Psalm 23 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; 3 he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff— they comfort me. 5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. 4

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long. 6

1

05.11.2014

Down in the Valley If there is one bit of scripture that most people are familiar with—regardless of whether they attend church—it is Psalm 23. Psalm 23 has been set to song, recited in television programs and movies, and read at funerals. I think its popularity has to do with a few things. First, the imagery is evocative. Even if we’ve never seen a sheep in person we can picture God as a shepherd. We can see the green pastures, the still waters, the dark valley, the rod, the staff, the table, the oil, and the cup. For such a short psalm, Psalm 23 is filled with concrete imagery. Second, the psalm is short and easy to memorize. I attended at least one youth group retreat where students were required to recite the psalm before they could sit down to eat. The psalm is a favorite of many and rightly so. Its message is comforting: God is like a shepherd to us, providing what we need to thrive both physically and spiritually, walking with us through the dark valleys of life, protecting us from danger, and showering us with goodness and mercy. In seminary I took a class called Psalms in Christian Worship. Its focus was just that: how to incorporate the psalms into a worship service. That class is one reason our call to worship is usually taken from one of the psalms. The premise of the course was that the psalms express a variety of emotions: joy, sadness, loneliness, despair, fear, hope, confidence, etc. One of our assignments was to create a list of twenty-five psalms that could be used by a congregation as a sort of emotional vocabulary, to help express all those emotions. The professor told us that we could choose any twenty-four psalms we wanted, but Psalm 23 would be on everyone’s list: of that we had no choice. I discovered just how powerful Psalm 23 is when I spent one summer working as a hospital chaplain. I mentioned last week that I strongly considered working at that same hospital after graduation. One of the things that makes chaplaincy so 2

appealing is you get to see how the Bible speaks to people when they are at their most vulnerable, and in the hospital, everyone is vulnerable. It’s amazing, really, that words written two thousand years ago in another language and within another culture can have such an impact today. When I look back on my time in the hospital, I realize that many of my strongest and fondest memories involved reading, reciting, or discussing the Bible with patients. And I was not someone who went into rooms trying to force people to read the Bible or pray with me—not at all, in fact. My supervisor would have been upset with me if I did that. My goal was simply to get them to talk and see where that led. But I realize now that the Bible had so much to say to the people I met and to me, and in a hospital no passage speaks louder than Psalm 23. I worked with three other chaplains. Our supervisor spread us throughout the hospital by assigning us to different units. One of the units I was assigned to cover was the intensive care unit, or ICU. Every patient in the ICU was there because of a serious illness or injury. Because the hospital was in a rough neighborhood with a lot of violent crime, many of the patients I saw were victims of gunshots and stabbings. Others had suffered traumatic injuries, such as multiple broken bones in automobile accidents or falls. Still others were hospitalized with life-threatening medical conditions, like kidney failure or heart attacks. Many of these patients could not breathe for themselves and were on ventilators—machines that breathed for them. Given the serious state of patients in the ICU, many of them are not capable of talking. So I actually spent a lot of my time in the waiting room talking to family members. For both patients and their families, the ICU can be a valley of darkness, a valley like we read about in verse 4 of Psalm 23. It is in such valleys that we may question whether God is present. Where is God when the prognosis is bad? Where is God when 302 people—most of them teenagers—die in a ferry accident? Where is God when 270 teenage girls are kidnapped from their school in Nigeria and sold into forced marriage? As Christians, how can we proclaim God’s goodness and faithfulness to those who walk through such dark valleys?

3

Let me share a brief story of a family I met that was in the middle of a dark valley. One day I was sitting in the waiting room writing in my notebook. A man who looked to be in his late forties came out of the ICU while talking with a doctor. The news that the doctor was giving him was grim. The patient they were discussing was near death. After the doctor left, the man sat down a few chairs from me and let out a heavy sigh. As a chaplain, you realize that a sigh like that is an invitation to talk, so I turned toward him and asked, “Is everything alright?” He told me that the patient was his mother-in-law. I let him know that I was a chaplain and offered to talk with him. “You’re a chaplain?” he said, as if surprised. “My wife would love to talk with you.” A short while later his wife arrived and I met with both of them in a private room. Her name was Lisa. She looked drained and raw with emotion. Her hair was a mess. She had circles under her eyes. She had clearly been crying. As soon as I sat down next to her she clutched my hands and practically begged, “Can we pray?” “Yes, we can,” I offered, “but first tell me a little bit about your mother.” Lisa confessed that her mother had lived a troubled life. For years she had battled drug addiction, and so had her husband. By Lisa’s own admission, her mother was far from an ideal parent. In fact, they spent several years not speaking to each other. But recently, they had been in the process of reconciling. It was during this time of reconciliation that Lisa’s mother, who already had severe arthritis in her back, fell off her back porch and was rushed to the emergency room. The doctors told Lisa that her mother had severed her spinal cord. She was now paralyzed, unable to move her body from the neck down. In addition, her heart was too weak to maintain a normal blood pressure. She needed medication to ensure that blood was pumped throughout her body. The problem was that this medication could only be given for a few days before it stopped working. Her prognosis—her chance for recovery—was not good. In fact, it was so bad, that the doctor told Lisa that, because of her mother’s weak heart, she had no more than a 5% chance of

4

surviving once she was taken off the heart medication. And even if she did survive, she would still be paralyzed for the rest of her life. Lisa agreed with the doctor to stop giving her mother the heart medication to see how her heart would respond. Lisa was hoping that her mother would miraculously be in that 5%. She also gave the doctors permission to DNR—do not resuscitate—i.e., do not take extraordinary life-saving measures if her mother’s heart did not have the strength to beat on. In doing this, she was actually carrying out her mother’s wishes. And then, at last, we prayed together. We prayed for the strength to endure, for peace of mind, and for God to meet Lisa and her mother in the midst of this darkness. The next day, while getting off the elevator, I almost bumped into Lisa and her husband, who were getting on the elevator. She asked if I would go with her to visit her mother, which I was glad to do. Her mother was lying flat on the bed looking up at the ceiling. That was all she could do. She was only 65 years old, but she looked 20 years older. Life had taken a toll on her body. She wanted to speak but could only muster a breathless whisper. Lisa asked me to say a prayer. The first thing that came to my mind was Psalm 23. I had committed it to memory back when I was a youth group teacher. At least I learned something at that youth group retreat! Afterward, Lisa asked me what it was that I had recited. I told her it was Psalm 23. But, actually, I was struck by something that she had said to her mother. Just before I prayed, she stood over her mother, stroking her hair, and said, “You weren’t a perfect mother, but you were perfect for me.” Once or twice in your life you may be blessed to hear the Holy Spirit speaking through someone. What Lisa said to her mother--those words were spoken by a human being, but they were not of human origin. The wisdom, the grace, and the love reflected in those words still overwhelm me. The next day I was in a meeting with the other chaplains when the pager started beeping. Yes, we still used a pager—20th century technology in 2012. Normally we 5

took turns answering the pager, which was used only for emergencies. It wasn’t my turn, but when I heard that the emergency was for room 301, I knew immediately that it was my patient. I raced to the hospital and met Lisa and her husband in the waiting room, along with several other family members. The medical staff had just recently removed life support. All the wires that connected the mother to the machines that were keeping her alive had been unplugged and their monitors turned off. She had been given medication to allow her to sleep peacefully until her heart would eventually stop beating. Lisa asked me to pray Psalm 23 again. I began… The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters, he restores my soul. He guides me in right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me… “For you are with me.” Did you notice that in the first three verses the psalmist speaks about God [SLIDE]? It’s as though God is not present but the psalmist is thinking about him. In English grammar this would be called speaking in the third person: “The Lord is my shepherd”; “He makes me lie down”; “he leads me”; “he restores”; “he guides.” He, he, he, he. No, I’m not laughing. Those are all the thirdperson masculine singular pronoun. The psalmist is talking about God when all is going well—when the pastures are green, the waters still, the paths right. 6

Yet look what happens in verse 4 [SLIDE]. The psalmist suddenly shifts to the second-person pronoun “you.” Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me… The psalmist is no longer lying down in green pastures or by still waters but is walking through the darkest valley. There, in the darkness, God has drawn near to him—so near that the Psalmist then addresses God as “you.” It’s no accident that the writer of the psalm shifts from speaking about God in the first three verses to addressing God directly in the valley of darkness. That one little “you” speaks a necessary truth: God is with us in the darkest valleys [SLIDE]. God is not absent from such spaces, but it is there in the darkness that God necessarily dwells. I say “necessarily” because that is the nature of God’s love. God’s love may be proclaimed from the mountain tops, but it dwells down in the valley where the shadows are. We know this to be the truth. We know this because of the way in which Jesus lived and the way in which he died. Jesus lived, suffered, and died—not for love—like the hero of some romantic drama—but as love. Jesus was love incarnate, in the flesh. And as love, in his flesh, Jesus was not a stranger to human suffering because to love is to eventually suffer. In seminary I twice had to read a book called Lament for a Son [SLIDE]. It’s a short book—only about 100 pages. In it, the writer, Nicholas Wolterstorff, contemplates the death of his son, who was only in his twenties when he died in a mountain climbing accident. The book is a meditation on suffering and death. Wolterstorff, who taught at Yale Divinity School, cites the new commandment that Jesus teaches in John 13:34: “love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” He then writes, “In commanding us to love, God invites us to suffer.” It’s 7

not that God wants us to suffer, but God knows better than anyone, as a Father who lost a Son, that to love is to eventually suffer. I know that seems like grim news. We may even ask ourselves, “then why bother to love at all if it will lead to suffering?” Wouldn’t we be better off protecting ourselves from getting hurt? We could do that. We could insulate ourselves from the pain of loss by not allowing ourselves to get too close with anyone. But if we did that we would miss a fundamental truth about the Gospel: that in Jesus Christ God came to earth to share in our pain, to taste what it is to suffer. Because God knows what it is to suffer loss, God meets us in the midst of our pain. That is a bold claim. Think about what that means. It means that whatever pain and loss that we live with, we do not live with it alone. Whatever dark valley we may be walking through now, we do not walk through them alone. Christ goes ahead of us, because we are following in his footsteps. And Christ goes with us, bearing with us the burden of our pain. In my time at the hospital I heard so many patients and family members tell me, when I asked them how they had the strength to endure what they were enduring, that God does not give you more than you can bear. I mentioned last week that that is a Christian cliché that isn’t actually in the Bible. What people are thinking of when they “remember” that line is a passage in 1 Corinthians in which Paul writes that no one will be tempted beyond what they can bear. The temptation Paul is referring to is idolatry, which the Israelites succumbed to and suffered for [SLIDE]. The simple truth is that sometimes we are forced to bear the unbearable—such as the death of a spouse or a child. Many parents in Ansan know this all too well. That we are, in fact, able to bear such pain is because Christ shoulders that pain alongside us, not eliminating our burden, but sharing it, making our pain his own. This is what it

8

means to be Immanuel—God with us. God is with us amid the darkness of even the darkest valley. God is with us in Jesus Christ; of that we are certain. God is also with us in one another, in the way that we, as Christ’s disciples, share one another’s burdens [SLIDE]. This is what it means to be Christ’s community: we live for one another. Let us be the community Christ calls us to be.

9