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Sunday, June 14, 2009
I HAVE ALL I NEED
2nd In A Series On The Twenty Third Psalm
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Psalm 23 New International Reader’s Version
1 The Lord is my shepherd. He gives me everything I need. 2 He lets me lie down in fields of green grass. He leads me beside quiet waters. 3 He gives me new strength. He guides me in the right paths for the honor of his names. 4 Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid. You are with me. Your shepherd’s rod and staff comfort me. 5 You prepare a feast for me right in front of my enemies. You pour oil on my head. My cup runs over. 6 I am sure that your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life. And I will live in the house of the Lord forever.
I know that some of you were following the celebration eight days ago of the June 6 landing at Normandy-the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. It was a world changing event and one that I have read about in the excellent histories of World War II by Stephen Ambrose. There was a lot of live coverage that day of the commemoration of the largest invasion in world history. One of the news channels was airing an interview with the grandson of Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister during the war. I was interested in the way that Churchill’s grandson characterized that time in world history and in British history because he used a phrase from the Psalm we are studying this summer.
When he talked about the extreme difficulty that England was experiencing before the Normandy invasion began to turn the tide of the war, he described that as a time when they were “going through the valley of the shadow.” You and I have heard other references to the images from this psalm in current events which just reminds us that, for those of us with some church background, we can recognize how the words and phrases from Psalm 23 show up in various ways in our culture.
On the other hand, we need to remember that many people, now in their twenties and thirties, do not have that familiarity with much of the Bible or with religious images. One minister told five years ago about conducting a funeral and then afterward being approached by a young woman who asked for a copy of that very moving poem he had read during the funeral because she had never heard it before. He was confused and could not remember what she meant. She said, “O you, know, the poem about the shepherd.”
We had a great discussion last Tuesday morning in my 7 AM class (there is still room for you) about when this Psalm has meant the most to you in your life. People talked about Psalm 23 being an anchor during difficult times and I mentioned that it is part of my daily devotional life, and it was important as I went through major surgery last fall. I commend that question to you as you visit with the people you are with today over lunch or dinner. When has this Psalm been most important to you and what did it provide to you?
I want to look at the first phrase of Psalm 23 before we focus on the part that gives the sermon title for today. The Psalmist pictures God as a shepherd and there are some positive and some negative parts of that metaphor. The negative parts are that sheep are not known to be very smart! They need guidance and they need protection. That was the role of the shepherd, guidance and protection. To be a shepherd in ancient times was not a very high class job! Shepherds were on the lower part of the status ladder. That is why in the Gospel of Luke there is much significance when the beginning of the Christmas story tells us that the first people to hear about the birth of Christ were some scraggly, smelly shepherds who were caring for their flock by night. Luke is telling us that the good news of new life in Christ is for everyone, for every class and group of people, even those who are seen to be, “the other,” those who are seen to be, “less than.”
Shepherds were disrespected, except that Jesus characterizes himself as a shepherd in the Gospel of John! “I am the Good Shepherd. I know my sheep and my sheep know me. And I have other sheep who are not yet here and I must bring them here so that there can be one flock and one shepherd.”
Jesus goes on to use other stories and images of sheep and shepherds in his teaching, most notably in Luke 15, where he talks about the shepherd who has 100 sheep and one gets lost. The shepherd leaves the 99 at risk and goes to look for the lost sheep. It is not that the lost sheep was bad or was worse than the other 99; she/he just got lost and needed to be found and brought back to safety. Have you ever been lost? Have you ever gotten separated from where you need to be? Have you ever wandered away and needed to be called back or nudged back or brought back?
Christy Boyle told us in last week’s children’s sermon that in ancient times two important things about shepherds apply to us and to Psalm 23. The shepherd knows each of the sheep, in other words, the shepherd recognizes each sheep, each lamb. And the sheep recognize the voice of the shepherd. Here is another sub theme, recognizing the voice of the shepherd, the great shepherd. How we do recognize that voice? I quoted a couple of writers last week in a speech at Iliff School of Theology who remind us of the bad things that have been done in the name of religion. Dr. Charles Kimball, professor of religion at Wake Forest University, tells us of the evil that has been done in the name of faith in his book, When Religion Becomes Evil. He reminds us of the terrible things that have been done by people who say that they are hearing the voice of God telling them to do so. Is that the voice of the shepherd, the great shepherd?
And Dr. Peter Gomes, chaplain at Harvard University, has several chapters in his introduction to the Bible reminding us that Christians have abused and misused the Bible to justify slavery, anti Semitism, discrimination against ethnic minorities, denying women the right to vote, bigotry against gay and lesbian persons, and murder of Muslims and Jews during the crusades. Were people hearing the voice of the shepherd or were they hearing something else?
How do we discern the voice of the shepherd? One guideline is that if we hear hate speech, the kind of demonizing and dehumanizing of persons that I believe led to the attack in the Holocaust museum last week and the murder of Dr. Tiller two weeks ago in Wichita; that hate speech is not the voice of God whether that comes from Bill O’Reilly or Jeremiah Wright.
The line of Psalm 23 that gives us today’s sermon title is a difficult one because of translation changes and vocabulary changes over the centuries. The King James Version, done 400 years ago, gives us the translation of this Psalm that we are most familiar with, but it really can confuse us. The King James translation was done in 1611 and uses beautiful Elizabethan English, Shakespearean English. We love the poetry. But the meanings have changed.
By the way, to confuse us even more, did you hear the story of the five year old Sunday School student who was trying to get clear about the story of Jesus, and asked her Dad: “Now help me. Who was Jesus’ mother again, the Virgin Mary or the King James Virgin?” Now I have probably really confused the discussion. I’ll confuse it even more with another story of the other Sunday school student who was memorizing Psalm 23 and got it twisted a bit and recited: “The Lord is my shepherd and that’s all I want.”
Interestingly, that is closer to what the writer probably meant. The better translation of this morning’s phrase in current English would be to say, “I will lack nothing. There is nothing that I will need. The lord is my shepherd and I have everything I need.”
We talked about this quite a while in our group discussion last Tuesday morning. How do I tell what I really need What is the difference in what I need and what I want? Are you sorting that out in your life? So much of what we think we NEED is more about what we WANT than what we need.
How are you identifying in your life what you NEED from what you want? We asked each other last Tuesday, what can be and should be, some uncomfortable questions. How many pairs of shoes do I need? How many shirts does a fellow NEED? One Methodist missionary defined that in a way that makes me and my closet uncomfortable by saying that a fellow only NEEDS two shirts, one to wear and one to be laundered while I am wearing the first one. One of our high school youth a few years ago went to Belize, Central America on the summer youth mission trip and saw how other people in the world live and how they seem to live more simply and perhaps more happily than some of us. He came back and went to his closet and gave many things away because he had seen the difference in what we might want and what we NEED. You and I are being given a chance to look more closely at ourselves when we come in two weeks to Jerry Herships ordination celebration and can bring shoes that we really don’t need, to give away. How are we discerning the difference in our lives between what we want and what we need? Do you believe that if God is the great shepherd for us, as the Psalmist believed, that we will have what we need? What do we need? We need relationships with God and with each other.
Dr. Forrest Church is retired now from being pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan. He is dying of esophageal cancer. He was not expected to live even into his sixties because his grandfather and father did not make it to age 60. His father, Frank Church, was a senator from Idaho. Rev. Church tells about his feelings and thoughts in his recent book whose title contains part of Psalm 23: Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow. He recalls for us some of the obituaries in the New York Times eight years ago of some of the persons who were killed in the tragic attack of September 11. What he points out is that in those obituaries it was the relationships that people had which were so important, not the status or job or what they had accumulated. It was relationships. The pastor quotes one of the obituaries, that of Christopher Amoroso. The writer said,
The other night after daughter Sophia Amoroso had her bath she looked at her tiny hands, wrinkled from the bathwater and told her mother, I have Daddy’s fingers. She will also always have the letter he wrote her when she was 10 weeks old: “Sometimes it makes me cry as I am overwhelmed by the joy I have been given by you and your mother. I want you to know that I consider myself the luckiest man to ever walk the face of this earth. If anything were to happen to me, I could honestly say I have known true love and happiness in my life.
The Lord is my shepherd and therefore I have what I need. Much of what I need is relationship, relationship with God and with others who let me love and be loved. There are other THINGS that I think I need, but perhaps my faith can help me reevaluate that.
Or perhaps the information that I can hear about Denver Urban Ministries can remind me of the difference between what I want and what I NEED. One other resource for discerning wants from needs came from our Tuesday morning class. In that class, Diane Miller wrote me this quotation that her brother Oliver wrote when the economy was crumbling. Diane said he lived a simple life and was very spiritual. Here is what he wrote.
Economic disaster? Remember all you really need for survival on earth is enough to eat, clothes sufficient to keep you warm and maybe dry, and a covering over the head to remain out of the weather if possible. Not really a lot. To be happy requires that one learn to be happy within regardless of outward circumstances.
The next line of the psalm which we will look at in a couple of weeks helps us understand a bit more about God giving us what we need. If God is my shepherd and I am part of the great shepherd’s flock, then God guides me to what I need. In the psalm it is green grass and quiet water.
I am not a sheep but I still believe that God will guide me to what I need. Are you and I willing to take the time with God, the time for God, the time in worship and study and prayer, so that God the Great Shepherd will be able to guide us to what we truly need?