16th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, RCL)

Sarah Ruden writes some of the most sumptuous words about Bible words I’ve ever read.

A shepherd’s staff has a crook for drawing the sheep away from danger, and a blunt end for prodding them toward places they would rather not go. This week’s texts embrace the tension between the two in the shepherd’s role.

It feels to me like evil is hovering over the prison in the form of a government ready to kill a woman who prayed with me when my father was dying of cancer. There isn't a thing I can do about it except pray this psalm and damn if we can't get it right. 

In his years as a pastor my husband read the 23rd Psalm at the bedsides of quite a few people who were dying. It was the most frequently requested passage among those who were facing their own going and still able to choose. When I began to volunteer for hospice, I found, as he had, that even for people who had wandered far from church, even for the skeptical and the uncertain, even for those who were unused to prayer and didn't want to be prayed over, the 23rd Psalm provided a place of return that was beautiful, familiar, inviting, and reassuring.

“Many were coming and going, and they had no leisure, even to eat.” I think of the many lunches spent at my computer with a sandwich.

When I pray the words of Psalm 23, the “you” I address them to is God. But I hope others will overhear.

Perhaps it's only when we let go of who and what our loved one was that we can receive who they are now.

This Sunday of words and songs about sheep and shepherds has always challenged me. For most of my preaching life I’ve been in or near a city. Now I live in New York City, where as far as I know even the Sheep Meadow in Central Park has no sheep.

Yet here is an enduring image from Jesus, an image captured perhaps millions of times in our art, our songs, our stories.

Jesus listens patiently to the disciples. Then he tucks them in for a nap.

It’s the second movement of Leonard Bernstein’s choral work, Chichester Psalms. A boy soprano (or a countertenor), in the “role” of the shepherd boy, David, sings in Hebrew the opening verses of Psalm 23. He is accompanied–sparingly, fittingly–by the harp. The first several measures are tender but not tentative; filled with sentiment, but without sentimentality (this per Bernstein’s instructions). When the women’s voices take over the text at גַּם כִּי־אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת . . . (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .) there’s an ethereal echo-canon effect. This part of the movement, when executed well, is something sublime.

Christ "has broken down the dividing wall. . . . that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it."

Have the disciples started to think this is all about them? I know I would.

This is no voluntary association, no transactional contract. The sheep do not earn the shepherd or elect him.