Scripture
Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not be in want.
The Lord makes me lie down in green pastures,
and leads me beside still waters.
You restore my soul, O Lord.
and guide me along right pathways for your name’s sake.
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 prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil, and my cup is running over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
John 10:11-18
“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me, just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”
Sermon “The Good, Good Shepherd”
Happy Easter! I know Easter Sunday was three weeks ago. I am aware that the supply of Purple Marshmallow Peeps and Cadbury Crème Eggs at CVS has, alas, dwindled to nothing. Nevertheless, the resurrection season is still with us, and so I say, again, Happy Easter! It is still the season in which we celebrate our risen Lord.
In our service for the Sacrament of Baptism we hear these words:
In baptism God claims us,
and seals us to show that we belong to God.
God frees us from sin and death,
uniting us with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection.
Baptism unites us with Christ in his resurrection. We are a risen people, living the risen life. What does that mean, exactly? In the Sundays we have together between now and the day of Pentecost, I’d like to explore this. What is the risen life? How does it affect us? How do we live it? How do we share it?
Today’s psalm and gospel passage offer us some very specific ideas of what the risen life means.
Psalm 23, in our day, is very much associated with the funeral. Its verses about walking through the shadow of death whisper in our hearts when we are going about the business of remembering those we love, who have passed into God’s perfect peace. Yes, we breathe. Yes. That is our comfort and consolation. Even in death, God is with us, was with them, the ones we have lost to our senses in this world.
But Psalm 23 is so much more. It describes the fullness of God’s love for us, even as we have witnessed it in Jesus. The description is pastoral, beautiful. I’ve just returned from a trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Spring has unfurled there in the most lush and inviting way—the grass is that new green, all the flowerw are up—tulips and irises, happy pansies, bowing jonquils. The color on the mountains is exquisite, a green-blue, just as you’d imagine. I imagine this shepherd—David, who most surely wrote this song, pondering God’s love while out in nature, when his only charges were lambs, ewes, and rams, long before he was responsible for shepherding a nation.
You are a God who is a shepherd, he realizes. As I heard in a song this week, “I shall not want, I shall not lack, I shall not do without any good thing.”[i] You pasture us, David sings—you lead us to places of food and water in this land flowing with milk and honey. You know when we are weary from all this moving about and climbing and running and hurrying through our days, and so—you give us the gift of weariness, so that we will lie down, and rest, and know that we are held by you, and in you. And in so doing, you restore our soul, David sings. You restore our soul.
David describes and kind of care that attends, not only to our most basic human needs of air, water, and food, but also the need for beauty. The need for rest. The need for our souls to find a place of peace and comfort with one we trust completely: our good, good shepherd.
What David sings next surprises me every time: You lead me, you guide me along right pathways for your name’s sake. David, imperfect, beloved friend of God that he was, knows that God’s care for us extends beyond the physical and even the spiritual. Or, maybe more accurately, God includes in our spiritual care the call to do justice. The King James version gets it just right: God leads us along “paths of righteousness.” What does this mean for us?
In the world that confronts us right now, it could mean any number of things. Our country is in a time of polarization, but for Christians, Jesus’ call to do justice is clear. Jesus stands alongside the marginalized, those without resources, those without a place to lay down their heads; the widow, the orphan, the immigrant. He is known as a friend of sinners. He is known as a friend to children. He erases boundaries of race and ethnic origins. He befriends and heals those outside his religion. He upholds the dignity of women, who in our country have lost the right of control over our own bodies. His followers even, as we will see next week, extend welcome to those whose gender identity goes beyond the usual binaries of biological male and female. God, Jesus, our Good Shepherd, leads us along paths of righteousness, for the sake of God’s own holy name. We are invited to stand alongside and befriend those who are at risk. We are invited to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.
And then, David sings perhaps the most famous lines of the psalm—at least, these words famous enough to have been folded into a desperate prayer by Whoopie Goldberg as she hides out from the mob in a nun’s habit. I’ll say them in their most well-known translation:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
I believe David was singing of the faithfulness of God in all stages of our lives. He would eventually know what it was to walk through the valley of the shadow of death—David would lose a baby, and he would watch the suffering of a daughter who was raped, and that of other sons as the family turned upon one another in warfare, and then he would lose a grown son. And of course, David, as we all must, eventually knew what it was to weaken, and to draw his last breath—with God ever at his side, holding him close.
But this verse prods us to move into our New Testament passage, which describes God’s care for us in Jesus as going beyond caring for us when we’re in extremis. Instead, Jesus, as any good shepherd would, lays down his life for us.
He does this so many ways. God laid down their life when God came among us in Jesus. Big cosmic powers, little bitty living space. God laid down the life of God by being born as a human, growing up, learning things, having parents he had to obey, learning scripture along with the other children, learning a trade by his father Joseph’s side. And then, being send by the Spirit to the Jordan, to be baptized, and then to the wilderness to be tested—these are all things God, and then God-in-Jesus, did voluntarily, laying down the power and the glory and the remoteness of a God who was invisible to us, forever becoming God-With-Us.
And then, the One who was, and who is, and who always will be, accepted the human experience of death—not only death, but death on a cross, Paul tells us, which means, a painful death. A humiliating death. A death branding him a traitor to his people and to the Roman Empire.
It turns Staunton, Virginia, where I visited my daughter last weekend, not only is home to Mary Baldwin University, but is also the birthplace of President Woodrow Wilson—born in a manse, the son of a Presbyterian minister, no less. The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library is there, and is marvelous, absolutely worth a visit. As President Wilson spoke to a joint session of Congress about the United States heading to war, the Great War, World War I, he said:
I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer’s boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.
God could not do this—let the poor farmer’s or poor widow’s or even the great family’s child fend for themselves in the hard conditions of life on this planet. Rather, Jesus came among us, and laid down his life for us, showing us love AND justice (as well as the cost of injustice) every step of the way. And this, for Jesus, for us, was the path to the risen life.
The next part of David’s song is about a banquet in the halls of the palace. The shepherd has been revealed to be a king—but one who, still, extends us, you and me, the hand of friendship and hospitality. The God of God and Lord of Lords prepares a table for us. He anoints our heads with oil, as any good Ancient Near Eastern host would, and keeps our cups full to overflowing.
Goodness and mercy, forever. That is the last word of David’s song—I can tell, he sings, that goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. And that last word is also the sum and summary of the psalm and the gospel passage: the goodness and mercy of God, which will pursue us throughout our days. The love and care of God, who abides with us throughout every age and stage of our adventures and misadventures. The guidance of God to reach out to our siblings everywhere who are in need of our solidarity, our kindness, our empathy, and our help. This is the risen life, in which we dwell in God’s house—by which I mean, we will dwell in God, who is our home—forever.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Nicole C. Mullin, “My Shepherd” from her album Captivated, Maranatha Music (MRA), 2010.