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One of my seminary professors when talking about how to read the Bible used to tell an old story about a man wanted to learn how to read the Bible. The story went that the man paid a visit to his village priest and asked the priest to teach him how to read the Bible. The priest told him to go home and read Psalm 23 over and over and then come back in a week and tell him everything he had learned. The week passed and the man returned and told the priest that he had learned that God is like a shepherd. He takes care of us and protects us. God is with us even in the worst and most fearful of situations. God provides for us abundantly. And so on and so on he continued for a few more minutes on things one would glean about God from reading the 23rd Psalm at face value. The priest said, “No, you didn’t get it. Go back and try again for another week.”
Well, a bit confused, the man thought the priest was nudging him to dig a little deeper so he went to the library and got all kinds of books on Psalm 23 and learned everything thing he thought he could possibly know about the Psalm. A week later he returned to the priest and went on and on about what this person says this and what that person says and so on and so on. The priest had to cut him off and told him, “You still haven’t gotten it. Come back in another week.” The man got quite angry at the priest and called him a quack who didn’t know anything and then vowed never to come back.
Well, several months went by and a knock came on the church door. The priest opened the door and it was the man. He looked like he’d been through Hell, disheveled, unshaven, tears in his bloodshot eyes. The man said, “The Lord is my shepherd.” The priest embraced him. He had learned the meaning of the Psalm.
The lesson to learn from Psalm 23 is located in the my. The Lord is…my…shepherd. It isn’t enough to know what the Psalm says about the Lord, about what God is like. Knowing about God is not the same as knowing God. Even more so, knowing everything you could possibly know about a Bible passage is definitely not the same thing as knowing God. What the Psalm says about the Lord doesn’t mean anything until it hits us that the Lord is my shepherd. I am a sheep of his own fold. I am his. He is mine. The Lord is my shepherd.
This Psalm is supposed to have been written by King David, ancient Israel’s second and most influential king. In I Samuel we get a little biography of David. He was the youngest of seven sons to a guy named Jesse (not Uncle Jesse of the Dukes of Hazard). Apparently, he had red cheeks and curly hair. He was ruddy in appearance. As the youngest, his main family responsibility was to tend the family sheep, shepherding. That task occasionally involved the heroic work of protecting them from bears and lions which prepared him for his encounter with Philistine giant named Goliath. But mostly, the work of shepherding was the monotonous, boring, ordinary drudge of pasturing them – feeding, watering, and making sure they didn’t wander off.
I suspect David spent a good deal of time sitting on slightly higher ground just watching sheep and thinking, but what about? If we are to take into account the David that we meet in the Psalms he wrote, he was probably pondering God. His psalms reflect a person of profound faith and prayer not unaccustomed to a persistent sense of God’s presence with him; present with him not only in those long, monotonously boring, ordinary days of just sitting and watching sheep but also under much adversity from powerful enemies when he was king. Even in his youth David was a man after God’s own heart as was reflected when he was the only man in all Israel to fearlessly stand up for God’s honour in the face of Goliath’s insults of the God of Israel.
Imagining how David got his poetic fodder for the 23rd Psalm, I like to think that he must have had a moment one day when his father’s flock was reposing by a cool stream running through a vast, knolly green pasture. The sheep were safe and well fed, lying there serenely burping and chewing their cud. It must have occurred to David, “This is the peace I feel in the presence of the Lord who is my Shepherd. I want for nothing. I fear nothing. My Lord is with me. Bears and lions are out there to predate on us, but my Lord protects me. The pastures are abundant and green; my Lord sets a table of abundance before me. The joy…my cup runneth over. Bears and lions after me…Hah! The Lord’s goodness and lovingkindness are what truly pursue me. This peaceful repose in the presence of the Lord is what I will know all the days of my life. I will dwell in my God’s house forever.” Imagine coming up with that while simply watching a bunch of dirty sheep mindlessly chew their cud. Somehow it occurred to him that God does for him what he was doing for those sheep. The Lord was present and watching over him and was indeed his Shepherd. God does speak to us and does so often in wonderfully ordinary ways. Early in life, David learned God was wonderfully with him and it was incredibly “reposeful”. He had nothing to fear. God abundantly provides. This would be so for the rest of his life.
Having learned “the Lord is my Shepherd”, David grew up and became the greatest king Israel ever had as well as the most prominent voice of spiritual song and prayer in the lives of both Jews and Christians. David even had a profound impact on the spiritual life of Jesus, the Son of God. In the glimpse we get of Jesus’ prayer life in the Gospels, we see that Jesus prayed the Psalms of David. In fact, Psalm 22 was on his lips while he was on the cross. It begins with “My God. My God. Why has Thou forsaken me?” The whole Psalm describes uncannily well the experience of crucifixion from the eyes of one being crucified. Towards the end of it, the Psalmist passes through a moment of silence and resumes with praising the God who has raised this once forsaken person from the dead. Jesus’ last words before he died were Psalm 31:5, “Into your hand I commit my spirit”. The verse ends in profound certainty, “you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.” God the Father had not abandoned his Son, but rather redeemed him, bought him back from death.
If the lesson of Psalm 23 is the Lord is my shepherd, let me give my own experience of that. As a small child, my mother took us to church. When my parents divorced, church attendance got very sporadic. Back in those days churches didn’t know what to do with families going through divorce. Even so, I kept being drawn to reading the Bible stories book that Mom made sure lived on one of the endtables we had in the living room and even thumbing through the big King James family Bible prominently displayed when you first entered our house. “Drawn” is an important word. My best friend’s mom used to drag him and me off to church and VBS in my pre-teen and young teen years. So did my father occasionally and the mother of my first girlfriend. If I wanted to date her daughter, I had to go to their Baptist church. In my late teens, church was only on Christmas Eve and Easter, but for some reason God and becoming a minister were thoughts quite present in the back of my mind. That sense of being drawn still hovered about me. Finally, at age 19 a couple of weeks from 20, I threw a New Year’s Eve party to which no one showed up. I decided if that’s the sum total of my life, it wasn’t worth living and so I gave it to Jesus and the next morning I called my best friend’s mom, Mom Landis, and asked if she was going to church. She said “Yes” and I said “I’ll see you there.” I’ve been going ever since. That call to ministry became my only choice of vocation and I started that long process of preparation which in Presbyterian circles requires a university and a master’s degree.
University was difficult for me. I didn’t realize I was mildly depressed and living with anxiety. Mental health was very stigmatized back then. I had to work which killed my social life at school and I had to go to school which killed my social life with work people. I’d date and get dumped. It was hard, but I really enjoyed what I was studying. One day during the Spring of my first year, I was out for a run heading up “the hill” on campus and something happened. It was as if a door opened up and I realized I wasn’t alone. Jesus was/is with me. I am and will never be alone.
I’m in my 26th year of ordained ministry now. From that run up the hill until now I have been married, lived 3 years with a full blown/untreated anxiety disorder panic attacks inclusive on top of that persistent mild depression I spoke of, divorced, rebounded and wound up unemployed and guestroom surfing for nearly a year, moved to Canada, remarried and started a family, tried to treat that depression with antidepressants which one of the side effects was an uncontrollable compulsion to drink. I put my family through alcoholism. After finally realizing I was powerless over alcohol, my shepherd took away my compulsion to drink. It totally disappeared one very painful night. I then went off the antidepressants and have been sober for going on 12 years now. I never want to be that shame-filled person again. Addiction is Hell. What keeps me going in this ongoing life of recovery is the persistent presence of my Lord, my Shepherd, whose lovingkindness is new every morning even as I find myself in the darkest valley.
These 26 years of ministry have been difficult times for ministers as the church in North America has declined to the point of having just about died off. The church in North America exists largely in the form of small congregations of less than 30 in attendance who are mostly elderly and mostly pretty tired. The Pandemic was socially/emotionally/spiritually brutal for just about everybody. During the lockdowns, we discovered how to be online. This online presence was and continues to be a blessing, but we can’t forget the importance of real, face-to-face relationships to a vibrant faith. Physical gathering has been fundamental to the people of God since Old Testament days. Regardless, when I look at and walk among the people of the “Church that’s left”, I find something nearly all of us have in common. We still come because we know “The Lord is my Shepherd.” Remember how you came to know that and don’t be shy to share it. Amen.
