Psalm 23 "Everybody Needs a Shepherd" Scott Hoezee

You just knew he would read it. The Rev. Michael Wenning was the Presbyterian pastor who presided over the initial service with the Reagan family when President Reagan's flag-draped casket was first placed inside the Reagan Library last month. And watching this brief service on television, you just knew that you'd hear Psalm 23. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." The pastor read these familiar words meaningfully and well, and in all likelihood even people who have seldom attended church knew exactly what he was reciting and probably knew at least a few of the psalm's lines by heart.

Can you even remember a time when you were not familiar with this ancient Hebrew poem? It is hands-down the most famous of the 150 psalms in the Psalter. In terms of recognizability, Psalm 23 is probably right up there with popular ditties like "Roses are red, violets are blue," with Shakespearean sonnets like "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," and well-known song lyrics like "Happy birthday to you." If you hear even just a snippet or two of such well-known poems and songs, your mind fills in the rest automatically.

It was 1969 in Mrs. Luyk's Kindergarten room at Seymour Christian School that I first saw Psalm 23 written out on construction paper and tacked up above the blackboard. My first homework was to memorize those same words. Since then, I've seen these words chiseled onto headstones, set into stained glass windows, calligraphied onto greeting cards, embroidered onto numerous wall hangings, and set to many different tunes. In fact, there are no less than seven different settings of Psalm 23 in our own Psalter Hymnal, easily making it about the most common biblical text in the entire hymnbook. When I punched "Psalm 23" into the Google search engine on the Internet last Tuesday, I was given a list of 95,400 websites worldwide that mention or quote from Psalm 23.

That's quite amazing given that the pastoral imagery of this poem is quite remote from our everyday life. We can understand why the song "Happy Birthday" is so well-known: we all have many occasions every year to sing it for someone. Similarly love songs and sonnets are things we can relate to because most of us know what it's like to be in love--plus, Valentines' Day, wedding anniversaries, and marriage ceremonies give us any number of chances to reach for famous romantic poems and songs.

But Psalm 23 is all about a shepherd and sheep, and very few of us have ever even met a shepherd. Certainly we don't have regular contact with sheep (wool sweaters notwithstanding). Speaking for myself, my primary contact with lambs comes when I'm tucking into a rack that is nicely crusted with a mustard-thyme coating of bread crumbs! 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, doctors, plumbers, and mechanics than we are with shepherds. We've had more experience with police officers directing traffic than we have had with sheep being directed along by a shepherd.

And yet the popularity of Psalm 23 persists. Why is that, I wonder? Psalm 23 has about it all the hallmarks of an echo from a bygone era. Our lack of contact with the pastoral world makes these words on our lips sound like some kind of anachronism. It's like hearing a teenager saying he's going to "dial" his friend's phone number. That's a funny, out-of-time expression seeing as very few people under the age of 20 have ever even seen a rotary phone with a dial on it. We don't dial phones anymore, we punch the numbers in. Yet the old language hangs in there.

So here: 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 tonearm. The kid would look bewildered. In our laser-driven age of CDs and iPods, talk of records, turntables, and stereo needles is archaic. So in our day of fast cars, asphalt freeways, and cable TV, what is it about a psalm that speaks of shepherds that still manages to mean something to people?

Is it merely nostalgia? Or is there something more going on here that may be worth pondering this evening? Because when you stop to think about it, by all rights Psalm 23 should have another strike against it, too: in this nation of rugged, self-made individuals where every person is encouraged to become his or her own ethical referee, taking life as it comes and making up the rules as he or she goes along: in a society like this one, why would we want to have much to do with an ancient psalm that talks about being led around by someone else? We live by the customer 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).

As thoughtful writers like Eugene Peterson and David Wells have noted, even the church has been affected by this wider cultural mentality. Church leaders are still referred to as "pastors," which means "shepherd," of course. But more and more seminaries are training pastors not so much to be leaders as facilitators. Even these latter-day shepherds of God's flock tend to hold up two moist fingers to the wind, taking surveys to find out what people's felt-needs are and then designing worship 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 set up shop next to and pastors then go there to perform a ministry that above all else must not trouble those same waters.

As Garry Wills noted a few years ago, go to any big bookstore and you can find whole sections devoted to books on leadership. No one publishes much these days on followership. If you go to Amazon.com and ask for a list of books currently in print that have something to do with being a leader or exercising leadership, you may get a list of over 12,000 titles. If you then check on titles that have something to do with following, you'll get about 600. When I did this recently, I thought I'd check to see what some of those books on following were about. Do you know what most of them were about? "Following" your dreams. And do you know what a lot of people today dream about? Becoming a leader!

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? Because in the deep places of our souls, I suspect that we all sense that maybe everybody needs a shepherd. Way down deep in places we don't talk about when we're laughing it up at a party, we long for someone bigger, wiser, and stronger to take care of us. In these days when we think so much about Homeland Security, we all realize again how much we'd enjoy more security than we usually have any given day.

Psalm 23 evokes this for us and in us. Maybe that's why we knew it would be read at President Reagan's funeral even as we expect to hear it at most any funeral we attend. Because we all know that there comes a point when even once-strong leaders like a president come to that universal 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 is next. At that same brief service in the Reagan Library when Rev. Wenning read Psalm 23, I couldn't help but notice that during the pastor's prayer, the Reagans' friend, Merv Griffin, sat there with his eyes open and glancing around. And I also couldn't squelch the thought, "Come on, Merv, pray if you got 'em. You'll be laid out in a box some day, too!"

Even the richest, most self-reliant, most can-do people cannot avoid that fate. But the wise among us know this. In fact, we sometimes forget that at a funeral Psalm 23 does not apply to the person who died. Verse 4 does not talk about passing into the valley of death but refers to walking through the valley of the shadow of death. That's where we all are: even when we are alive and healthy, we traipse through the chill shadow that is cast by death on the far horizon of our lives. The shadow reminds us of where we are all headed.

Everybody needs a shepherd because no one gets off the planet alive. But if we need a shepherd in this ultimate sense, it seems only natural to want to start being led by this same shepherd as soon as possible. We need someone already now who can restore our often troubled souls.

Psalm 23 starts out with what looks to be an overly rosy picture. The images of green pastures, still waters, and righteous paths sound very nice but not necessarily like a description of an average day. Similarly the banquet imagery to which this psalm switches near the end 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 at other times our cups dry up and it seems like our enemies are feasting on us!

But the center of the psalm introduces that necessary element of realism, too. As with Psalm 16 last Sunday evening, so Psalm 23 does a good job covering the spectrum of our lives from good times to bad ones, from sunny seasons to death's darker valleys. 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 Yahweh is our shepherd, we have what we need.

In fact, the Hebrew of verse 1 is intriguingly left open-ended. The verb "to lack" does not have any object. The new translation says, "I shall not be in want," but the older version may have been closer to the Hebrew original: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . ." what? If someone says, "I think I am missing . . ." the logical thing to ask is, "You think you're missing what." So in Psalm 23:1: if the psalmist wants to say he is not lacking, you might wonder what specifically he's talking about. But instead it's left open-ended as if to say that if the Lord God is with us, whatever else in life we may wish we had, the bottom line is that we are still OK so long as we are under this shepherd's care.

On other occasions we have reviewed the nature of Hebrew poetry. Today most people think a poem is anything where alternating lines rhyme. "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep / But I have promises to keep." Ancient Hebrew poetry, however, did not rhyme alternating lines but put them parallel to each other. Hebrew poets would say the same thing two different ways, letting the second version add a deepening, retrospective meaning to the first. We do the same thing when we speak parallel lines such as, "My son is thirteen. He's a teenager." In a sense both lines mean the same thing but the freight gets loaded onto the word "teenager" in the second line, deepening the meaning behind the number "thirteen" in the first line. It's the second line that let's everyone know that you are conveying more than the chronological age of your child. He's not just thirteen, he's a teenager replete with all the adolescent Sturm und Drang and struggle that can go with that.

The opening verse here does the same thing. "The Lord is my shepherd" gets mirrored by the parallel line, "I will not lack." This 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? 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 where he cannot follow in his goodness and love. So what is it you will not lack? You'll 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, in point of fact most people know virtually nothing about the pastoral life of sheep and shepherds. Because of that we've all heard sermons in which the preacher tries to re-educate the congregation on the nature of sheep. A key item that typically get highlighted is that sheep are pretty dumb. But 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 doggies" 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 sometime back 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 may 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 various shepherds don't worry about this mix-up because each shepherd knows that when it's time to go, all he has to do is give his own distinctive whistle, call, or play his little shepherd's flute in his own unique fashion, and all of his sheep will separate themselves from the mixed-up herd to follow the shepherd they've come to trust.

So 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 and my sheep know my voice." Jesus is the one who has revealed that if all along in this world death has been casting a kind of shadow, maybe it's only because a brighter light has been shining behind death all along--that's how you get a shadow after all: a light shines behind something. Jesus is the shepherd who knows the way through death to get at 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 like it. We like 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 that looks to have been slain at that. This Shepherd-Lamb walks with us, his shepherd's crook now in the shape of a cross leading us on, prodding us, protecting us, and taking us home in the end. When we were in Kindergarten and the teacher had us memorize these words, our young voices sweetly intoned that line about a banquet "in the presence of mine enemies." Truth is, back in Kindergarten we didn't know what an enemy was and probably we didn't have any real ones.

But we're older now. Now we've got enemies and we are altogether too 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. Life is not easy. It's not all still waters and green grass. We wish it were and we pine for the day when maybe that will describe our every waking moment. But until that day comes, we can know and celebrate again and again that the Lord is our shepherd. With this great and good shepherd of the sheep with us, we lack nothing because in his presence we already have everything. Amen.