June 24, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

I’ve Never Known a Shepherd . . .

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23

On Friday night, I saw a play over at a theater called Chicago Dramatists. It was called I Am Going to Change the World. The main character walks out onto the stage in the first scene, dressed in a cap and gown, speaking at his college graduation. He tells his fellow graduates and their teachers and parents the story of how he sat down at age nine and wrote down a list of goals that he would achieve by the time he turned thirty-five: seventeen—graduate as high school valedictorian; twenty-one—the same for college; followed by landing a job at the world’s biggest bank, buying his father a house, getting married, having children, and finally buying the Sears Tower and living on the top floor. After graduation, he stumbles in his plan: he doesn’t get the job, and when he realizes that he has not attained one of his goals, everything else falls apart. When he fails to live up to his own unreasonable plan, his life crumbles, and his disappointment becomes severe mental illness—totally delusional thinking in which he imagines that none of the failures ever took place. As the play develops, it is only in the very difficult process of learning to accept who he is versus who he had hoped he would be that he begins to find any healing and comfort.

I’m going to come back to that story, but for now, suffice it to say that I think it has something to do with the message of Psalm 23, the reading for tonight’s sermon. I think there is an important message in Psalm 23 about learning to accept ourselves and learning that God accepts us, and that’s what I’ll be talking about tonight. Many of you will know that we are in the midst of a summer sermon series on well-known and recognizable passages of scripture, and Psalm 23 is definitely one of those. If you ask people how it begins, many people will know to say, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . .” People love this psalm; in my experience as a pastor, many, many people claim it as a favorite passage of scripture. You could say many things about Psalm 23, but this afternoon I’d like to explore two ideas about the psalm that fit together in a surprising way: (1) that this psalm seems to have a powerful and comforting effect on us, even though (2) the primary metaphor in the psalm is not very familiar to us. I’m going to start with the metaphor, and then work backwards toward the comforting part.

It is something of a mystery to me that people tend to have such affection for this psalm, because it centers around an image that is not very central to most of our lives. The image is that of God as a shepherd, and let’s be honest: who among us in Chicago has much of a point of reference for what shepherds or sheep are like or what they do? I don’t want to overdo this generalization; yes, we’re in a big city, but this is still the Midwest, and some of you may know something about shepherds and sheep. But here are a couple of personal observations that suggest otherwise.

I grew up and have lived almost my entire life in the Midwest, and I never met any shepherds here. The only shepherds I’ve ever met, and they were brief encounters, have been a few times traveling in Africa or when I lived in Scotland. It would be hard to have it otherwise, because there aren’t a whole lot of farms left in the United States where sheep graze in open fields supervised by a single shepherd. I know I’m not alone in my ignorance: this situation is at least common enough that, when the weather starts to get warm here in Chicago, our children’s ministry has asked a local farmer to bring sheep and we host a petting zoo in the Garth, the little courtyard of the church. Why? Because we realized that we keep telling Bible stories about these animals to city children who have never seen them. So I think it’s fair to say that, at least in this church, most people who hear this psalm don’t know much about shepherds.

Metaphors and descriptive language are important to understanding anything you read, and certainly the Bible; that’s why I’m dwelling on this point for a few minutes. Let me give you another example.

Pastors get advice from their congregations all the time. I’m convinced that people mean well most of the time when they give us advice. Here’s a piece of advice I received once: In one of my first sermons here at Fourth Church, I made a comment about our Jewish friends at Chicago Sinai Congregation, which I described as being “down the road” from us. The next day, I was informed by a member of this congregation that this is downtown Chicago, and that we don’t have roads, we have streets and avenues. At first this advice seemed rather nitpicky to me, but after thinking about it a little, I realized what it was about. This person was reminding me of the importance of knowing my audience and not seeming to be too much of an outsider. People are less likely to listen to something they can’t relate to. The advice was about being accessible and not distracting to my congregation, and this correction to my vocabulary was probably a helpful one.

Language is important and needs to be relevant, and so this is what puzzles me about Psalm 23: how can so many big-city people who may not even be able to tolerate the phrase “down the road” have such great affection for a psalm about shepherds and sheep?

Let me tell you even one more reason why I’m surprised that people like this psalm. Even if you know something about shepherds and sheep, if you do any research and if you pay any attention to what the psalm itself suggests, you notice a couple of things. First of all, the psalm doesn’t present a very flattering picture of who we are as the “sheep.” Being a sheep isn’t something to be very excited about.

Biblical historian Kent French tells us that in the Bible sheep stand for what it means to be alternatively “affectionate, stubborn, stupid, aimless, passive, easily startled, and always hungry. Sheep are prone to wander off and become easily vulnerable” (Feasting on the Word, Year B). This is not a very flattering description of us as children of God. We are weak and needy creatures, says the psalm, erratic in our moods and desires and not even particularly self-aware about it. This is how Psalm 23 describes us—and we love this psalm! How can that be?

To take it a step further, not only are these not admirable qualities, but if you came to church today hoping to find a way to fix these sheeplike qualities in your life, the psalm doesn’t provide us with any answers. It lacks any of the guidance, help, or expectation that the rest of the world tends to throw at us regarding self-reliance, achievement, or success.

So I would expect the kneejerk reaction to a psalm that describes us as sheep to be pretty negative. The expectation our society places upon us is that we will always be looking for ways to be smarter, more goal-oriented, pursuing excellence, cultivating consistency, avoiding excessive emotional displays, and, most importantly, accomplishing all of these things on our own. But what does the psalm say? The psalm says it is not we who deal with our problem of being lost sheep—we can only find peace in leaning on the shepherd. We don’t need to spend our whole lives beating ourselves up about our shortcomings, because the shepherd loves us anyway. The shepherd is the one who, in the midst of our shortcomings, “makes me lie down in green pastures, leads me beside still waters, restores my soul, leads me in right paths.” It is not we who do the work; it is the shepherd. The shepherd is the one who comforts us with the protection of rod and staff, who prepares a table before us even in the presence of our enemies, who anoints our head with a cup that overflows. It is not we who do these things; it is the shepherd.

So what gives? Is that supposed to make us feel good? Why do we like this psalm? My hunch is that although we are not good at admitting it, the kind of care described in this psalm, the kind of acceptance that is indicated in the midst of our weakness—this is what most of us really want, and we love the psalm because we don’t find this acceptance in enough places in our lives. In the midst of the immense pressure placed upon us everyplace else in life for everything to be fixed and corrected and for us to be solely responsible for that, the testimony of this psalm is that God’s love is different. The shepherd does not take care of the sheep because of anything they have done to deserve it; the shepherd cares for the sheep because they need it. And this is faith. Not that we would earn God’s love with our self-improvements, but that we would admit our need for God and through the acknowledgement of that need, that we would allow ourselves to grow into a more meaningful relationship with God. It’s not that our actions don’t matter; it’s not that self-improvement isn’t important. But the appeal of this psalm is that it offers us a more generous way of understanding the imperfections in our lives. It helps us understand that God made us with these imperfections, and God loves us still.

So, for a moment, back to the play I saw on Friday. As I thought about it afterwards, it occurred to me that one of the most interesting things about the play was the author’s decision to make the main character obviously and severely mentally ill. I think that it was a literary hook. It draws the audience into an idea they might not accept without the hook. I sat smugly there in the audience and thought to myself, “Only a truly delusional person would set unreasonable goals for himself; only an insane person would drive himself crazy in living a life filled with the pain of failure.” But at some point it hit me: Isn’t that what we all do at times? Aren’t we all sometimes delusional with our expectations? Is there anyone among us who, at times, has not been horribly troubled because we cannot live up to the expectations that we have set up for ourselves? Do we not commit some of our worst acts when, out of our inability to accept ourselves, we retreat into denial, act irresponsibly, and then make matters worse by trying to hide the mistakes we have made? And this can be the greatest roadblock to faith as well: the misunderstanding that God expects perfection from us and will not love us for who we are, because that is not what God is like—not according to Psalm 23.

Just like the use of mental illness in the play, it is my hunch that maybe, in Psalm 23, all the talk about shepherds and sheep is something of a literary hook. We can bear to hear the words about the flaws of sheep: alternatively affectionate, then stubborn, stupid, aimless, passive, easily started, always hungry. We can acknowledge the need of sheep to be led, comforted, and restored. But perhaps the real power of the psalm is in getting past the hook—realizing that the sheep is us. And realizing that our salvation does not need to be our burden, for we have been given a promise. And the promise is this: that just as we are, God loves us, for as the psalm says, we are sheep, and nevertheless, “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.”

Amen.