throughout the Twenty-Third Psalm:  dangerous waters, wrong paths, evil (not evil that we do but evil that happens to us).  And what are the “rod and staff” for?  What I want us to be aware of is that this beautiful prayer doesn’t ignore the way the world is:  this psalm incorporates all the darker aspects of our lives right into itself; and yet, the message of the prayer is FAITH; the focus of the prayer is HOPE. 

            It is the blessings that sound the dominant chord here.  It is the blessings that keep bringing us back to this poem throughout our lives.  And blessings there are—a life full of blessings for the woman or the man who is willing to stake your life on the God who is your shepherd.

            If you stop trying to force everything in your life to come out perfectly, and if you relax your hand in God’s care, you will have refreshment after every trouble.

He leads me beside still waters:  he restores my soul.

            Oh it was hot!  Harriet and I had left our small children with my mother and had taken a trip to the mountains, and our car didn’t have air conditioning!  Even in Gatlinburg the temperature soared close to one hundred degrees.  I stopped at a service station and bought some wrapping tape just in case the car’s water hose developed a crack; and while I was there I bought some sandwiches and a can of Coca Cola.  Where were we going to eat lunch?  We drove for half an hour into a historic valley called Cades Cove and found a picnic area.  We parked the car and took the food as we walked along the little creek that meandered along the edge of the area.  There were large stones and a few boulders in the creek, and the water looked really inviting; so we slipped off our hot sneakers and socks and waded in.  What refreshing!  What a wonderful place to eat lunch—in the shade, in the middle of the creek.  I set the Coke down in the water to cool, not realizing that even though the carbonation was suspended in the liquid, it would still  float; and there it went, down the creek, before I could stop it.  In bare feet treading on sharp pebbles, I chased our Coke down the stream:  I thought we were going to lose it.  But I caught it, and it was that much more enjoyable for the chase.  And more:  we have enjoyed the memory of that Coke for more than thirty years—and the cool mountain creek, and the simple, happy lunch with our feet in the water. 

He leads me beside the still waters:  he restores my soul.

            There’s another blessing in this psalm—the blessing that God’s care for you continues to sustain you long after human help is exhausted.

You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life.

            He was a highly respected pharmacist in the community.  He had a reputation for traveling bad roads in the middle of a winter night to make sure a customer would have her medicine.  He was a deacon in the church, although there were some who cringed to see him coming because he was so prone to argue.  He wanted to talk with me about his faith, but the conversations sometimes took on the tone of arguments:  it was a lively faith with plenty of doubt and plenty of unanswerable questions, right to the end; and he loved it!  He loved a good wrestling match—especially of the mind and heart.  He was that loveable old rascal.  And so everybody was shocked when they learned that he had cancer.  I watched his long, slow decline from health to fight to weakness to pain.  I got the phone call in the early evening and rushed to the hospital.  Kitty met me at the waiting room door and said, “Oh, Dan, they had to put him on a ventilator.  He never wanted to be on a vent!  I feel so guilty.”  I went in to see him, and he just looked at me—looked into my eyes as if to say, “She can’t help me now; but I have a helper.”  And he did.  For two weeks he slowly let go, not into the jaws of cancer, but into the everlasting arms.[4]

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

            The blessings of the Good Shepherd began long before you were born, and those blessings will accompany you every day of your life, and they will sustain you long after this mortality has claimed your present form.

            How can I get from where I am to the place of peace in my life?  How can I live my life in continual consciousness that “the Lord is my shepherd”?  How can I arrange my thought patterns and my behavior so that God will sustain me like this?  How can I get there?

            Jesus said that you are already there.[5]

            This is your psalm.  It is right in the middle of your Bible.  It is written for you to pray.  “The Lord is your shepherd.”

AMEN