Psalm 23: A Sermon upon the Death of Queen Elizabeth II

1. The Lord is my shepherd 

I lack nothing  . . . and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

The psalm has two main characters.  But they are not EQUAL characters.  The well-being of one – the Psalmist – depends on the other – the LORD.

This is a Psalm the Queen – and her mother before her – loved.  It figured in the Thanksgiving Service in St Paul’s immediately after her death, in St. Giles Cathedral Edinburgh and in her funeral at Westminster Abbey. 

The familiarity of this Psalm masks a great surprise in it.  Compare for a moment the (nearly as well known) Psalm 100 –

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs.

Know that the Lord is God.  It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

That makes perfect sense.  We are familiar with the Shepherd and the flock of sheep (gathered in the fold or dispersed across the hills).  

But Psalm 23 is not about a flock of sheep. The Psalmist writes from the perspective of just one sheep. 'My Shepherd'; 'leads me'; 'restores my soul' etc.  An individual can know the shepherd’s love and care. 

Although she was the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the Queen often referenced her personal faith: And as surely as it was true for King David of old and Queen Elizabeth II it can be true for me and for you.  Not a general God-Shepherd and an uncertainty about whether we are in or out of the flock.  A personal grasp that The Lord is my Shepherd.

2. I shall not want 

This cannot mean I will have no problems because most of the rest of the Psalm is exactly about those problems.  There are four that are plain to see:

a. Need for Refreshment

²  He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, ³ he refreshes my soul.

The Queen served us in a phenomenal way for a historic duration.  But she died at a place very dear to her and where she could relax from the hectic Constitutional life of London. Even in London she liked to listen daily to her bagpiper- a reminder of Balmoral!  Part of the secret of her longevity of service is that she did not try to do it 24/7.

What is true for our bodies and minds is true for our souls.  Many people, seeking inner refreshment, turn to a multitude of places and methods.  Yet if we let Our Shepherd lead us this will be seal peace into our souls.

b. Choosing Right over Wrong.

He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.

Not only will life’s journey have the capacity to weary us, it also has many ways to go wrong.  It also has paths that are RIGHT. 

No Shepherd choreographs sheep!  They can have choice – but they must he headed away from what is dangerous and bad for them.  Whoever we are, we need to be led by Someone greater than ourselves. In the words of a great Scottish hymnwriter:

Thy way, not mine, O Lord, 

however dark it be;

lead me by thine own hand,

choose Thou the path for me.

I dare not choose my lot;
I would not if I might:

choose thou for me, my God,
so shall I walk aright.
 
The kingdom that I seek
is thine, so let the way
that leads to it be thine,
else I must surely stray.
 
Not mine, not mine, the choice
in things or great or small;
be thou my guide, my strength,
my wisdom, and my all.

c. Dark Times

⁴ Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Her late Majesty said, in the year of a major fire at Windsor and of the break up of three of her children's marriages --  “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis.’ I suspect that I am not alone in thinking it so.”

More recently she suffered the great loss of her husband on whom she greatly relied.

All of us know such seasons of life’s journey.  The Shepherd is the same, but the environments we travel through are wildly different.

d. Enemies

⁵ You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

In some of the Psalms the enemies loom very large.  But in this psalm, with this trust, they are simply a background.  Like the Pharisees in the Gospels; the soldiers guarding the tomb and – at Christ’s return one day the Kings of the Earth, they serve only to enhance the central figure – or in the case of Psalm 23 the meal.

The Shepherd reduces enemies to background.

3. I shall dwell in the house of the Lord

⁶ Surely your goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

One of the last people that the Queen met at Balmoral, on her last Sunday, was the current Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.  In his capacity, he had tea with the Queen and they talked about many things.  

In the middle of this conversation, he said, the Queen suddenly talked about the Christian hope and the meaning of our Resurrection. They discussed a while, then moved to another subject.  In the light of the last week he reflected on the fact that she began her last week anticipating life beyond death.

In Psalm 23 the Psalmist does the same.  Faith is not an endless journey.  It is a journey home. 

The Queen took many journeys in her lifetime.  She also had many homes, official and private, that she lived in throughout the UK.  But she could only, this week, have one home that actually matters.

And that’s our story too.  We all have different ‘home’ stories. Maybe we even have more than one home, we own a home, we don’t own a home, we lodge, we live in a shed (yes, someone connected to our church has done that!).

But actually in the end the issue is about whether we have this promise - I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever - I'm heading home.

Today hundreds of planes will land at London's Heathrow Airport.  Coming from everywhere, hot or cold climates, rich or poor countries, long or short distances, small or large planes - all that then matters is that they land.

Our journeys are all different; but as for Her Majesty the Queen, so for us each and all, we need a Shepherd in life and a Home in death.   

We need the Lord.

An April Evening

The first genuinely spring day (as against day in Spring) moves toward its close.  The sun looks like it has forgotten to go down - or at least is staying up late - perhaps to make up for its relative disappearance over several weeks.

It brings to mind something that can only be associated with such an April evening:

Maybe it's down to my male council estate barbarism but this bit of Victorian-Edwardian sacred choral doggerel did nasty things to me.  This has evoked guilt over the years when elderly people have expressed their devotion to it - one wanted me to play it on the organ so they could sing it and some imagination was required to avoid this.

This April I've decided to try to understand myself on this issue.

My initial excuse to myself was the paucity of the performance of a Sunday evening Free Church choir in the 1960s when its finest days would have been its former days.  But listening to this chorally excellent rendition on YouTube convinces me that the problem lies elsewhere.

I like sheep and lambs.  I like the countryside and especially the hills.  I have given my life to the Lamb of God who sacrificed his life for me. So the themes in the song can hardly be the problem.

I have concluded that the problem with Tynan's poem, a problem reinforced by Robertson's mood music, is that it evokes pity for the crucified Christ.  And this is not at all what should happen.

Yes, lambs are pitiful, but the Lamb of God who died was not to be pitied.  Did he not quell the women of Jerusalem's tears and tell them to weep for themselves and their children?  The pity in the Passion is all ours, his is the pain, the sacrifice, the slaughter.  

And the salvation.  It is not of any note that He died between two crosses on a hill: he died between two condemned sinners who were on crosses.  In the end the song takes away the power of the cross and replaces it with pity.  Perhaps that is what I find, pitiful lamb that I am, so pitiful about it.

Happy St Andrew's Day!

This is my favourite picture from my Sabbatical and on St Andrew's Day it seems appropriate as it comes from Scotland, and the Isle of Harris.

The question is, what is the building in the middle of this picture?

The answer is obvious.  It is a bus shelter.  And it is easy to imagine on this windswept moor that shelter would be very important.  Life-saving might be nearer the truth given the (understandable) infrequency of the W13.  Three hours wait?

Isn't that a sheep waiting for a bus?  But no, of course not.  Sheep, even in Harris, don't wait for buses.  The sheep is in the wrong place.

On reflection, though, I imagine that over a year this construction has many more sheep in it than people.  It may have been put here as a bus stop, and look like a bus stop but it is really mostly about sheep.

And when the lifelong fisherman from Galilee whose name was Andrew (and whose day today is) began to follow Jesus he looked and sounded like a fisherman, and looked like he should have been a fisherman, but the Lord told him 'from now on you will be a fisherman of people'.  Or to put it another way, from now on you are going to be all about sheep.