Transcript
The Lord Is My Shepherd
First Baptist Richmond, May 31, 2026
Trinity Sunday
Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Welcome to a sermon series called “Good Psalms for Hard Times.” I got the title from Garrison Keillor, who once published an anthology called, Good Poems for Hard Times. That was in 2005. You might argue that those weren’t such bad times, you might even argue that these aren’t, but every time is a hard time for someone. I bought a copy of that book when it came out, and in the years since I’ve had plenty of reasons to take it down off the shelf. In the introduction Keillor wrote: “The meaning of poetry is to give courage.”
I’m not sure if that’s the reason the psalms were written, but it’s the reason many readers have reached for them—to find courage. Psalm 23 is a perfect example. How many times have I quoted its lines to someone facing serious surgery, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me”? It’s one of the most comforting chapters in the Bible. But one of the reasons it works is because it doesn’t pretend that life is easy, something I noticed in a sermon I preached here in 2010. It was called, “Not a Pretty Picture,” and it started like this:
Just for fun, let’s pretend that you’re not at church, but at church camp, and that you’ve already been roused from your bunk by the “good morning” song, blaring from the loudspeakers. You’ve put on your shorts and your camp T-shirt and you’ve made your way over to the dining hall where you had something vaguely resembling
scrambled eggs and a frozen waffle that was in the warming oven so long it had turned entirely to plastic. After that you went for a nature hike, and then to Bible study, and now it’s time for arts and crafts. And so you stop at the arts and crafts hut and you sit down at a table where you are given an assignment, along with a few sheets of construction paper, some scissors, some glue, a handful of cotton balls, and a box of crayons. The instructor—an art major named Jennifer from Charlottesville—hands each of you a small printed copy of Psalm 23 and says, “I want you to take all these supplies and illustrate this psalm.”
So you take a minute to read through it. It doesn’t look too hard. Something in there about shepherds and green pastures and still waters. And so you turn a piece of blue construction paper sideways and cut a wavy line right across the middle of it. You glue that down on top of a green piece of construction paper, making sure the top corners match up in just the way Jennifer showed you. So now you have some sky and some mountains. You take what’s left of that sheet of blue construction paper and cut out a squiggly line to look like a stream winding its way through the valley, and you glue it down on the green grass in front of the hills. And now it’s really looking lovely. There’s the blue sky, the green hills, the deep pools of that blue stream winding through the valley. You take some of the cotton balls and glue them on to the green paper right near the water, like sheep bedded down for an afternoon nap. And then you think it might be nice to have some clouds in the sky so you take a couple of those leftover cotton balls and glue them on to the blue of the sky, but it doesn’t look like clouds, it looks like some of the sheep have floated up into the air, so you pull them off, but now you have a smear of Elmer’s glue on the sky and you try to scrape it off with your fingernail but that doesn’t work, so finally you just take a black crayon and draw in some of those birds we
always used to draw in elementary school. Do you remember? The ones that looked like big, flying “V’s”?
Still, it’s looking good! The birds were a nice touch. Jennifer comes by your table and asks, “How’s it going?” “It’s going great,” you say. “Look at that: Psalm 23, illustrated! See? There are the sheep. The green pastures. The still waters.” But she says, “Would you mind reading the psalm again, a little more closely this time? I think you’ll find that there’s more to it.” “Well…OK,” you say. So you look. And there’s that whole thing in there about the “valley of the shadow of death” you didn’t even see the first time through. So, you get out the black crayon again and draw a kind of a big “V” right down in the middle of one of your green hills, and then you color it in—dark, black, there it is—the Valley of the Shadow of Death! Jennifer comes by again. “Not bad,” she says. “I think you’re getting it, but read a little more.” So you do. Not only is there a valley of the shadow of death in here but there is a banquet table. Oh, OK. That’s what the brown construction paper is for! So, you pick up your scissors, you cut out a little table shape, you stick it down on the green hillside, over on the other side from where the sheep are, and then you glue some more cotton balls down around the table.
Look at that! There are the sheep, sitting around the banquet table! “You prepare a table before me,” it says. And Jennifer says, “And…?” You look again. Oh, yes. “You prepare a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” You get out the black crayon again. And this time you begin to draw the enemies of the sheep all around the table. And these are wolves. And they’re really scary looking wolves. They have really big, black bushy tails. And teeth! Sharp, white teeth. Big red eyes. They’re all around the table staring at these sheep, and the sheep are looking a little nervous. And then Jennifer comes by again and says, “Now. Now I think you’re getting it.”
And you look down at the picture you’ve been working on and you can’t help but feel a little disappointed at the way it’s turning out. It had started out so beautifully, with just the blue sky, the green hills, the sheep, the still waters, a couple of birds winging their way across the sky, but now there are these wolves in there and this big, jagged gash of a dark valley, and the sheep are beginning to look frightened, and it’s just not the kind of picture you thought it was going to be.
Not at all.
I have to tell you I hadn’t really thought about how full of dark shadows Psalm 23 really is until I read it like this. It’s our favorite Psalm. Probably, after John 3:16 and the Lord’s Prayer, it is the most memorized passage in all of Scripture. It speaks of green pastures and still waters. But, as you’ve seen, it also speaks of other things. Take a good close look at this psalm and you will find that it is filled up with threatening images. There is that valley of the shadow of death. There is that banquet table surrounded by enemies. Can you imagine: trying to enjoy a banquet while your enemies are looking on, licking their lips? Even if they weren’t wolves, it would be difficult. There is this talk about “paths of righteousness” in the psalm, which suggests that there might also be paths of wickedness. “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” says the psalmist, but a rod is what you use to fend off dangerous predators and a staff is what you use to prevent those sheep from falling off the edge of a cliff. Even a phrase like, “I shall not want,” implies that somewhere in the world there is want. Hunger. Thirst. Someone shivering in the cold. It’s kind of a frightening text, and when you look at the Gospel passage that is most frequently paired with this one you come up with a similar picture.
In John 10 we find Jesus, the Good Shepherd, walking along Solomon’s portico in wintertime at the temple in Jerusalem. It’s the Feast of Dedication, what we would call “Hanukkah.” Around the city we can imagine people lighting candles and children
opening gifts. Everybody’s in a good mood, but Jesus is surrounded by his enemies. And they say, “Tell us the truth. Don’t keep us in suspense any longer. Are you the Messiah or not?” And Jesus says, “I’ve already told you but you didn’t believe me because you are not from among my sheep. If you were my sheep you would hear my voice. My sheep hear my voice, they follow me, I give them eternal life.” But then listen to what Jesus says: “They shall never perish,” introducing that concept into an otherwise lovely passage of Scripture. “And no one will snatch them out of my hand.” As if such a thing might happen if you weren’t very careful.
And then there’s a passage in Revelation 7 about the shepherd who will guide his sheep to springs of the water of life. God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. But when you look more closely at that picture, at the multitudes standing there dressed in white robes, waving palm branches, you learn that these are they who have come out of the “great ordeal,” whose robes are white because they have been washed in the blood of the Lamb who was slaughtered, but who now stands before the throne.
Take a good, close look at any of these passages about good shepherds and their sheep and you will find them dripping with blood, covered in darkness, surrounded by enemies, which makes me wonder: why are they our favorites? If I had to guess, I would guess that it is because this is how we experience life. It is beautiful and sunlit in so many ways, but also dark and full of danger. And we know that. Crossing the street in front of your house on a beautiful, sun-drenched afternoon you look both ways, because you don’t want to be struck down by a car and killed. In my own home, in a part of the city that is virtually crime-free, with good neighbors on both sides, I activate the security system when I come home after dark. Because someone could break in and steal—or worse. When my children travel I often ask them to give me a call just to let
me know that they got there safely, that they’re doing OK. I can’t help myself. I know the world is lovely and sunlit but I know that it is also dark and full of danger.
Christians are sometimes accused of being naïve, of thinking that because they love Jesus and Jesus loves them everything will be OK. But these passages of Scripture don’t suffer from any such delusions. David, the one who wrote Psalm 23, the one who said that the Lord was his shepherd, had been a shepherd himself. Do you remember what he said to King Saul just before he went out to fight Goliath? He said, “Your servant used to watch over his father’s flock, and there were times when a bear or a lion would come and take a lamb from the fold and I would chase it down and club it and kill it and if it turned on me I would catch it by the jaw and strike it down.” Danger! Darkness! When King Saul later turned against David, when he tracked him all over the wilderness of Judea like a lion following its prey, hoping to catch him and kill him, David—remembering his own experience as a shepherd, remembering the way he watched over that flock, the way he led them to green pastures and still waters, the way he kept them from falling off cliffs—said,
“The Lord is my shepherd.”
It’s a dark world. Dangerous. Jesus knew this when he talked about being the Good Shepherd, with those enemies of his surrounding him, looking for a chance to do him in. In the very next verse after our reading for today his opponents take up stones to kill him. And in the book of Revelation that beautiful text doesn’t speak of a miraculous rapture in which all Christians are saved from persecution. It speaks of a great multitude of people, too numerous to count, who have gone through the Great Ordeal of tribulation, suffering, and distress. They’re standing there before the throne of God because they have died for their faith. But their robes are white, washed in the blood of the Lamb who died for them. There’s nothing naïve about these texts. They see
the world as it is, but they also see God as God is. We don’t love these passages because they present us with a picture of the perfect life. We love them because they present us with a picture of a life as it is—filled with dark shadows and deep valleys and all the time, everywhere, the comforting presence of God.
On the Sunday after September 11, 2001, I talked to my congregation in Washington about terrorism. I said, “The goal of terrorism is to terrify, to make us so afraid we can no longer function. But let’s not give the terrorists that satisfaction. Let’s refuse to be afraid.” I took Psalm 23 as my text and told them that in these verses we have the antidote to fear. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” the Psalmist says, “I will fear no evil.” Why? “For Thou art with me.” The presence of God is the antidote to fear. When I visit in hospitals I find myself saying to people over and over again, “God hasn’t promised us that we would never go through difficulties, but only that when we do he will go through them with us. Even when we walk through the darkest valley,” I say, “we don’t have to be afraid. God is with us.” And that’s a comfort. It really is.
Back in the arts and crafts hut, you’ve gone a little overboard. Now in your picture there are bombs exploding in the background and fighter planes flying overhead, strafing the sheep. The sheep are running in all directions and tanks are rolling toward them, soldiers advancing on foot. Someone has declared all-out war on this poor little flock and when Jennifer comes by your table she says, “OK! Now I think you’re getting the picture! You’re just missing one thing.” And then she hands you what she’s been carrying around the room the whole time, a paper cutout of a shepherd who looks strong, confident, and able. “Here,” she says. “Take this.” And you do. And you squeeze out a little Elmer’s glue on the back and then put it down right there in the center of your picture. And you look at it for a minute. There is that shepherd, standing there in
the midst of his flock, surrounded by danger on every side. And yet, there is that shepherd. And somehow, somehow…
That changes everything.
—Jim Somerville © 2026
