Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

Presbyterian minister in Atlanta.
Music lover.
Found beer in seminary.

About Me | Contact

  • Facebook
  • Instagram

Copyright © 2023 Andy James

You are here: Home / Archives for shepherd

Singing About the Shepherd

April 17, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 23
preached on April 17, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s something unusual and special about Psalm 23. These incredible words that we just sang manage to touch our lives in ways that we just can’t imagine—especially for the city dwellers among us who have never even once seen a sheep or a shepherd!

There are so many wonderful settings of this psalm, both spoken and sung. My friend Michael Morgan, a collector of translations of the Bible and especially of psalters, or translations and paraphrases of the psalms, shared with me a lecture he offered recently on Psalm 23 to the good people of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, the congregation where former President Jimmy Carter worships and teaches Sunday school. In his lecture, Michael offered dozens of translations of this beloved psalm, wandering through centuries of English poetry and prose to describe in words ancient and new the wonder of our shepherding God. For centuries, great poets would offer their own translations and paraphrases of this psalm, mining these incredible lines for deeper meaning. Among all the translations and paraphrases shared by Michael in his lecture, including one that can be sung to the tune of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” I had a difficult time deciding which ones to share with you, but I did decide on three that seemed appropriate for this day when we consider these beloved words anew.

First comes one that Michael describes as “the worst”—and I would agree—from The Politically Correct Jargon Version:

It is an ongoing deductible fact
that your inter-relational empathetical and non-vengeance capabilities
will retain me as their target focus
for the duration of my non-death period,
and I will possess tenant rights in the housing unit of the Lord
on a permanently open-ended time basis.

I can only offer one word: yikes.

Then there is a lovely paraphrase by contemporary poet Marjorie Gray:

Divine Guardian, You care for us;
You provide all we need, and more,
taking us to serene, green places
where we are refreshed to the core.

You show us Right Ways,
trails Your Ranger blazed.
Not even death’s gloom traumatizes us
on the path to Your Lighthouse.

We are safe and strong:
with so-called enemies
You invite us to feast, carefree,
blessed with effervescent health.

Your passionate compassion
always invigorates us;
we’ll be Down Home forever
with You, Joyful Peacemaker.

Finally, there is a lovely paraphrase by 17th century poet Samuel Woodford that begins:

The mighty God, who all things does sustain,
That God, who nothing made in vain,
Who nothing that He made did e’er disdain;
The mighty God my Shepherd is,
He is my Shepherd, I His sheep,
Both He is mine and I am His;
About His flock, He constant watch does keep;
When God provides, poor man can nothing need,
And He, who hears young ravens cry,
His sheep will feed.

Yet all these wonderful poetic settings so easily miss that these words of Psalm 23, like all the psalms, were meant to be sung. We don’t know exactly how the ancient Hebrew people sang the psalms. Modern musical notation has only developed in the last six hundred years, and so the original tunes are long lost.

Modern-day composers and churches have taken several different approaches to singing the psalms. First there is the metrical paraphrase, much like our last hymn. These have a regular meter that can easily fit words to tunes that might even be familiar from other hymns. In many quarters of the church after the Reformation, including in our own parent churches of Scotland and Switzerland, the only music that was allowed was sung settings of the psalms like these—never accompanied, always as simple as possible—and some churches even keep up this practice today. As an example of these sorts of psalms, let’s sing the first verse of my friend Michael Morgan’s own paraphrase of Psalm 23 as found in your bulletin.

As faithful shepherds tend their flocks,
So God will care for me;
And from God’s store of grace my needs
Are met abundantly.
In pastures green, by waters still,
My soul new life does take;
And in the paths of righteousness
I follow, for God’s sake.

Other sung settings of the psalms use a refrain and then a chanted tone, like setting two in your bulletin. This particular setting uses a portion of a hymn tune as the refrain, but the chanted part that follows is a little different, as it has no written rhythm but rather follows the natural rhythm of the words.

(No recording of this setting seems to be available online.)

Building on these sorts of responsive, chanted psalms, some contemporary composers have offered their own settings of the psalms, with simple, repeated refrains and fully composed music for the verses. This style came into its own after Vatican II in the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s, as traditional Latin liturgical music became less important and the church sought out new ways to sing the traditional portions of the service. One of my favorites actually has made it into our hymnal at #473. Let’s turn there and sing it together.

 

There are hundreds more sung settings of Psalm 23, reflecting not just the deep love of this psalm in the lives of people of faith but also the incredible possibilities of interpretation found in these words. As my friend Michael Morgan put it so well,

In this broad variety of words, translators have expressed the endless season we will enjoy in God’s presence, as sheep with a faithful Shepherd, or as Isaac Watts identifies each of us, ‘No more a stranger or a guest, But like a child at home.’

As a final view of these incredible words in song, I invite you to join me in singing an incredible and relatively new setting of Psalm 23 by Presbyterian composer Hal Hopson, setting words from the 1650 Scottish Psalter to a soaring responsive tune.

(No recording of this setting seems to be available online.)

So may God inspire us all our days by the knowledge of our mighty and loving shepherd who surrounds us with faithfulness, love, and hope as all things are made new in Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Filed Under: posts, sermons Tagged With: Ps 23, shepherd, song

We Need a Shepherd

April 21, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 23
preached on April 21, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Shepherd me, O God,
beyond my wants,
beyond my fears,
from death into life.

—Psalm 23, paraphrased Marty Haugen

These are days when we need a shepherd. It might be a bit strange for us to need a shepherd when there are no sheep nearby, when the last pastureland in Queens shut down before many of us were even born, but the last week made me long for someone to be present with us through difficult times.

This past week has been one of the toughest in recent memory. If we look back, it had plenty of difficult history, as it already held anniversaries of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and the Columbine massacre, to name just two. But the new horrors of this past week were almost too much to bear. First, the bombing at the Boston Marathon killed three people long before their time and injured hundreds of others, then the ensuing investigation and manhunt for the perpetrators consumed the nation for much of the week and culminated in an intense 24-hour search for the two bombers that left two more dead and shut down an entire city for a day.

But that wasn’t all that shocked us this past week. In Iraq, a wave of bombings continued across the nation as local elections were held yesterday, and some 33 people were killed by bombs on Monday alone. An earthquake on Friday in the Szechuan region of China left over 150 dead and thousands injured. Closer to home, the city of Chicago witnessed its 100th homicide of the year on Thursday. Two letters laced with poison were mailed to the president and a U.S. Senator. Fifteen people were killed and hundreds injured in a terrible explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas. And somehow our United States Senate came up four votes short of passing a bill favored by nearly ninety percent of the American people to finally require background checks on most gun purchases.

The violence and strife around us is just too much to bear, and that’s without considering all the other stuff that is going on with our friends and families and neighbors, all the unemployment, the sickness, the cancer, the addiction, the depression… It’s all just too much to bear. There’s just not much we can say. These are days when we need a shepherd.

It’s not even that we just want a shepherd—we actually need one. What are we supposed to do with all these things? We are used to dealing with grief in our lives—in fact, I think we have gotten pretty good at it over the years. Yet it seems that nowadays we are constantly bombarded with news of deep pain and hurt: so many deaths, so much violence, wars and strife escalating around the world, so many things that show us the deep brokenness in our midst, so much that reminds us that we are not the people God wants us to be. And the more we learn of all this, the less we know what to do with it. We need something, someone to show us the way. These are days when we need a shepherd.

Our psalm from the Lectionary today reminds us of the wonderful shepherd we have before us. These incredibly familiar words are often the first on our lips in times of loss, the first attempts at comfort when we face confusion and pain and hurt, the first thing that comes to mind during a week like this. Psalm 23 is so often recited at funerals or offered in times of deep loss, seemingly giving us comfort and consolation for days yet to come, in a world separate from our own, but if we read more closely we might just see that this is a shepherd for the here and now, a God who brings us what we need and frees us from our want not just in the future but even more in the present. God shows us the way to a new wholeness and peace in the midst of the uncertainty and confusion of our world. God invites us to lie down in green pastures and find rest. God leads us beside still waters to bring calm to our busy days and restore our souls. God walks with us and shows us how to journey in the pathways of new life. God guides us and directs us and comforts us even in the darkest valley, and there is nothing that we should fear—no terrorist who can do us harm, no earthquake that can shake us to the core, no threat that can separate us from God’s deep and real and present love.

And so the psalm speaks incredible words of comfort and hope just when we need a shepherd. t shows us the way to emerge from the darkness that surrounds us in days like these. It helps us find our way into new life when there seems to be nothing but death around us. And it helps us to recognize God’s presence among us, shepherding us “beyond [our] wants, beyond [our] fears, from death into life.”

But in these days when we need a shepherd, Psalm 23 also tells us that there is more to this shepherd’s work than just bringing us comfort right where we are. This shepherd might bring us comfort in a surprising and unusual place: at a table prepared in the presence of our enemies. This table is not just for our comfort— it is for our growth, for our real peace, for our honest engagement with the places where we fall short, for our hope of new relationship with those who seem to be set against us. Our comfort and peace amidst strife, then, do not come at the expense of the life of others but rather as “a banquet of love in the face of hatred” (Marty Haugen). Only then, after this strange and incredible feast, are we anointed as God’s own with oil that overflows, bringing us grace, mercy, and love beyond our wildest dreams.

And finally this comfort becomes all the more real as “goodness and mercy… follow [us]” throughout life. Strangely, they do not come before us but rather follow after us, maybe partly because we are as responsible as anyone else for bringing them into being in our world, but maybe also because God gives us these things in ways beyond our understanding, in glimpses that are clearer when we look back upon our most difficult days. And this goodness and mercy then sustain us as we find a new home in the house of the Lord for the fullness of our lives and beyond.

These familiar words of Psalm 23 are perfect for days like these when we need a shepherd, for these weeks when our hearts seem so heavy that they cannot bear anything more, for these moments when we can do nothing more than turn to God and offer a cry for help. And so in these Easter days when the resurrection still seems so far away, in these moments when it seems nearly impossible to believe that Jesus is alive and at work in our world, may God shepherd us through the darkness, pain, and sorrow of our world, beyond the want and fear and despair of difficult days and guide all of us into new life. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Filed Under: posts, sermons Tagged With: Boston Marathon, comfort, Psalm 23, shepherd, tragedy, violence