On Being a Lamb

Sunday, April 29th, 2007
Fourth of Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Psalm 23

I’d like for our scripture reading to be a little different this morning. There are a few isolated verses that I’d feel comfortable doing this with, but there are not many passages of the Bible that I’d ask a congregation to recite together and expect to hear the majority of the room join in without having the words in front of them. Our text, as you can see in the order of worship, is the 23rd Psalm; if you would, in the version that I suspect most of us have it memorized:

KJV
1 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not
want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the
still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness for his name's sake.
4 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.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the
presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 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.

However I feel about the King James version of the Bible in other areas, it still has the ability to touch those memories from my childhood where I first learned the ‘restoreths’ and ‘leadeths’ and ‘runneths’ … it reminds me of how beautiful the English language can sound.

Now, onward.

Just how much do we want to be compared to sheep? I mean, when it comes down to it, the animal is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, right?

I loved my high school. I REALLY loved my high school. One thing that I especially enjoyed was the physical setting of the school; on the outskirts of Santiago, in the foothills of the Andes, looking out on Cerro Manquehue directly to our west, with a view of the Andes to our southeast.

The schedule of classes during my last couple of years there usually ended up giving me a free hour here and there during the week, and if we weren’t troublemakers, we were allowed to either hang out in the library, or if the weather was nice, sit on the front lawn of the school and study, read, or do homework.

Or do other things … like wander around the school property. There were the caretaker’s buildings – both the Paz family’s home as well as their shop and tool sheds up behind the classroom building, and at the time there was a ravine separating the academic campus from what had been the athletic area of the school; the Tennis courts and the Soccer field. Today, there are houses and even, I think, apartment buildings on the hills below, above, and beyond what was then the Soccer field, but is now the baseball diamond, but at the time, it was open rangeland. There were herds of goat, occasionally cows, and sheep. Sometimes the goats and sheep would wander onto the soccer field and give it a good clipping. In the spring of the year, there would be several ewes along with their lambs wandering around. And I would walk over and sit on the field to see how close they would come to me. (I also regularly carried puppies or cats into class with me… but that’s another story.) A few times the lambs came close enough that I was able to … let’s call it ‘pick up’ one and hold it … not that it came WILLINGINLY exactly, but it settled down after I’d held it for a couple of minutes, and it knew I wasn’t going to hurt it.

That was the first thing I thought of when I was given this sketch. I remembered holding this little lamb – almost newborn – not more than a couple of days old – it still had the little bit of its umbilical cord attached. And I remember thinking how vulnerable it was… and how … gentle it was. It was soft, and made these little sounds that were actually more like those a baby would make … not exactly animal-like at all … and it was trusting.

Frederick J. Gaiser, a professor of Old Testament at Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, in St. Paul, Minnesota, puts it this way:

“Psalm 23 is a[nother] psalm of trust. These apparently spring from the psalms of lament, which regularly include a confession of trust (e.g., Psalms 13:5; 22:3-5, 9-10). Those confessions function something like our creeds, (speaking from the Lutheran perspective) remembering and professing who God is and what God has done. They “talk back” to the lament, refusing to allow it the final say, even though those who pray them know full well that they walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

This setting is important to understanding the psalm. It is no romantic idyll where God and I walk untroubled through fields without thorns and dandelions. The psalmist’s trust is hard-won, tested by the reality of death and the threatening beasts that make rods and staffs necessary.

So it is with Easter. What we proclaim is life in spite of death, life in the teeth of death. The appropriate facial expression is eyebrows raised in wonder, not a forced smile which dare not admit the ongoing reality of chaos and pain.

It is no accident that Psalm 23 is frequently read or sung at funerals. At the coffin death cannot be denied, but precisely there, in the midst of our questions of “why?” and “how long?” the psalm speaks of the presence of God. The psalmist said more than he knew, for God was never closer to humanity than in the suffering of Jesus Christ. "

So we have this deeply familiar Psalm in front of us, and for the most part we associate it with only one event in our daily routine – the reading at a funeral. But there is more to this Psalm than the comfort of knowing that God is with us in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Gaiser goes on to say:

The shepherd was a frequent royal image in the ancient Near East. Biblical and traditional royal language is not popular these days because it is generally seen as both sexist and hierarchical. But if we forget that the Bible proclaims God as king, we can never understand the subversive claims of texts like Psalm 23, which fundamentally alter the way kingship is to be understood. Kings have real power, but here it is exercised in gentleness. The God of Israel gathers lambs in his arms (Isa 40:11). .The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. (John 10:11). It is on the cross that Jesus is finally identified as King of the Jews. This is what biblical kingship looks like. Thus, all seats of power are challenged by these texts, but only if we are willing to hear that they do indeed speak of power.”

And this is where we get the other shade of meaning from the Psalm, the one that echoes Jesus’ words regarding his own role, who HE was … and what HIS reign would look like.

The neat thing about this is that the psalm was written hundreds of years before Jesus was born. But in the sense that it presented a picture of a servant King, in the guise of a shepherd, it points to Christ.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

We are compared to sheep for a reason. Not because of the comment that can be rendered about the general intelligence quotient of sheep, but because of that trust that they place in the voice of their shepherd. The biblical image of a shepherd laying down his life for his sheep, of going in search of the single lost sheep when 99 are safe and sound, of the shepherd keeping watch over his flock … those are all relational images, not quantitative statements on the relative worth of the sheep.

So what DOES it mean for us here at Jerusalem?

We are called to relationship. With Christ, and with each other. That can be easy to say, of course, but it is in the practice of that relationship that we find out what it means to be sheep who have gone astray. I know what it feels like to fall among brambles or thorns, I know what it feels like to be standing on the edge of a cliff and to be looking down into the abyss. And I know what it feels like to have the arms of the good shepherd wrap around me and pick me up and pull me back and hold me close. Those arms WERE his, but they came across in the person of friends and family who were there when I was so lost I didn’t know where to turn. And for that I will be eternally grateful. That is why I love to sing ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’ … because I know what it is to know the faithfulness of God.

Let’s pray.