Song for Living

Text: Psalm 23
Other texts: Isaiah 25:6-9

A man walks down the street. He is pushing a shopping cart. In the cart are bags and empty bottles. The wheels of the cart go clink-clinks when they cross the seams of the sidewalk. The man’s feet hurt. He rests on the steps in someone’s doorway. People look down when they pass, wishing not to see him. Sometimes he sleeps behind a church. In the winter, his hands get cold.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

A child sits on the curb. He is humming a little tuneless song. The cars rush by in front of him. When the trucks go by with their rattles and groans, the boy’s hair gets blown. Otherwise it is as if he does not notice. In his hands is a disposable camera. He picks it up by the strap, then smashes it against the sidewalk. He smashes it again and again, until the camera opens and little plastic parts spill out. “It’s broken,” he tells his little sister, who is about four years old. Then he calls her a slut.

The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me beside still waters.

Inside, the man’s voice is gravelly with anger, the woman’s voice harsh with fear. They rise and fall like some modern harmony. There is a moment of quiet. There is a sound of doors slamming and silverware spilling. Something breaks. “We are not fighting,” he says, “this is a discussion.” She says, “get out, get out, get out.”

The Lord is my shepherd. He makes me lie down in green pastures.

A woman mourns her brother, and she wishes he were here with her now. She thinks: There was no reason for her brother to get so sick. Her brother was the healthy one. The smart one, too, and handsome. He would have been a rich man, everyone always said.

The Lord is my shepherd. He revives my soul.

The man sits by himself, watching. Time goes way too fast. Maybe it is a blessing. The life he thought was his to have never quite came. He wasn’t very lucky. And truth to tell, he did some stupid things. It’s hard. He’s not the person he thought he was. Not everything he has done has made him proud. People ask him how he’s doing. “No regrets,” he tells them.

The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me along right paths.

We are surrounded by enemies. But they are not the enemies we think. Not terrorists and robbers. Not people eager to harm us. Our lives are a mixture of good and bad, abundance and scarcity, joy and sadness. Things happen to us. We do things, We find that we are not the captains of our own ships.

The twenty-third psalm is about our deepest longing to be saved from sorrows. It is about our profound understanding that we are not made to live in sorrow. We know that we are creatures of sorrow, but we know that we are not made to be that way. There is dreariness and dread in our lives, but we know that God’s expectation for us is otherwise. We know that we walk down dark and scary valleys, but we know that we walk there neither alone nor desperate.

The twenty-third psalm makes us weep to hear it. It is not a sad song, but it reminds us of the sometimes sad songs of individual persons, men, women, and children. People we know and people we are. Songs we sing about us and about the people we love most dearly and the strangers—the mixed-up boy, the freezing man, the mourning sister—whom we see every day. It reminds us of the people we pray for, the things we ask of God. It’s not that we are creatures of sorrow. We are not. We are creatures of joy, beset by sorrows.

The psalm is not a sad song. We weep because it is a song that reminds us of what we wish to be, what might be, what we want most.

To be free from want. Not to have all we want, but to be free from the power of wanting.

To have enough to eat and drink, and which is pleasing and good, perfect as clear cold water.

To see beauty, and to live in, create, and preserve from harm places as beautiful as green pastures.

To have a light heart. To take pleasure in our existence and to make stupid jokes and dance and laugh out loud in inappropriate places. To forgive ourselves and others.

To have inner peace. To be free from apprehension, worry, and regret. To be revived when tired and restored when depleted. To live in trust. To be good.

And finally, to be guided by God’s hand. To be shown the way to these things. To be led along the right paths by God who both is way wiser that we and who forever loves us.

The psalm tells us that though surrounded by enemies, God prepares abundant life for us. Surrounded by enemies, we are served a feast that God lays out for us. The enemies—the things of sorrow—are still there. But we eat, and take pleasure, and laugh. God is with us. And for that, we weep in relief.

The prophet Isaiah speaks to the people of Israel in up until then their darkest hour. He reminds them of the promised life, the life created for them, a life that is possible, that is inevitable. God will wipe away the tears from all people, the prophet says. God will prepare for them a life of satisfying abundance.

A shroud—a veil, a blanket, a fog—a shroud covers them. The shroud is sorrow. They live in sorrow. But that is not their destiny, their nature as creatures of God. God will destroy, the prophet says, the shroud that is cast over all people. These verses move us. They are hard to believe, yet if they do move us, it is because we do believe them. We are drawn to them.

Christians are people of unsentimental hope. We know about the enemies, but we know about God, too. We have heard God’s promises, and in the valley God has walked with us the person of Jesus. God knows about sorrow. And God knows about abundant life. About vitality and beauty and renewal and refreshment and laughter. And God has made it clear which, between sorrow and life, God prefers for us.

In his baptism, Cormac today has been called by name into a community of people—all Christians all over the world, and the particular people here—who turn in hope and trust to the words in Swedish which ring this altar: the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”