Under the Care of the Good Shepherd

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost by Holly Huff, Postulant for Holy Orders.

Psalm 23 is the best known and most beloved of the psalms, and with good reason. “The Lord is my shepherd.” This poem-prayer is probably the most ecumenical text second only to the Lord’s prayer: Christians of all stripes, all denominations, know and love this psalm. There are countless musical settings. We say it at funerals. I’ve prayed it with patients in the hospital, or with their grieving families. These words resonate somewhere very deep. Listen to it again and notice what you hear and what you feel. This time in the traditional language:

The Lord is my shepherd; *

          I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; *

          he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul; *

he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake.

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.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; *

          thou anointest my head with oil;

          my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, *

          and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

These words carry more than nostalgia or sentimental connection, I hope, more than fluffy cartoon lambs. The image of the Shepherd with the sheep is a central analogy scripture gives us for our relationship to God. This psalm, this prayer can be for each of us a meaningful expression of faith and trust in God, or our desire to trust, our assent to God teaching us to trust. We read that Jesus is no hired hand but the devoted Good Shepherd, who cares for the sheep and is willing even to lay down his life for them. The Good Shepherd leaves the crowd, the ninety and nine, to find the one; he gathers up those who got lost or were scattered by others, and he guides us all in the path we should go. In today’s Gospel passage from Mark, Jesus looks at the people who have followed him in his attempt to get away and has compassion on them “because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” That word translated here as ‘compassion’ describes a deep-seated, visceral love that moves him to act: you could say he literally feels it in his gut. And this devoted love prompts him to become their shepherd, caring for them, teaching them, leading them, healing them. So to pray that first line of Psalm 23 summons up all these resonances and reminds of us God’s devoted, covenant faithfulness, that love that will not let us go. All of this is invoked when we say, “The Lord is my shepherd.”

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” We can trust this Shepherd to provide for us: we will not be left wanting or lacking. This comes at a contrast to much our lives. We worry about not having enough, and being found lacking. Often we spend our days running frantic, busy with many things, occupied with kids or relationships, the news, the rent, the mortgage, the test results, though as Jesus tells us we can’t add even one day to the measure of our lives by worrying over it. God is inviting us daily to surrender our busy and burdening story about all the things we must do and how the world depends on what we earn or produce or achieve. Lay that burden down. Jesus leads his sheep to rest: “He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul and guides me along right pathways for his Name’s sake.”

As a recovering perfectionist, I’m preaching to myself first here. I find it hard to stop working and truly rest, I struggle to step away, to trust that God will do it, that as Jeremiah says, “the Lord is our righteousness”—not anything I do, and as Ephesians says, “Jesus is our peace,” not me or my effort. It’s a move from doing to being and from fear to trust that God is still teaching me—and will be for a long time, I suspect! But as Father James Martin says about preaching, “you can still get good advice from a doctor who smokes,” and it’s Jesus, not any pastor, who is both the divine physician and the Good Shepherd. And Jesus invites us each to the still waters, where the current flows peacefully without great effort or splashing drama: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

“Come away and rest awhile,” Jesus says to the weary apostles. The Good Shepherd sees that their souls are in need of restoration after their journey, and he leads them toward still waters. “Come away and rest awhile.” The pandemic has left many of us so very tired. Exhaustion is everywhere right now; our souls are in need of restoration and revival. Collectively we have been through an exceedingly difficult and traumatic experience, and though it has touched each person differently, fear and grief have been the norm for months upon months, so much so that we have forgotten that we are traveling through the valley of the shadow of death. And though much has improved, we are not out of that shadow yet: concerns about vaccination rates and contagious variants continue, and we continue to live with inordinate uncertainty: uncertainty about what is safe and about how best to care for our neighbors, and uncertainty as we resume so-called normal life—what do we resume and what do we do differently now, because we are different now and the world has been cracked open and we have been changed by this experience. How could we not be?

But hear these words: “Yea, 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.” Our faithful shepherd is with us to defend us and guide us. The shepherd’s rod wards off predators, and the staff, the shepherd’s crook, shows us where to go. God walks with us in the dark. That doesn’t make it magically better; faith isn’t plastering on a smile and denying the difficulty of these times. Trusting God’s unbreakable love isn’t supposed to cut us off from reality but give us courage to face our reality and be present to it, just as it is. Often this will be painful. Reality as we feel it in our minds and hearts and bodies may be filled up with grief, or vibrating with anxiety, or sparking with anger. Perhaps our reality right now is malaise, or loneliness. But we can move through these painful experiences and feel them fully, without fearfully trying to escape from what is. God is with us. Goodness and mercy follow us even there, to the aching extremes of human experience. That’s the Jesus who is with us to the end, from whom nothing can separate us. God in Jesus is so committed to full, embodied solidarity with our human experience that he goes to his death on a cross, where he cries out, quoting that other psalm: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He knows and inhabits that sense of being alone and abandoned. God has invaded Godforsakenness, and no place is left beyond God’s reach. God knows the valley of the shadow of death. Even there, especially there, you are with me.

          And so, freed from fear, the Psalmist continues in grateful praise: “You have spread a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup is running over.” Enemies in the Psalms should be understood to include inner enemies as well as outer enemies, all those people and also those parts of ourselves who “trouble us,” who we do not accept or allow to be as they are but who we oppose and fight against. Resisting and refusing the painful edges of reality turns our own experiences and feelings into enemies to be disowned, projected onto others who we then cast out and keep far off behind walls we build ourselves. But here in Psalm 23 we see reconciliation: enemies are now gathered around the banquet table that God has laid to overflowing. In the language of Ephesians, Jesus has created a new humanity in his own body, breaking down that dividing wall, putting hostility to death and making peace, reconciling us to ourselves, each other, and to God through the cross. In his flesh Jesus holds together all the contradictions of our lives: “He is our peace.” And he gives us back to ourselves and to each other.

This is God’s work in us. We are God’s handiwork, and anything we do is an expression of God’s grace. There is real freedom in this. You don’t have to be good—that’s neither here nor there. “The Lord is our righteousness.” God loves you just as you are, and God is slowly gathering in all the pieces of your life you have cast out or others have shunned. Accepting that you are already loved makes space for God to work. So stop picking the scab and cease the ceaseless striving! Give it a rest, and resting, give the Holy Spirit room to work. God lays the banquet. It’s not yet another doomed-to-fail self-improvement project but God incorporating you into God’s own household, an organic structure built together in the Spirit and growing into a holy temple where God can dwell.

Psalm 23 concludes with this assurance: “Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” The house of the Lord, like the gate of heaven, is not in one particular place, either near or far away. No, the Letter to the Ephesians tells us it is our inheritance by grace to live always in God’s presence. “You are no longer strangers or aliens, but citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” “No longer servants but heirs,” at home with God.

This home is accessible now, beyond circumstance. You can dwell in the house of the Lord while waiting to check-out at Smith’s, or while scrubbing a floor or peeling an apple. You can dwell in the house of the Lord while you’re on hold with Comcast—really. Up in the mountains or stopped in construction traffic or sweating on the street or sheltering inside from hot and smoky air, you can dwell in the house of the Lord. And when we think we’ve wandered elsewhere, God is still with us: “Goodness and mercy follow you every day of your life.” With a moment’s attention we can return to the holy of holies, open once again to God’s presence. Wherever we are, whatever we are experiencing, God is in it. We can dwell in the house of the Lord even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The whole world offers itself to you as the house of the Lord: and you too are God’s dwelling place. “Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”