Scripture Sunday: The Lord is My Shepherd

by Ashtyn Adams

Psalm 23 (CEB)
1 The Lord is my shepherd.
    I lack nothing.
2  He lets me rest in grassy meadows;
    he leads me to restful waters;
3  he keeps me alive.
He guides me in proper paths
    for the sake of his good name.
4  Even when I walk through the darkest valley,
    I fear no danger because you are with me.
Your rod and your staff--
    they protect me.
5  You set a table for me
    right in front of my enemies.
You bathe my head in oil;
    my cup is so full it spills over!
6  Yes, goodness and faithful love
    will pursue me all the days of my life,
    and I will live in the Lord’s house
    as long as I live.

As a kid, I often heard the remark “Remember, God is always watching.” It was usually deployed when I was fighting with my sister or suspected of doing something particularly displeasing to adults. It may have just been a silly, often desperately used phrase, which was not necessarily untrue, but without much else to go on, I came to understand God’s gaze as something I certainly did not want, a heavy burden, the unwelcomed attention from some deity breathing down my neck. It took time to understand that God’s gaze is less like a somber judge or pesky stalker and more like a shepherd who leads us to rest in grassy meadows, more like a host who pours us so much wine that our cups overflow. Deitrich Bonhoeffer so eloquently says, “God’s seeing protects the world from falling back into the void, protects it from total destruction. God sees the world as good, as created – even where it is the fallen world – and because of the way God sees his work and embraces it and does not forsake it, we live.” The CEB does a particularly good job of emphasizing God as the one who breathes breath into all life, translating verse three as “he keeps me alive,” rather than “he restores my soul,” and translating verse six as “I will live in the Lord’s house as long as I live” rather than “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” It may seem redundant, but its repetition is poetic in its own way, and is free from our Platonic ideas about the soul and misconceptions about forever as some other-worldly heaven. The Lord is our shepherd, here and now, pursuing us, and all of creation with loving-kindness: willing life, life, and more life. Not only does this psalm illuminate God’s gentle and protective gaze as shepherd and host, but it invites us to a radical recognition and embrace of our unity and interdependence with creation. 

Something particularly striking about this psalm is its noncoercive guidance. God wills rest for us, solace from our anxieties and labors, wanting us to fully enjoy the beauty and freshness deep within his created things. However, it must be something we want for ourselves too: God will lead, but not force, God will let us be among the meadows, but not demand it. We may think, well who would not want this vision of peace? There is a reason it is such a famous psalm! Yet, our consumer-capitalist culture molds our desires into something completely foreign from this gaze of the good life: we want to extract resources from the land of the meadow, commodify and hoard water, and we are convinced we lack everything and need more, only to dispose of it in the next moment. We must recognize there are contradictory guides, or gods, of our world, and realize, as was said in CJM’s Green Lectionary Podcast, that contentment isn’t something we can do with our own power; it is a spiritual practice. We must train our eyes to want to follow where the Shepherd leads, train our feet to trust the slower path. ​

Not only are the grassy meadows and restful waters creation images that we ought to pursue and restore, but the oil we are bathed in and wine spilling out of our cups assume a fruitful, nourished, and tended-to land. The fabric of this psalm illustrates God as the tender of our being, as well as the One who cares for all other aspects and systems of life. No thing is overlooked. This includes even the dark valleys and dangerous aspects of creation: there too God is, with a rod and a staff, safeguarding our steps.

For us contemporary readers though, the Anthropocene feels like the darkest of the dark valleys, unleashing a barrenness to our Earth which makes God’s life-giving breath seem obsolete. I find myself wondering, “Is God here in this dark valley too?” since this state is something man-made, a product of our own ego, materialism, and love of violence. I hear the psalmists, “I fear no danger,” with a loud sting of irony, for it seems that we don’t fear the lasting danger that is coming from our actions. The table that is set in front of our “enemies” is ourselves. We are the predators destroying other life forms without limit, which is inherently an attack on humanity, as we jeopardize and make impossible the state of rest and pleasure God intends for us within the created order.

Yet, I hear the echo of another beloved psalm: “Where can I flee from your presence?... If I make my bed in the depths, you are there” (Ps 139:7-8). Despite our very best efforts to push God away, despite our determination to dig ourselves and other created things into graves, God does not abandon us. We are his sheep, his friends, the ones he honors with fragrance and festival. His love pursues us with a resolve I am only beginning to grasp and transforms us into what we were always made to be. The invitation to stretch our tired bodies in the warm meadow under the sun, the tender hand placed on our head, softening our skin and hair with the riches of oil, is the unending love of our Creator. This is what it means to live in the house of the Lord, where all of creation flourishes in harmony, and it is always available to us, should we choose it. Just as the Israelites had to unlearn the ways of Egypt in the wilderness though, it will require community effort, and sustained, intentional practices of seeing the way God sees, of caring for the world in the active way God cares for it; we must seek to abide deeply in this particular divine way of being. It seems we are to be taken back to the beginning of our psalm then, meditating on this affirmation and echoing it in courage: “The Lord is my Shepherd. I lack nothing.”

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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