Hilton Head Island, SC – May 23, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 23; Luke 15:1-10; John 10:1-11
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. – Psalm 23:1 (KJV)
People in most areas of the United States of America personally know as much about sheep as we know about ocelots or musk oxen or penguins. That is to say, we know almost nothing. You tend to find sheep only in places where you don’t find farmers. If land can be farmed, it is much more productive to farm it than to raise sheep on it. They likely teach that in Agriculture 101, which I also suspect none of us ever took, which is part of why we know little about either farming or shepherding.
There are places in the so-called Holy Land which are excellent for farming: the coastal plain along the Mediterranean Sea, a narrow band of flat alluvial soil along the Jordan River, and the broad and fertile Valley of Jezreel and the Plain of Esdralon, north of Nablus and south of Nazareth. But the central plateau of Israel, the desert to the east of the plateau, and the Negev Desert of the south are not suitable for farming. They are far too rocky and/or arid. Thus it was from the earliest days of the Israelites in the land that sheep and goats provided many people the primary means of eking out a living. From the sheep they got wool, and from the goats they got milk for drinking and for making cheese.
Because sheep were so familiar to everyone in biblical times, shepherds and sheep are frequently mentioned in the Bible. Speaking of God, Psalm 77:20 says, “Thou didst lead thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” Psalm 80 begins with this verse: “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou who leadest Joseph like a flock!” Psalm 95:7 says, “For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.” The famous Psalm 100 says, “Know that the Lord is God! It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” One of the best-known lines in Isaiah, and also in Handel’s Messiah, is, “He will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gathers the lambs in his arms, he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young” (40:11).
It is surprising, therefore, that for the past two thousand years Jews have paid little or no attention to the 23rd Psalm. There are dozens or scores or perhaps hundreds of Christian musical compositions which use Psalm 23 as their text. To my knowledge, however, no Jewish composer for many centuries has utilized the words of this memorable short Psalm. Why?
Surely it is because Christians have practically put a copyright on Psalm 23. And they have done so largely because of the two New Testament passages which were read earlier, the parable of the lost sheep, and Jesus referring to himself in the Fourth Gospel as the Good Shepherd. Thus in the common Christian understanding, it is not God who is our shepherd; rather it is Jesus. And thus Psalm 23 has become the quintessential Christian Psalm.
Being a shepherd in Israel in the 10th century BCE or the 1st century CE or now in the 21st century is essentially the same economic enterprise. Unlike in the Scottish Highlands or the mountains of New Zealand or the desert of the American Southwest, shepherds in Israel did not use dogs to assist in herding the sheep. There were no border collies or Shetland sheep dogs. Biblical Jews did not like dogs. They thought of them as wild and dangerous.
Therefore being an Israelite shepherd was a solitary occupation. He was out in the wilderness by himself with his pastoral charges. Even now you can see Palestinian children and adults out on the hillsides with the sheep. They are alone with the sheep. Modern shepherds, as far as I know, no longer have rods or staffs. A rod was a short cudgel or club which the shepherd used to drive away predators. The staff was a shepherd’s crook, a long stick with a curved end. With it he could pull a sheep by its neck out of a hole or crevice. Bishops today carry a shepherd’s crook as a symbol of their ecclesiastical office. In light of news over the past several years, you can deduce whatever you choose from that.
Because biblical shepherds raised sheep mainly for their wool, and not for their meat, they became very familiar with each particular sheep. I have read that they would spend time with each sheep individually, to make them know they were valued members of the flock. Don’t ask me whether this is actually true, because I don’t know; I’m only telling you what I have read.
H.V. Morton was a well-known professional travel writer early in the last century. He told of seeing a flock of sheep out in the Palestinian hills with a shepherd. The shepherd decided to leave the place where they were. As he went to the crest of a hill, he made some sounds that were nothing like human speech. Not an animal stirred. Then he made another, even more eerie sound. The lead sheep, with a bell around its neck, quickly followed him over the hilltop. In a few minutes the other sheep realized they were alone, and in a panic they all charged up the slope and over the top in pursuit of the shepherd and the lead sheep.
I tell you all this about sheep, even if you were not lusting to hear it, in order for you better to understand what Psalm 23 is all about, but especially to see how Jesus used pastoral imagery to refer to himself. The primary point is this: sheep are very dependent creatures. Domesticated sheep could not long survive by themselves in the wild. Wolves or coyotes or birds of prey would kill them. Furthermore, they would quickly get lost. Wherever there are shepherds, there is a common observation about sheep that they “nibble themselves lost.” They keep their heads down as they munch the grass, and they keep moving to find fresh grass. Then, when they have been doing that for several hours, they end up where they never have been, and they haven’t a clue on how to get back home. Another genetic factor about sheep is that when they passed out the brains in the primordial species assembly plant, sheep were nearly last in line.
Everything prior to this now leads into another major feature of Christianity. The clergy who are attached to parish churches are called pastors. A church thus is a kind of pasture in which the ecclesiastical sheep are tended. The word “pastor” derives from the Latin verb pascere, which means “to feed.” Does that therefore mean that parishioners, like sheep, are not afflicted with a superabundance of gray matter, and that they need somebody to lead and feed them? That you also shall have to decide for yourself. As someone who has been a pastor for far longer than he was a normal human being, I can assure you it has been my experience that the pastoral office is much more like herding cats than it is like herding sheep. Sheep seem naturally to respond to a shepherd, but not every Christian is so easily or willingly directed by a pastor.
The parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15 is the first of three parables about being lost. Besides the first one, there is also a parable of the lost coin, and a parable of the two lost sons, which we know better as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Jesus presented all three parables because its says in verse 1 that the scribes and Pharisees were grumbling aloud because Jesus publicly and even brazenly spent time with and ate with known sinners, people like social media tycoons and fallen politicians and the like.
Did Jesus tell these stories because he intended to imply that he, Jesus, sought out lost sinners? Without question. But surely he also implied that God seeks and saves the lost. Jesus is the good shepherd who goes out in search of the lost sheep, but he does that because he is convinced that is the main thing God wants him to do on behalf of God. So whether it is Jesus or God who is the Good Shepherd, the point is that all of us need a shepherd, because all of us, to one degree or another, are lost. We go in directions we choose for ourselves, not in the direction God chooses for us. We do not recognize our dependency on our Shepherd, and we mistakenly suppose ourselves to be totally independent beings. Far too often we do what we want to do and not what God wants us to do. As a result, we inevitably become lost. We follow our own wills and ways and wiles, and all of us sooner or later “nibble ourselves lost.” We are human, after all.
By their very nature, domesticated sheep (Merinos, Shropshires, Hampshires, Cheviots, Orkneys, whatever) cannot survive on their own. We, on the other hand, are meant by God to be somewhat independent. Not totally independent, but somewhat. In a related way, very young children are completely dependent on parents or others for their survival. But as they get older, they need to become more independent for their own well-being.
Just so, God wants us both to realize our total dependence on Him, and also to be partially independent from Him. Nevertheless, none of us is to be a shepherd with respect to God. We are all sheep in relationship to Him, and it is imperative that we understand that sober and sobering fact. Human beings tend far more to err by seeking too much independence than too little. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” said Elizabeth Barrett’s husband, Mr. Browning, but if we seek to take control of everything as though it were ours to do, we shall find our hand sharply smacked by both the rod and the staff of the Celestial Shepherd. No comfort from rod or staff shall we find under such prideful circumstances.
There are three particular lessons to be learned from the 23rd Psalm. By chance, or maybe by design, they are found in verses 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6. I shall use that biblical translation which is by far the best suited to this Psalm, the Authorized or King James Version.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside still waters.” Another zoological feature of sheep is that they either can’t or won’t drink from fast-moving water in a stream or river. They need somebody to show them where to find quiet pools of water. The two verses clearly proclaim that we cannot make it through life by ourselves. We need a shepherd, someone to lead us to the greenest pastures, to feed us as a pastor (pascere) with the most nourishing spiritual food, and to enable us to drink deeply of the cleanest and best water available. Left to our devices, we will never manage that on our own.
Pride is one of humanity’s greatest failings. It is an example of great hubris for anyone to suppose that he or she is a “self-made person.” There is no such being. Anyone who succeeds in life does so because of what she finds and utilizes from the world around her. All of those gifts come from God. God doesn’t force anyone to use to the best of our abilities what He gives us, but he leads us to the green pastures and the still waters, and we must take it from there.
“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.” If God restores our soul, it means that it needed to be restored. “I once was lost, but now am found/ Was blind, but now I see.” We delude ourselves into supposing that we are doing just fine in life, thank you very much. But at times we are not doing fine, not fine at all. At times we become lost, and we need to be restored to the flock by our Shepherd. To imagine we are making it on our own is to fall into one of the most lethal of life’s traps. Great pride goeth before great pratfalls.
Marilyn Robinson wrote a wonderful sequel to her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel called Gilead. The sequel was called Home. It told the story of an elderly minister and his middle-aged daughter. She came home to care for her father as he was dying. The minister’s son Jack, a ne’er-do-well in everyone’s estimation, also happened to come home at about the same time, having been gone for many years. Jack returned, frankly, because, as in Robert Frost’s poem, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Jack Boughton was talking to his sister Glory about his bad behavior when he was a youngster. “I know why people watched me. I’m not even sure that was what made me uneasy. I think it made me feel safer sometimes. I used to test it, stir up a little trouble to make sure the old fellow” [their father] “was keeping an eye on me…. I’d think, Maybe they’ve forgotten all about me, and it felt like death, in a way…. I was usually closer to home than I thought I was. Where he didn’t look for me” (p. 276).
Pride sometimes keeps us from seeing we are lost when we are lost. But if we know we have a Shepherd, we know we can withstand anything, even the valley of the shadow of death, and be led safely back home.
“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 shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Even when life is the roughest, when times are the toughest, when we believe we cannot possibly get through whatever we are facing that is so traumatic or painful or stressful, we have a Shepherd who provides a way out for us. His blessings are endless. Our cup of goodness ever and always runs over. But only the eyes of faith allow us to see that. Otherwise, we tend to stew in our own juice, and not happily so.
With God as our Shepherd, with Jesus Christ leading the flock, there shall be no end to the goodness and mercy which are in store for us, especially knowing that we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Is that a subtle intimation of immortality, hidden within the words of a six-verse Psalm from the Hebrew scriptures? No, I don’t think so. “Forever” meant to the Psalm writer as long as he lived. There was almost no widespread biblical notion of eternal life prior to the first century of the Common Era. That new conviction was prompted by several things, but especially by Easter. The last verse about dwelling in God’s house forever is one of the reasons why this is the most beloved Psalm of the Christians. We choose it to say what we want to be said. It has a distinctively Christian ring to it. And so shall it always sound to us.
One of the greatest strengths – and weaknesses – of the Bible is that its readers can make it say whatever they believe needs to be said. Presumably Jesus used the imagery of this Psalm to make some crucial observations about himself. Are they true? In one sense incontrovertibly they are if we believe they are. And even if all of us don’t believe it, I believe it. The Lord is our Shepherd; we shall not want. Temporally we may be in want, but eternally, no. We shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Therefore, Hallelu-Yah: Praise God.