1 Samuel 16-13; Psalm 23

Even people who are not regular church attenders recognize and are comforted in Psalm 23, it is a beautiful reminder that we are taken care of and are beloved, that we are guided, and noticed even when it might not feel that way. And it is also a lot more than that. In six verses we have an entire roadmap for understanding our lives in relationship to God. Now, I’m not going to pretend that I can explain all of that today in fifteen to twenty minutes, but my hope is to make this an invitation to something that you want to go home and explore more. And I want to frame the conversation by asking: who is your shepherd? Whose voice do you follow? Is it God’s, all the time? That can be hard to do!

The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests there are three types of psalms, and sometimes multiple movements in a single psalm; basically we are working with psalms of orientation (who and how we are to be in the world – what orients us), disorientation (addressing the emotional reality of upheaval and not knowing or understanding where we find ourselves), and reorientation (grateful perspective based on what we have come through and now understand a little more deeply). The 23rd psalm is one of orientation: it describes to us the comfort, order, and inherent safety for us in the world, in which and when, we are in relationship with God. It tells us who we are (a sheep), it tell us that we are valued, we are protected, and it reminds us that God is the one who is guiding us. It’s beautiful, it’s perfect, it’s exactly how we want to feel all of the time. Except, except, here is where it get’s sticky: show of hands, who likes the idea of being a sheep? 

Not I. It is a lovely thing to say ‘the Lord is my Shepherd,’ and to feel that comfort, it is a whole other thing when you have to move along as the rod and the staff bump you on the bottom to keep you on that right path. We are not good at being sheep, we are an unruly flock, and I think the reason we like to read the 23rd psalm at funerals is because often you have to hit some kind of a bottom before you can really accept that you need someone else to care for you and to guide the way. In those moments when you can accept a sense of being lost, of feeling loss, it is a lot easier to accept and allow someone else to take charge. 

In 12 Step work you have to admit you are powerless before you can even get to thinking about the possibility that a power greater than yourself exists, you have to surrender before you can look for salvation. I want to suggest we need to get more comfortable being one of God’s sheep, we need to get more comfortable being led by God, we need to remember that it is in God’s house that we want to dwell, and allow ourselves to follow God’s voice, not our own, not just some of the time, or in the times when we are low, but all of the time, everyday, everywhere. 

Both passages we read today are functionally about why we need to follow God if we want to make it out of the dessert, out of confusion, out of bad decision making, out of egocentric decision making, why we need to listen to God and not our own ideas, or other people’s ideas of what the right way is, why we need to let God be our shepherd. These are lessons that we need when we wander in the metaphorical dessert of our own self-directed, fallible human choices. When we start from a position of “I can do this,” rather than a position of humble, “help me do this.”  

One of the really beautiful things I find about our entire creation story is the autonomy built into our existence. What a truly stunning act in creating beings, all beings, that are not just robotic. Not only do we not do what we were programmed to do, it seems that we were not programmed at all: we were given a guide, we have been offered shepherding, but we have also been given the freedom to reject that. Listening to God is a choice, it requires effort, it requires reasoning, but just sit with that miracle for a moment. This is not a retributive karmic system: we will experience the consequences of our decisions, but we get to make decisions. In Perelandra C.S. Lewis does a beautiful study of this freedom by exploring how we choose to be obedient to God, even as we don’t understand the reason for the direction. 

If we are to be a part of God’s flock, and I know this is a hard metaphor for strong, independent, confident, capable people, but if we are to be a part of the flock then we have to be practiced in listening for God’s voice, trusting that voice, and following that voice even if we don’t understand or even agree with where it is calling us. We are not meant to be figuring all of this out on our own, and I am sorry to say that when we try to, when we respond to our self-directed idea of where to go and how to get there, we very often get it wrong. 

Years ago I attended a business school program at Stanford for “women leaders.” It was a great program, lots of really interesting stuff, lots of opportunities to learn in different ways, and one of the classes included an exercise literally called Lost in the Dessert. I don’t remember the details of how we came to be lost in the dessert, plane crash, wild night, whatever but we were put in teams, given a list of resources we had on hand and given some amount of time to come up with a plan for survival. In my group I was the only person who had actually ever spent time in a real dessert and despite the fact that my experience included only my grandparents very comfortable home and a spa I was appointed the expert on dessert survival. And let me cut to the end of the store where I say we failed in the exercise and according to the instructor very likely all died. Here is why: I tried to figure it out by myself, yes the group all discussed and planned, but it never occurred to me (or to anyone else for that matter) that one option was simply to make camp and wait for help. It never even crossed my mind that someone might come looking for us and that I should trust them to care about me, to seek me, and to find me. 

“The Lord is my shepherd.” “The Lord makes me lie down in green pastures, leads me beside still water, leads me in right paths, restores me.” “Even though I walk in fear, the Lord is with me.” No I do not think that God was going to float down from heaven and evacuate the team from the dessert if we had just waited, but I do realize that a person or people probably would have. The problem was my failure to trust people, because I had forgotten to even think about the way God shows up for us in the world. We can get out of the dessert if we are willing to trust that there is someone there with us and for us, helping us to see the right path at the right time. 

This is the exact same thing that is happening in the passage we read today in Samuel. A little background before we get to the key lesson for today: Samuel served in the temple at Shiloh which is north from Jerusalem, and was called as a prophet and judge during a time when there was a lot of corruption building in the priestly class. The people have been losing some of the focus of following God and those in power are taking advantage of that power, rather than being care takers of and for each other we see practices self-enrichment and idolatry which pulls energy away from practices of attentive compassion and faith that was a lot of what the Mosaic call was about. There is conflict in the region, the ark, symbolic of that Mosaic covenant is lost, then returned, the people turn back to God, things start to settle down, Samuel is guiding them and then everyone looks around and decides that the problem was not really with them as a people group, and their failure to be disciplined in listening to God, the problem was that they didn’t have a king. Everyone else around them had a king, and while the Israelites had prophets to interpret God’s word, and priests to exemplify right behavior, what they thought they needed as a king to, in the Hebrew: “restrain them.” So Samuel talks to God and says this is what the people want and God says “no” they just think they want that because they have rejected me as their king, but fine, you think you want a king, here is your king. And we get Saul. And it does not go well because Saul also doesn’t really trust God and really likes to be the one in charge, and then we see God saying Saul is out and someone new is in which is where we find ourselves today. 

It does not go well for us when we think we can figure it all out on our own. We end up wandering aimlessly or going in the wrong direction, following the wrong people, picking the wrong team, and getting stuck in identifying our self worth with the decisions we have made and refusing to admit it was a mistake. Samuel doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t want to do this, he does not want to admit that the first guy didn’t work out. But, and this is the key, he listens to God, he is comforted, and he is shown a path forward. He gets it wrong, he leans toward the wrong decision, but he is willing to listen and to be instructed. And most important, even though it feels like he thinks God is crazy, that the plan is never going to work, ultimately he trusts God; he does not understand it but he trusts him. 

Jesse parades his beautiful sons in front of Samuel, and Samuel looks at them and says this one: this tall, confident, well spoken, handsome guy sure looks like a king. But God says no, not that one. Not that one seven times. Finally the child, the little boy out tending the sheep arrives and God says, “yep, that’s the one.” He’s not old enough to be a king, he’s not mature, or prepared, or even considered a viable candidate by his family, but this is who God is going to work with. Maybe because he isn’t yet so full of himself that there is still some room for God to work? Now we know that David is not perfect, and David’s story is not a simple one, but we also know that David for as many times as he failed, would turn back to God, tried to listen, wanted to follow. And we hear his voice in the 23rd psalm: the lord is my shepherd. God is who I am following, God is who I am turning to for guidance.  

The beauty of David being chosen, the beauty of his theology represented in the 23rd psalm, is that this willingness to allow God to be our shepherd becomes accessible to all of us in our own imperfection, and hubris, and egocentricity. It brings us back, in six short versus to the comforting truth that we are blessed, we are cared for, we are tended, and we have somewhere safe to dwell. If we are willing to be one of God’s sheep. 

We all have moments when we turn away and start to wander in different ways, and I think we all want someone to come along and be the heroic king who just solves it all for us, we all have assumptions like Samuel about what a ruler should look like, and like those Israelites instead of remembering that we have someone to shepherd us we end up wanting someone to “restrain” us, or to “restrain” those other people who are causing the problems. I don’t think it matters which side of the political aisle you sit on, we all have moments when we look to another person to be our salvation and we end up giving over our personal responsibility for actively following God by relying on that other person to figure it out. 

The book of Samuel was likely written around when the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah split, so in the neighborhood of 800 years before Christ. This is comforting news my friends; it means that we have been struggling with this issue for almost three thousand years. And before you say, ‘well we are the no kings people’ I want to suggest that if we are honest there is probably a name or two that pops to the top of your head as the person who could “fix it” if only they were in control. We may not want a king, we may not be asking for that, but are we looking at God as our shepherd and are we following, or are we hoping that someone else, someone familiar, comfortable, easy to understand just takes care of things? But if we are following God, if we are letting God guide us, show us where to go, and how to live, we start to fix it ourselves, little by little, some might say like yeast working through dough. 

It is hard to trust God, it is hard to be in the discipline of listening and moving slow enough to be sure you are hearing the right voice. At least it is for me. I remember one minute, especially when I have one of those moments where it is so very clear that God is at work in my life, and then the next minute when I am back in the fray of everyday humanness and I start to wander off on my own path. I sit in contemplative time almost every morning and yet I still struggle, I still wander, I still think God is taking too long to get me to that still water and I am thirsty right now so I’ll just mosey over here to this pond. Do you do this too? Maybe it’s just me. And invariably I am not refreshed. I may be sated, but my soul is not restored. Until I remember to do the work of listening for God’s voice. But man that takes discipline and patience and faith and a willingness to not understand but to just go. 

The Lord is my shepherd. 

The Lord is my shepherd. 

The Lord is my shepherd. 

I know that not everyone here has the time of space to pray or meditate for an extended period everyday. If you do wonderful, I’m going to offer a practice that you can do in thirty seconds or thirty minutes, but I want it to be accessible for everyone. 

We are in a little better than mid-way through the season of lent but this is such a good time for pausing to think about who the shepherd is that you are following, or if you are following at all. So for six days, Monday through Saturday I want you to find a little space each day to read out loud, or recite if you know it by heart, the 23rd psalm. And then breathe in imaging light, breathe out saying The Lord is my Shepherd, at least three times. Just try it for six days. Sit with the discomfort or the comfort or the curiosity and see where God starts to take you. 

God bless you today and everyday.