Sermon, Sun 4 Feb: Ps 23 series wk1 'The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want'

This week, beginning a seven week series on Ps 23...which will take us through Lent up to Palm Sunday.

READINGS: Ps 23;  Exodus 3:1-14

SERMON ‘The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want’
Let’s pray: May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

A million years ago, well, back in the 90’s - as some of you know, I used to live on the small Inner Hebridean island of Iona.
And, at some point while I was there,
18 000 kilometres away, on the other side of the world, on a much bigger island – Australia –
my Dad saw a T.V. programme about Iona.
And what he noticed most?
‘Nothing. There’s nothing there!’ he said, in a letter.
A wee stony, boggy place, with no trees, in the middle of nowhere –
that’s how I think he viewed it.
No shopping mall – just Finlay Ross and the Spar, with perhaps one choice of shampoo on the shelf.
No bank – well, actually, there was: the mobile bank that came to the island once a week.
No movie theatres, no hairdressing salons,
no resident doctor – like the bank, she visited once a week;
no proper system of street lighting beyond the 4 lights at the jetty.
No pub, or tearoom open in the winter to warm up the one poor, benighted tourist
who’d bravely – or foolishly – decided to make the journey across from the mainland,
which involved 2 ferries and a bus, and which didn’t always connect....

‘Nothing. There’s nothing there!’
To my dad, the thought of living in such a wasteland of nothingness,
a small, seemingly barren rock in the Atlantic, far beyond actual civilisation, ...
well, it was just astonishing.
Almost incomprehensible.
Why go there?
Why stay?
Why, when there were so many things...lacking:
you don’t have this,
you can’t do that.
He saw... the gaps.
Living on the island, I saw differently.

I saw the soft light,
the white sandy beaches,
and clear clean sea;
watched the way the colours changed the rocks and hills on the other side of the Sound of Iona –
oranges, purples, and browns.
I found the one wee pocket of trees, and heard the cuckoo calling there in the dusk.
Discovered the beauty of the small as I stumbled upon the tiniest and most intricate of flowers,
and picked wild thyme on the machar.
Watched dolphins dancing, and seals swimming.
Drew deep breaths, taking in the smell of fresh-baked bread -
and, in the sharing of bread, the sharing of stories and laughter.
I made friends for life at beetle drives
and village ceilidhs where toes where trod on but nobody cared a jot;
and I and delighted that I could actually get shampoo – even if it was just the one kind.
There was so much, that truly, I lacked nothing.

‘The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want.’
So begins the traditional version of Psalm 23.
When I was younger, I’d occasionally get a wee bit confused:
‘Why would I not want the Lord my Shepherd?’ I’d often wonder.
Later on, a different version of the Bible cleared it up for me.
‘I shall not want’ became:
‘I shall lack nothing’, as our own pew version of the bible says.

As we read the Psalm, and sometimes, because it’s so very familiar, it’s almost hard to see it:
what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing... is something that’s a response to a crisis.
Whatever’s going in the psalm writer’s life is not spelt out for us –
but there’s been, possibly still is, some kind of major difficulty.
A little later, the psalmist will talk of needing some soul restoration,
will refer to walking ‘through the valley of the shadow of death,’
will make mention of the evil that’s around and about,
and speak of being in the presence of enemies.
Things are, and have been, tough.
And as the writer of the psalm notices this,
rather than focus on lack,
rather than focus on all the things that aren’t available,
that aren’t there,
that can’t be done,
what is focused upon is:
the Lord, who is shepherd.
The Lord in whom...
I shall lack nothing.
The Lord who supplies my needs.
Acknowledging the difficulties, yes, and yet, the focus is not upon the problems
but upon the One whom the psalmist follows.
Whatever has gone on,
whatever is going on,
whatever will go on in the psalmist’s life in the future,
the one constant,
the one thing that the psalmist does have, is
the Lord...
the Lord, who is as a shepherd;
the Lord, who will protect and provide
the Lord, who will enable the psalmist to live.
The focus is on the Lord,
and of faith being affirmed, not fear.

Our other reading this morning, from Exodus, is also well-known:
the call of Moses at the burning bush.
There is fear, and lack, here in this reading.
A little re-familiarization with what’s gone before our reading:
The place is Egypt, in the time of the pharaohs.
There’s a steadily growing fear among Egyptians that the Hebrews, who’d been invited to live
in Egypt centuries before, are now becoming too numerous –
will they take over?
Will they perhaps fight alongside Egypt’s enemies?
Will the glory days of the Empire –
of Egyptian power, culture, fame... be eclipsed or destroyed by these incomers?
And so the fear turns to hatred,
which turns to oppression,
which turns to genocide:
the slaughter of every Hebrew baby boy.
In the midst of this horror, a male child is born,
but instead of being killed,
in the hope of giving the boy some slim chance at life, a basket is made –
the original ‘Moses basket’ –
the child is placed in it, and then pushed out, onto the Nile River.
The daughter of Pharaoh finds the baby, adopts it, and brings him up in the Palace
as a prince of Egypt.

As a grown man, this prince, Moses, hears the cries of the Hebrew slaves,
is brought to anger by the harshness of an overseer, kills him, and then flees for his own life.
Now fugitive, he makes his home in the wilderness, marries Zipporah,
and tends the flocks of his father-in-law Jethro.
The years pass, the old Pharaoh dies, and a new Pharaoh takes the throne.
The Hebrew slaves cry out to God in their oppression...
And Moses, tending Jethro’s flocks, stumbles upon something very much out of the ordinary:
a bush, as if on fire, and yet, showing no sign of being destroyed or burnt.
He goes closer.
Things get stranger:
a voice seems to come from out of this burning bush –
a voice that calls his name. 
Moses is told that he’s standing on holy ground,
instructed to take his shoes off,
and is then told that he’s being addressed by the God of his ancestors.
Now, I’m not sure what you might do if faced with such a thing,
but Moses is a little blown away by this –
and hides his face, afraid to look at God.
Perhaps a fear, too, that God will find him lacking – in faith, and just in general.

And then God gives him a task:
to go back to Egypt,
to speak up for the Hebrew slaves,
to tell them, and Pharaoh,
that God has heard their cries,
to place the hope of liberty into the hearts of the captives.
And Moses responds –
not by writing a psalm,
not by focusing upon the One who has given him this difficult and unsettling task –
but by focusing upon lack,
focusing on the gaps:
what he hasn’t got,
what he can’t do;
‘Who am I, that I should do this?’

Later, Moses will list off the many reasons why he’s not up to the job,
why the job just can’t be done.
And one by one, God will knock aside all of Moses’ reasons.
But immediately after saying ‘who am I?’
Moses basically asks:
‘And who are you? 
Who shall I say sent me?
What’s your name?’
And the God who created all things says:
‘Tell them “I am who I am sent me to you.”’
Or, another way of saying this:
‘I will be what I will be.’
Or...another way of saying this:
‘I am able to be what you need me to be.’
And eventually, with God’s help, Moses leads the Hebrew slaves to freedom,
to journey in the wilderness where they are visibly led by God by pillar of cloud and pillar of fire,
where they are guided to water,
where food is provided,
where, over time,
they throw off the shackles of Pharaoh, and learn what it is to begin to trust in God
who quite literally supplies all their needs while they journey to the Promised Land.
It’s not an easy journey – they don’t necessarily get all their wants met:
at times they pine for leeks and garlic by the Nile.
But they do get their needs met, and live as free people of God.

‘The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want,’ says the Psalmist in the midst of difficulties,
and, in doing so,
echoes that Exodus story,
echoes those wilderness wanderings;
remembers that the God he, or she, follows, is the same God
who brought freedom to the captive Hebrews,
who heard their cries,
who travelled with them,
who met their needs –
God was, God is, faithful.

We follow in the footsteps of Moses,
in the footsteps of those liberated Hebrew slaves,
in the footsteps of the Psalmist...
we follow the One who is our Shepherd,
in whom we lack nothing.
And we follow a path that is utterly counter-cultural,
for our Western society is based upon ‘want’ and upon ‘lack’.
It’s based upon the gaps – on what is missing,
on what we don’t have,
on what we can’t do...
or, on what we could do, if only we had all of the things deemed necessary to construct our lives.
All of the things that would show others:
how hip and trendy we are,
how wealthy,
what taste we have in music, art;
how up to the minute we are with gadgets.

But...
Consumerism has an inbuilt dissatisfaction switch, specifically designed to make us focus upon
what we don’t have:
our deficiencies,
what we lack...
Consumerism tells us that, if we don’t have it, then, we can’t truly be happy.
And, consumerism...is consuming us:
our essential selves,
our authentic selves.
We’re conditioned to live
‘with an imagination dominated by a pervasive sense of scarcity, 
far more aware of what we don’t have...than what we do.’
That sense of scarcity fires up our minds and hearts in all sorts of ways.
It may be that:
we envy those who have what we don’t;
It may be that, sometimes, we even take, or destroy those things that others have:
if we can’t have them, then no-one else should;
we store up more than we’ll ever need or be able to use – just in case –
at the expense of others...
others we scapegoat, or somehow decide are less deserving, others who aren’t like us.
We see this played out big, on the world stage;
and we see it in the small, everyday interactions between people.
And we are called, as God’s people, to call this out in our wider society:
to respond as the writer of Psalm 23 does, and say those words of reassurance:
‘The Lord is my Shepherd...your Shepherd; I...you... shall not want.’
To remember and to call to mind that
the One who created us all is the great ‘I AM’,
the One who provides our needs –
who sustains us,
who restores us,
who calls us to readjust our focus from lack,
to finding in Him, abundance in the most surprising, unlooked-for places –
whether in the wilderness by a blazing bush,
or on some small, seemingly barren, Hebridean island.

Before Christmas, I shared with you that one small way of focusing for me,
involved the very simple practice of looking at the end of each day,
for three things that I could be grateful for.
And, I’m still doing that:
I’ve found that this wee thing that I can do has so helped me to work against
focusing upon scarcity...of lack.
And it’s particularly helping me as your minister, and, as a minister within the Church of Scotland.
Currently there are just over 200 vacant parishes in the Church of Scotland –
many of them in rural areas.
And, over the next five years, there are about 300 ministers due to retire...
and the rate of incoming ministers is roughly about 30 per year.
So, as the national church, we are living in interesting times and the current way
we undertake ministry may look very different in the future.
It’s easy to focus on what we don’t have...
and hard not to look inward, rather than out,
hard not to give in to fear.

At our own parish level, we too, have been facing difficult, challenging, and sad times,
over this last year – especially this last few months.
And it’s easy to get caught up in our own fears around scarcity and lack.
It’s easy to focus upon those we’ve lost over the last few years –
missing faces, missing friends, gaps in pews.
No this, no that, no other...
It’s easy to get caught up in
what we can’t do,
what we don’t have.
And I want to say to you all:
that’s not where our focus should be.
Like the Psalmist, of course we acknowledge the difficulties, to not do so would be delusional.
But, we don’t stay there, coorying down in what we don’t have.
We, worship the Lord who is also our Shepherd.
We worship the One who:
never promised that it would be an easy journey;
who never promised that we’d have everything that we wanted...and in the way we wanted it.
We worship the One
who liberated the Hebrew slaves from Egypt,
who walked with them
and who taught them to take off the chains that kept them still shackled.
We worship the One
who would liberate us
from the chains of defining ourselves by what we don’t have –
the One who wants to teach us,
as Moses, as the Hebrews, as the Psalmist,
about freedom to
walk from a life focused on lack,
and instead, walk to a life lived in its fulness.

As God’s people here in Upper Clyde remember, and hold fast to the words of the Psalmist:
‘The Lord is our Shepherd. We... shall ...not ...want.’
As God’s people, I want us so much to refocus:
to switch the lens from scarcity, to thankfulness for God’s faithfulness.
Let’s walk into the freedom and the blessing of
what we can do,
and what we do have,
mindful that:
we belong to God.
He is our faithful Shepherd.
In Him, we lack for nothing –
for he is our joy and our strength forever. Amen