Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The Holy Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ according to John.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Glory to you, Lord Christ.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Jesus said, very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate, but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit.
The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.
The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice.
He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.
They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.
Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.
So again Jesus said to them, very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.
All who came before me are thieves and bandits. But the sheep did not listen to them.
I am the gate.
Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Children ages 3 through 10 are welcome to go with Katie for story time and join us again at the feast.
In the name of one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
This week we have one of the true bangers of the biblical tradition, the 23rd Psalm.
Other than the Lord Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, with its powerful poetry and invitation to deep connection with God, has got to be one of the most familiar parts of the Bible for all of us.
We use it in prayers, we use it at funerals, we use it in Sunday school, in art. It's everywhere in the Christian tradition.
But just because we have heard something over and over again doesn't really mean we're listening to it.
There's a fine line between something becoming rote and something that has become a part of our own spiritual DNA.
So today we're going to do something that's meant to give each one of us some biblical exploration tools for passages when we've become blind to the ones that we've heard over and over again to learn how to see them afresh.
Mind you, the things I'm going to give us today are just scratching the surface. Everything I'm about to share can be done with every single verse of this particular passage, probably even every word.
So this is just a little taste and a note, one of the number one ways that it has been shown to grow in your faith. Is by studying Scripture.
So I would highly recommend to bring your Bible to church on Sundays to treat these services as an intentional scriptural study.
Write in your Bible, get to know it, capture revelations.
And since you may not have your Bible today, maybe please go ahead and take your leaflet back out, turn back to the psalm. And so if something strikes you, you can take a note home with you.
So there's two different Bible story techniques we're going to use today. The first is historical contextual study, and the second is going to be word study and see how they relate to our spiritual growth.
The first one, historical.
It is so important to know what these texts would have meant in their time frame.
I think that's especially true for things like poetry and parables, because metaphors are working on several levels of meaning. So it's helpful to know what the base level is.
For example, is anyone here an expert in ancient agrarian practices, especially ancient near east shepherding techniques?
Anyone? Right. Thirteeners. Did you learn about that? No? Okay. All right, then. Perhaps some of these images could use some unpacking for us.
Now. If you're going to do your own Bible study, here's one way you can do it. Find a good commentary or biblical dictionary to learn more about life in these ancient times. You would just look up shepherding and it would give you a whole article on this one. I recommend for all things shepherding is Philip Keller's the Shepherd trilogy, from which I'm drawing a lot of inspiration today.
Now, you've likely heard that sheep are dumb.
That's actually not true. Scientifically speaking, they're pretty intelligent creatures. They have great memories. They have strong emotional and social bonds. They're not dumb. But what they are is very fearful and anxious.
Maybe some of us can relate.
No other type of livestock requires such individualized care and handling and direction as sheep do.
Shepherds have to live with them to help them with their fear.
So right off the bat, in the 23rd Psalm, if you've ever known fear or anxiety in your life, know that this psalm is for you.
It reminds us that we have a God that dwells with us, and we see that truth in its fullest expression in the incarnation of Jesus.
By the way, this is what Jesus means in the Gospel today as he's intentionally pulling on this exact psalm when he calls himself the Sheep gate.
The shepherd would have guarded the spot where sheep would sleep at night, putting their actual bodies in the front of an enclosed space, typically a cave, where they would guard the gate all night. They would be the protective gate.
But back to the 23rd Psalm. In verses 1 through 4, the Psalm describes everything a happy sheep could need.
Sure, it's water and grass, but if you know anything about sheep, you'll hear more than just bodily needs being met here.
You'll hear the lack of anxiety that they are experiencing.
Why? Well, a sheep will not follow a shepherd's whose voice they do not know because they don't trust them. It makes them nervous.
So the fact that they are following here shows that they are at ease.
Sheep will not drink water if it's moving. They would not like a La Croix. They want still water, like in a stream, because a stream might make them nervous. It has to be still waters or nothing.
So the fact that they're drinking here means that their shepherd has put them at peace. In fact, shepherds would often have wells, often in their territory, just so their sheep could drink.
A sheep won't even lie down and relax unless four requirements are they're free from all fear, free from friction with other sheep. There's a pecking order. They can't stand to see it broken. They're free from flies and parasites, and they're free from hunger. I don't know if I'd ever go to sleep if all of these things were met.
And all of this is mitigated by a good shepherd.
So the fact that they're eating and sleeping shows just how good and into this God is.
Now, to further rid the sheep of fear, the shepherd carries both a rod and a staff. The rod is a weapon.
It's meant to beat back predators and thieves that would be ever present as the shepherd leads the flock through the wilderness where they graze.
But it could also be used to throw next to a sheep that's starting to veer off the path before it gets lost.
So one way to think of this for us is as the scripture and word of God helping us, keeping us safe, keeping us from veering off the path towards things. Our tendency towards things that are distractions or desires and not the plan that God has for us.
The staff or the crook, on the other hand, is to help guide the sheep when they've been cast down, which is a shepherding term when a sheep has fallen on its back and cannot get up again without some help.
A metaphor for our life if I've ever heard one.
It's his most precious tool, and it actually is mostly for the sheep's comfort.
When a lamb is new, it's used to bring it back to its mother without touching it and giving It a human scent which might make the mother reject it. They use it to bring an adult sheep closer for examination and for comforting it.
So think of this as the way God brings us back to love and wholeness when we feel lost and alone. If the rod is the word of God, the staff is the grace of God pulling us close out of harm.
That's all lovely, but can we talk about flies and parasites for a moment? A little less lovely.
In verse five, it says, you anoint my head with oil. Again, poetry. Beautiful. In the biblical world, shepherds were the number one metaphor for what a good king of Israel should be. Think David, the shepherd king.
Olive oil was used in the kingly anointing ceremonies to show who was God's appointed shepherd leader. And fun fact, this is still happening today. The king of England used oil from Jerusalem in his coronation ceremony. They've been doing this forever.
We take that even further in the Christian tradition when we think of the chrism oil we use in baptism, which is why we call it a christening.
Here we are anointed as God's children, as heavenly royalty.
It's all beautiful imagery, but if I may put on my country farm girl hat for a moment, there is also a very literal way to interpret this, and that's dipping or treating your livestock with medical oils to keep them free from pests.
We may use pharmaceuticals to do this now, but in the ancient world, they would have to deal with the hordes of insects that they faced with a type of oily concoction, mostly linseed, oil sulfate and tar that they would smear on the heads and noses of the sheep to stop the flies from laying larvae in their noses and ears. A little less poetic, I know.
But without this step, the infestations could get so bad that the sheep would sometimes run into rocks to try to relieve the pain and accidentally die.
God anoints us with the Holy Spirit not just for the regal parts of our lives, the parts we like to show to other people, but God anoints us for the parts of our life that are painful, not glamorous places of pain, addiction, trauma, sin.
God doesn't just care for the important parts of our lives. God cares and tends us for all of it.
God cannot love the person we pretend to be because that person doesn't exist.
Rather, God sees us as God's anointed children, which means we are loved as we are and invited to be forever changed.
Now, there's so much more here, but we gotta leave room for the second type of Bible Study word studies.
These are really helpful. When you find a word that you're like, what does this mean? Or that you've heard something so many times, you become blind to.
In poetry, words carry with the multiple levels of meaning. So I've picked just one.
Actually, I picked two, but this got too long. So if you want to hear the other one. A few weeks ago in forum, we talked about it. It's called nephesh, and it's the Hebrew word for Soul, used 700 times in the Bible. What even is a soul? Go look that forum up if you want to know more. But. But if you want to try this in your own Bible study again, get a concordance or a commentary or a Bible dictionary, Find the word you're looking for and see what it means in its original language and how it's used in other parts of Scripture.
So the word we're going to look at is the word hesed. This means goodness and mercy at the end of the psalm. Here it actually means about 47 different things, but mostly gets translated as goodness and mercy.
And at the end of the psalm, it seems to be chasing us down. The verbs there are almost like it's hunting us. If we're following God, we can't help but be pursued by goodness and mercy.
I had a bishop once who liked to say revelation is best seen in hindsight.
Revelation is best seen in hindsight.
What he meant by that is that for so many of us, we struggle to see the evidence of God in our lives.
We may look to the future, hoping to see signs that what we want to have happen will work out.
We struggle to let God be our shepherd and follow God because we can't see where that's going to take us.
So we make our own paths and plans.
But that's the wrong thing to do when we don't know where we're going. It's when we need to follow God the most.
So if you're struggling with a decision and can't see God ahead of you, a good prayer practice is to make a timeline of your life and see where it was in the past that God was with you, where there were times you felt love and support by people or circumstances.
Where were there times when there was a decision made that was just the right one or just the wrong one.
Now, as we use this spiritual timeline as a prayer prompt, we need to think about sheep again. Sheep are a creature of habit. If they're not moved around constantly by a good shepherd, they will ruin the land they graze upon. By just habitually grazing, ravaging it, leaving it stripped. The only thing to following them is dry, brittle soil and waste, if you will.
Under a good shepherd, though, the sheep are moved. They are taken where they need to be so that they can have actual benefits for themselves and the world around them. They enrich poor soil, they eat bad weeds. And in the ancient world, sheep under a good shepherd were referred to as those with the golden hoofs. They had a way with words, those with the golden hoofs, because of how good they were for the land.
This is a discernment tool for us.
When we look back over our lives, what have we left in our wake?
Peace.
Love. Justice.
Waste. Bitterness.
Where did God walk us through the valleys of death and kept us moving?
Or where did we stay closed there of our own accord, wallowing in the kind of even driven deaths, grievances, bitterness, patterns of destruction that we keep chasing?
Where were the times there is goodness and mercy pursuing you even if you were about to veer off the path?
What were the discernible patterns when we think we are being pursued by danger and threat? How have we missed the goodness of God that was trying to catch up with us?
This is revelation. In hindsight, these are the way markers for us as we follow our Good shepherd friends. This is literally, as I said, just scratching the surface of what Bible study can do. It's so deep for us, it can change our lives if we let it.
It's the word of God, the sound of our beloved shepherd's voice.
But we have to spend time with it.
If Jesus, a good shepherd, is willing to spend all of his life with us, we too must follow, to stay close with it, to let it free us from our fears and anxieties.
So this week, spend just 10 minutes with this psalm, maybe praying it, maybe studying it, maybe just letting it soothe something in your soul or challenge you to new growth.
Let it be your good guide.
After all, we have a good Shepherd. How could we want anything more?
Let us draw close and listen to God's Word.
Amen.
