In Whose
Footsteps?
Psalm 23
First Presbyterian Church of Batesville, AR
25 April, 2010
When I was seminary intern at Central Presbyterian Church
in Austin, the pastor and associate pastor were out of town at the same time
one week and I got the call that the friend of a member of our church had died quite
suddenly. She was a young woman and her
family was in shock and asked that I come over to be with them and begin
preparations for the funeral.
I
changed out of my grad school attire in to my good grey preacher suit and armed
with my at that point unused Book of Worship set out to make my first pastoral
call on the family of a deceased member.
Now in seminary they prepare you to plan an actual funeral service, but
they leave out the part about what you should say when you get to the
door. When I reached the family’s home,
I rang the doorbell not knowing what I would say when the door opened. A few seconds later, the door opened and the
husband of this young woman stood there in front of me, his eyes swollen and
red, looking to me to be his pastor, and I froze. I did not know what to say. Then, without thinking I began to recite the
23rd Psalm faster than it has ever been said before.
When
I finished my breathless recitation of those ancient words, I returned to my
frozen posture once again at a loss for words.
A few seconds that seemed like an eternity transpired until the silence
was broken by the laughter of the husband standing in the door. He put
his hand on my shoulder and said, “I needed that. Get in here.”
Whether
set to the beautiful melodies of countless hymn tunes or recited in the staccato
ramblings of a newbie preacher, these words have an almost mystical power to
sooth and comfort. The grip these words have on biblical
spirituality and theology is deep and it is real. It seems almost pretentious to attempt to
preach on these words. It bears witness
to itself in its simplicity and scarcely needs any help from me. Yet, like so much of scripture, there lurks a
wealth of truth waiting to be found beneath the surface of the familiar.
Taking
nothing from the emotional and spiritual power of the Psalm as hymn of comfort,
there is much more to be found if we peer beyond the surface and allow the text
to live in our midst.
It
is often said that familiarity breeds contempt, but I would wager to say that
with a text like this it is more a matter of familiarity breeding
numbness. Like a garden or even a
relationship that requires attention and tending, scripture continues to call
us back for yet another reading that, in the hand of the Holy Spirit, even the
most familiar and comfortable words might stir our souls and draw us ever
deeper into communion with God and one another.
When
we dwell with the language of the psalm we soon discover that the message of
the psalmist is not merely that God relieves our sorrow and fears. There is more than healing balm in these
words.
There
is transformation, empowerment and even a little danger lurking beneath the
still waters.
The
writer of this psalm is not merely waxing philosophical about a love for God
that runs a mile wide and an inch deep.
This is not the stuff of momentary emotional comfort found in a Hallmark
card or an especially touching AT&T ad.
No, the comfort the psalmist finds in the Lord is the comfort that comes
when one’s whole being is surrounded in the whelming flood of God’s goodness
and grace.
There
is a local band here in Batesville named the Wizzbangers. Its members are all teenagers and their music
reflects the kind of all-encompassing emotion that is so familiar at that age. This is especially true with one particular
psychedelic/punk love song. The song
sings about a love that consumes. When
you fall in love as a teenager, well before the experience of life has had a
chance to shade or jade, the whole world becomes about that love.
That
is the kind of peace and comfort the psalmist writes about is just that kind of
intense feeling. The Lord is my shepherd
is not somehow an expression of benign satisfaction. It is a proclamation to the world that the
Lord, to the exclusion of all other claimants, is the sole guide and guardian
in our lives. The Lord is our everything. If the Lord is my shepherd, then no one and
nothing else can be. To declare with
the psalmist that the Lord is my shepherd is to believe the way we loved as
teenagers; wholly, with our entire being, without reservation, and with a
confidence that will not waver.
It
is precisely God’s companionship that transforms us and every situation in our
lives. It does not mean that there are
no more valleys of the shadow of death, no enemies who stand before us. Those are very real and persistent parts of
our world. The Lord is my shepherd does
not eliminate the valley of the shadow of death, but it does declare our deep
and abiding faith that we do not walk it alone.
In
the German town of Dachau during WW2 there was a Nazi death camp. It is a museum to the Holocaust now and in
that museum is a picture. It is a
photograph of a mother and her daughter being marched to the gas chamber at
Auschwitz. There is nothing the mother
can do to stop it, nothing she can do to prevent what will come when they come
to the end of their short walk to the building ahead, so she does the only
thing she can, the only act of love available to her; she puts her hand over
her daughter’s eyes so she cannot see what is coming.[1]
There
is no way to know what that mother said to her daughter in that moment, but I
chose to believe that she echoed the beautiful words of comfort we hear today,
“he Lord is my shepherd.” That though
they walked through the deepest valley death has ever known, and stood face to
face with an enemy so great as to stupefy the imagination, these powerful words
of comfort and proclamation spoke through time and, in a mother’s had shielding
the eyes of her child, declared to the world, this is not the end.
I
wonder if I would have the courage of that mother. I wonder if, faced with the kind of darkness
that loomed that day, I would have the presence of mind to make even the
smallest gesture of faith to cover the eyes of a child. I say I wonder if I would because like so
many in our culture, I find myself being pulled in different directions by
different shepherds.
We
live in a time when there is a pervading sense that meaning has lost its
meaning, that truth has become more difficult to hold on to than a soapy three
year old who refuses to stay in the tub.
We live lives suspended between the restlessness of our hearts that long
for the God of our ancestors and the anxieties of a world that declares such
things to be foolish remnants of a time gone by. We become seduced by the complexity of our
contemporary world and the layers of geo-political, military, economic and
other intricacies of our ever changing human community, what Walker Percy
called being “lost in the cosmos.”
We
construct such great walls to separate us from God when all we need to do is
stop and lay in the grass. Pause beside
the still water. We do not have to look
far to find the one who calls us by name because the shepherd stands not at a
distance but in the midst of the flock.
It
is in God the good shepherd that we find our rest, our nourishment, our comfort
and our care in the greenest fields and the darkest valleys. The shepherd feeds and tends and, when
necessary, fights off the wolves. The
shepherd loves the flock and we love the shepherd.
The
Lord is my shepherd and it is in the shepherd’s footsteps that I seek to walk…
…all
the days of my life.
In
the name of God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. AMEN.
[1] This observation, in slightly
different form, was made by Tom Long in a sermon preached at the Festival of
Homiletics in Washington D.C. May 2004.
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