Psalm 23:1-6
Here’s a question for us to consider: Is it possible that we have it all wrong? I’ll come back to the question in just a moment, but for now, I ask you to ponder it as I move us closer to seeking its answer. Is it possible that we have it all wrong?
Psalm 23 is perhaps the most well known passage of scripture in the Bible. This most familiar of the psalms does present a difficult challenge to the reader and the interpreter of Scripture. The operative word is “familiar.” I think Psalm 23 is too familiar.
Advertisement
It is familiar to all. Most everybody in this room could, in all likelihood, close his or her eyes and recite this splendid word in the King James Version and not miss a comma or semi-colon. There is an unmatched power in these words that seems to make any comment on them unnecessary. Some of you may even be thinking, “Why is Jimmy even attempting to preach the 23rd Psalm? He ought to know that you don’t have to preach the 23rd Psalm. It preaches itself.” I agree. It does. It is so familiar that it doesn’t need any preacher to speak for it or any choir to sing for it.
Then again, maybe the very familiarity of the words invites you and me to hear it in an unmarked way that has a brightness, a cleanness about it. What I’m asking us to do is to hear it as if we’ve never heard it. That’s no small task, either.
William Holladay expresses one of the reasons why we don’t hear it like we should in his book, The Psalms Through Three Thousand Years: Prayerbook of a Cloud of Witnesses. He calls the 23rd Psalm “an American Secular Icon” because, more or less, it is connected entirely with one modern situation: the funeral.1 It is often read at funerals and appropriately so. God supplies our need for comfort as all of us have, at one time or another, walked through life’s darkest valley — the “valley of the shadow of death.”
I’ve been the Backup On-call Chaplain at Tanner Medical Center this past week. What a title! “Backup On-call Chaplain.” That means if Tanner can’t find the designed On-call Chaplain, they call the backup. It also means beginning tomorrow, I’m the On-call Chaplain for the week. Yesterday morning, the On-call Chaplain could not be located so I was called to the Intensive Care Unit to pray with a family that was awaiting the death of a family member, who had been hospitalized since last Sunday. There were about a dozen or so folks there. I tried to speak with each one and offer encouragement. We formed a circle around the bed and then I prayed. In my prayer, I quoted some of the 23rd Psalm: “Lord, remind these folks that You will walk with them through this dark valley — the valley of the shadow of death.”