Dominus regit me (Psalm 23)

I didn't need to write a sermon this week since we are not gathering for public worship due to COVID-19 restrictions. But kind of like cooking, sermon writing is a "normal" thing that helps keep me grounded. And this was meant to be part of a Lenten series at Church of the Reconciliation in Webster. 

I suspect that the 23rd Psalm has new meaning in these challenging days. So I'm sharing it early; no need to wait for Sunday! I'm continuing to reflect on the psalms in my own life and on occasion in this forum too and I commend them to you.

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In his commentary on the Psalms, “The Prayerbook of the Bible,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer asks: “who prays the psalms?” He offers a three-part answer: David, Jesus, and the Church.

The psalms are attributed to David.  No one seriously believes that David actually wrote them all, but Israel’s communal life, poetry and liturgy developed under King David and later under King Solomon. So in Israel’s poetic imagination, the psalms belong first to the shepherd-king, David.

Imagine David’s descendants, praying the 23rd psalm by the waters of Babylon, in the midst of exile. They had wondered how they could possibly sing the Lord’s song in a strange and foreign land. But beyond their grief and anguish they discovered a language of hope. They refused to give in to despair. Imagine them praying for strength and courage in the midst of their homesickness even after laying up their harps and weeping: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

In reminding us that “David” prays the psalms, Bonhoeffer invites us to remember that the psalms existed before Jesus and before the Church, and that they continue to be prayed by our Jewish brothers and sisters to this day.

Bonhoeffer also reminds us that Jesus prayed the psalms. Luke’s gospel tells us that Jesus’ parents did all that the Torah required of faithful Jews. (Luke 2:39) On the eighth day of his life he was circumcised. (Luke 2:21) A month later his family went up to Jerusalem where he was presented to Simeon and Anna.  (Luke 2:22-38) When Jesus turned twelve, again his parents took him to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover (Luke 2:41ff). Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian! As a “son of the covenant,” Jesus would have learned to pray the psalms. In just two weeks we’ll hear him praying the twenty-second psalm moments before he breathes his last: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Today we remember that the One we call our “Good Shepherd” who knows his own sheep, and whose sheep know him, himself learned how to pray, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” (Psalm 23)

Because of Jesus—because of His life and death and resurrection, the Church now shares this extraordinary Prayerbook/Hymnal with the Jewish people. Corporately and as individuals we have learned to pray the psalms over the course of nearly two millennia. Peter and Andrew and the Zebedee boys and Mary Magdalene and those women from Galilee and all the disciples knew this prayer. So did Augustine and Aquinus, Julian of Norwich, Francis and Clare of Assisi, Catherine of Siena; so too, Luther and Calvin and Cranmer and Zwingli. So also Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King, Jr. Each in his or her own way went through difficult times, when they would pray for God to “lead them to greener pastures and beside still waters…to restore their souls…to lead them in paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake”

This psalm is prayed in churches and synagogues and funeral homes when we bury our loved ones, offering the prayers of the faithful in our grief and in our trust that life is changed, not ended. Even among the spiritual but not religious, the words are familiar. No doubt this psalm was prayed at Auchwitz, as it was almost certainly on the lips of some of those who died at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on that field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. No doubt it has been prayed on the lips of some of those who have died from COVID-19, or on their behalf by those who love them.

This psalm has a life of its own. So my task is simply to call your attention to a few details that you may not have noticed before. Have you ever noticed, for example, that it begins and ends with the name of God? YHWH is my shepherd, we begin; and (like a bookend) at the very end: “…I will dwell in the house of YHWH forever.” It is as if this poet who lived centuries before John of Patmos wants us to recognize the Lord as “alpha and omega,” as beginning and end.

The poet imagines God as “shepherd.” In the agrarian world of the Bible everybody understood the vocation of a shepherd: to care for and provide for and protect the sheep. “Green pastures” are about food to eat. “Still waters” are about water to drink. A shepherd carried a staff—a crook—to beat up on predators that wanted to harm the sheep: i.e. wolves, or wolves masquerading as sheep. And also, on occasion the other end of that staff to drag a straggler back to the others.“Shepherd” was also political metaphor, however, especially after David the shepherd-king. To claim “the Lord is our shepherd” is the same thing as saying “Jesus shall reign.” In both cases we are making a political statement, not just a profession of faith. We are saying that our allegiance is to God, and not to any of the pretenders to the throne who want a piece of us. Not to any nation, but to the God of every nation.

The one who prays this prayer understands the core of Biblical faith: that what this God of ours is about is “goodness and mercy.” God’s steadfast love and mercy is beyond measure. God is love! Thanks be to God! And that love is so deep and wide that it is beyond our comprehension. It is God’s “goodness and mercy” that makes prayer possible, for without these qualities, God’s “otherness” would surely overwhelm and consume us.

Notice that in the body of this prayer, God is referred to in both the second and third person voice. The psalmist wants the listener to know that “God makes me lie down” and “God leads me” and “God revives my soul and guides me…” But then it is as if the poet forgets we are even there…in the midst of this prayer the poet addresses God directly:

          Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I shall fear no evil

          For you are with me,

your rod, and your staff, they comfort me.

          You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me;

                   You have anointed my head with oil,

 and my cup is running over.

          Surely your goodness and your mercy shall follow me

all the days of my life…

What this poet grasps—even before Martin Buber put it into words—is that there is no “I” without this good and merciful “Thou.” That is so difficult for us to grasp in a me-first society “I” is so often about ego detached from God, about self-fulfillment, and self-centeredness, and self-aggrandizement. But the psalmist shows us what an authentic “self” looks like when defined in relationship to “Thou;” namely an “I” that is defined by its relationship to God; a self that is not afraid, a self that trusts that God walks this journey with us. There is no place we can go where God is not with us.

The two greatest threats to full and abundant life are fear and isolation. We are wrestling with those in a big way these days. Again and again the poets of Israel dare to admit in prayer: “I am afraid.” Again and again they ask (as Job did): “why hast thou forsaken me?” Consistently, however, when people dare to utter such hard prayers, God’s response is the same: do not be afraid…for I am with you.

Think about this for just a moment. Take a moment to soak it in, for it’s at the heart of the “earthy” spirituality of the Psalter and especially at the heart of the Psalm 23. In fact, here is a hyper-link to my favorite metrical version of this psalm, The King of Love My Shepherd Is. I invite the reader to soak this in before returning to the few remaining paragraphs of this post...

This isn’t some pious cliché. It is what the faithful learn in the journey of faith. We live so much of our lives tentatively, acting out of our deep-seated fears rather than from a place of faith. I suspect that many of us are even more afraid of an authentic, real life than we are even of death. The poets of Israel admit this and name it: “I am scared,” they cry out. Again and again, in concrete ways, day-in-and day-out, God answers: Do not be afraid, I am with you.

There are times in our own lives, perhaps when someone we love dies, or when terror threatens to undo us, or when we are isolated and afraid that we also will pray: “why hast thou forsaken us?” To which our God responds: But I haven’t…I am right here…I am with you and making all things new. I am Easter-ing a new reality even now. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. 

The psalmist has learned these twin lessons of Biblical faith, bearing witness to David and to Jesus and to the Church that the essence of faith is trust, trust that God is our companion along the way:

         

          Thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

                   I will fear no evil

                             For thou art with me…

This poet knows who she is in relationship to a good and merciful God. There is nothing left to fear, even in the valley of the shadow of death. Because God is with us wherever we go. Like the mother of that runaway bunny, God won’t let us go. Surely, goodness and mercy will hunt us down all the days of our lives. 

Our Lenten journey is moving ever closer to the empty tomb, closer still to that encounter on the Emmaus Road, which is another way of saying the same thing:

Stay with us, we pray, for evening is at hand, and the day is past. Be our companion, Lord Christ—our shepherd and our king—on the Way. Give us faith to move mountains and to walk through valleys—even the valley of the shadow of death. Be revealed to us yet again, in the reading of Scripture and the Breaking of the Bread.