For the opening worship of the Iowa Preachers Project gathering in Corona Del Mar, California, I decided to continue preaching on Psalm 23.
In his little book The Doors of the Sea, my former teacher David Bentley Hart recalls reading an article in the New York Times shortly after the tsunami in South Asia in 2005. The article highlighted a Sri Lankan father, who, in spite of his frantic efforts, which included swimming in the roiling sea with his wife and mother-in-law on his back, was unable to prevent his wife or any of his four children from being swept to their deaths. The father recounted the names of his four children and then, overcome with grief, sobbed to the reporter, “My wife and children must have thought, “Father is here . . . he will save us” but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”
At which point the man broke down, overcome by his weeping.
Hart wonders: If you had the chance to speak to this father in the moment of his deepest grief, what should you say? Hart argues that only a moral cretin would have approached the man with abstract theological explanation, “Sir, your children’s deaths are a part of God’s eternal but mysterious counsels.” Or, “Your children’s deaths, tragic as they may seem, in the larger sense serve God’s complex design for creation.” Certainly you would not quip, “It’s all part of God’s plan.” Most of us, Hart writes, would have the good sense and empathy not to so speak to a father broken and bewildered by grief…Such sentiments would amount not only to an indiscretion or words spoken out of season, but to a vile stupidity and a lie told principally for our own comfort, by which we would try to excuse ourselves for believing in an omnipotent and benevolent God.”
According to Hart, there is a homiletical mandate here, for preachers of the gospel above all. “And this should tell us something,” he asserts, "For if we think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them.” If we must not say utter such cruel and unfeeling bromides to a father in grief, then believers ought never proclaim them about God.
On Sunday, I had not yet buckled my seat belt before I landed on the receiving end of every preacher’s most dreaded question, “So— what do you do for a living?” Normally in such situations I summon my inner George Constanza and lie. “I’m a marine biologist,” I’ll say, “I’m an architect. I’m a latex salesman for Vandelay Industries.” But on Sunday my laptop was already open and illuminated with my exegetical notes. And Psalm 23 is nothing if not exceedingly familiar, leaving me with no option but to tell the truth.
“I’m a preacher,” I mumbled.
To my surprise, he did not expect me to apologize for all Christians in every time and place nor did he confess any troubles burdening his conscience. He left me alone. Until the plane began its slow descent to Los Angeles. Peering out the window, he pointed to the scorched earth and desiccated neighborhoods. It looked like a tsunami of flames had flooded the land.
He elbowed me.
“Preacher, how do you look at something like that and talk about God?”
“I’m genuinely curious,” he added with a hint of moral indignation.
I started to reply but then I recalled my teacher’s admonishment.
Then we ought never to say them.
So I bit my lip.
David Bentley Hart’s homiletical mandate brings us back to Karl Barth’s dialectical conundrum on preaching. “As preachers,” Barth insists, “we cannot speak of the God who is God. It’s an impossibility! Nevertheless, as preachers we must.” For Barth, what sets preachers apart as particularly peculiar from all other believers is that our lack is precisely our task.
Our deprivation is nonetheless our obligation.
Just so—
With the words of my mouth and the meditation of all your hearts, we must proclaim a word with these words of King David. And this is an endeavor fraught with danger, for this psalm of David appears to invite proclaimers to commit the homiletical malpractice David Bentley Hart chastens us to avoid. Whatever else this scripture might license us to say about God, it will not permit us to survey our world and speculate that God is not in control.
After all, the very first verb on David’s anointed lips makes the LORD’s sovereignty absolute. This is the only instance in the scriptures where the common verb hasar (to want) has no direct object. The verb stands alone because the objects are infinite. In other words, “The LORD is my shepherd; he supplies everything.” And while the underlying structure of the twenty-third psalm is difficult to discern, the prayer’s succession of images reinforces this stress upon God’s sovereignty. From grass meadows and quiet waters to the pathways of justice and the vale of death’s shadow, the LORD is in control at every location in creation. Even in the face of your foes— even there the Maker of Heaven and Earth is supremely in charge, setting out a table like he arranged the very encounter.
The psalm seems to say that which my teacher charges preachers not to say.
In fact, when the Lord Jesus comes to Isaiah and lays a word on the prophet’s lips, he echoes David’s prayer but raises its claim to an astonishing and discomfiting degree. “King Cyrus is my shepherd,” Jesus says to Isaiah. A God who can will the punishment of his unfaithful people to an end by means of the political maneuverings of a pagan monarch two thousand kilometers away in Persia is not a God we can exonerate by positing him as distant and removed from the events of the everyday.
The shepherd’s world is not a machine.
The shepherd’s world is his creation.
As David prayers elsewhere, “This is the day the LORD is making.”
Even the tense of Psalm 23 is problematic.
David does not locate the LORD’s sovereign care into an incontestable past, “The LORD was my shepherd when he…” Nor does David conjugate God’s sovereign care as a promise about a not yet future, “The LORD will be my shepherd…”
It is already; it is now, “The LORD is my shepherd.”
Of all the sheep in the shepherd’s flock, this is an odd assertion for David to register. At several junctures, King David’s own life appears to invalidate his contention about the LORD’s supreme control. After God strikes down Uzzah for touching the ark, David’s fear and second-thoughts prevent the LORD from taking his place in Jerusalem. If the LORD is shepherd, he is one who lets David wander from Michal to Abigail to Bathsheba. Speaking of Bathsheba, if God is in control as this scripture attests, if the shepherd’s world is not a machine, then this does not turn out to be good news for Uriah.
Before I departed Washington for Los Angeles, I spoke with a friend and parishioner. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Glenn enlisted in the Army out of high school. He has served several tours of duty and works now for the State Department. He and his wife have a toddler named after an Old Testament hero.
Just the other day, in the middle of the night, a disturbed and aggravated intruder attempted to break into his home. He was on the phone with the dispatcher when the intruder finally, violently breached his doorway. At which point, his training took over.
“It’s not the first time I’ve had to do that,” he told me, “But I never thought that part of my world would happen in my home.”
In the Book of Samuel, the LORD makes a covenant with King David. “He shall build a house for my name,” God pledges, “And I will establish his throne forever…my steadfast love will never depart from him.” And David responds to the LORD’s unconditional promise by praying.
It is a pattern throughout the scriptures:
Address/Reply.
Pledge/Response.
Promise/Prayer.
In the case of Jacob:
Covenant/Petition.
On the one hand, it is odd that the Bible should contain a prayerbook. It is strange that human words uttered to God could be also God’s word to us.
On the other hand, we might expect the scriptures to include a prayerbook if the covenant is real.
A covenant, after all, is a promise that binds the promise-maker to an other. To make a promise to an other, the promise-maker must acquire a shared history with the other. But for God to inaugurate a joint history with an other, God must accept no other future than with this other. As Luther taught, a covenant is like a wedding vow. The promise creates a shared history and a mutual future that would not have been apart from this promise.
But if this covenant is real, then God must be a God who can meaningfully be petitioned. Since a covenant-maker and those with whom he makes covenant have a common history, those with whom covenant is made must have their own voice within the relationship. And since in this case the covenant-maker is the Creator, that voice will be the voice of prayer. Implicit in the covenant is the fact that the Shepherd wants you to speak up, make a motion, voice your opinion about his job performance.
As Robert Jenson writes:
“If the covenant is to be real, we must be able to address God and tell him how we think events should go in our history together, in trust that somehow he will take our opinion seriously. And that reliance must be able to appeal to something real in God. Our expressed opinion is an essential pole of the process of God’s decision-making. Prayer is participation in Providence.”
In other words—
The sheer fact that David prays and the frequency with which he prays to the LORD who made covenant with him is itself acknowledgement that the world too infrequently conforms to the expectations set by the covenant.
If you really are our shepherd LORD, then do something! Because right now, you don’t seem large and in charge.
“I never thought that part of my world would happen in my home.”
Listening to Glenn, I thought of my teacher’s homiletical mandate. So I bit my lip. And I waited for Glenn to speak.
“I know God’s in control,” he finally said, “But life rarely feels that way. Now my house is surrounded by news crews and my wife is traumatized and…I’ve got a bone to pick with the Almighty.”
Robert Jenson notes that the doctrine of creation and images of God as shepherd are ubiquitous across the scriptures. They are so, he says, because what is persistent among God’s people is a set of worries, ascending ultimately to an anxiety about God’s very self. That is, the fragility of human life and the cruelty of the created world calls into question the goodness or competence of its Creator.
Just so—
Again and again, the LORD Jesus alights upon lips to say what faith cannot always see.
Goodness and mercy are pursuing you.
You will not want for anything.
In the house of the LORD, mourning and crying and pain…
No more.
King David responds to God’s covenant address by praying.
Promise/Prayer.
Address/Response.
Pledge/Petition.
But the pattern does not cease with this back-and-forth. The LORD to whom we are bidden to speak replies. He answers. The God of the Covenant not only solicits the prayers of his people, he answers them. David learns this the hard way, landing himself at the receiving end of a sermon.
The guy raw-dogging it in the window seat wasn’t going to let me get away with silence.
He repeated his question, “Seriously, how do you look at something like that and talk about God?”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” I replied, “It’s not my vocation to talk about God. Talk about God is speculation not proclamation, and speculation is how believers beget unbelievers. I’m a preacher— my job is to speak for God.”
He raised his eyebrows like I should be wearing a straightjacket instead of a collar.
Then he shook his head and rephrased his question, “Okay, how do you look at something like that and speak for God.”
I thought about the text that had been open and illuminated on my screen.
I turned to him.
And I said:
“I can’t explain God’s governance of his creation to you. I don’t even understand it. And I frequently file complaints with him. But I can promise you that when Jesus Christ looks at that (and I pointed out the window) or when he looks at the dumpster fires in your life, he prays to his Father and says, “LORD, I am their Shepherd.”
“I don’t know that I can believe that,” he said.
“Of course you can’t,” I replied, “Without a preacher, it’s impossible.”
It’s odd that we persist in trying to tease out answers to our prayers in the random acts and chance developments of our lives.
Events rather than words.
If the Triune identity is a colloquy, if our chief relation to God is through word utterance, if we reflect the image of God in that we are bidden to speak to God, if God creates a covenant history with us through address, then why would we think that the LORD answers prayer by any other means but words?
And where else would we expect to hear those words except in the particular word in which God promises to give himself?
A promise that you are able to hand over— on the basis of a passage of scripture— the gospel on the lips of a preacher, is how the LORD replies to a weary world. God’s answer to prayer is you.
The audible sacrament uttered by a preacher is how the LORD replies to the lamentations and petitions of his people.
This is not how I would arrange the world.
If you think God could find a more reliable, clearer means of communication, then take it up in your prayers.
But in the meantime, preach like your life depends on it.
Because, other lives do.
As David Hart says in The Doors of the Sea, “To see the goodness indwelling all creation requires a labor of vision that only a faith in Easter can sustain.”
About Easter faith, Paul wonders, “And how shall they believe if they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?”
Of course, having laid such a terrific burden on you, I can’t leave you there.
I can’t get out of here until I’ve handed over the goods.
Just so—
What does this text promise that I may promise you based on the fact that Jesus lives with death behind him?
The Lord Jesus hides his promise to preachers smack dab in the middle of David’s prayer.
There are precisely twenty-six Hebrew words before it and twenty-six Hebrew words after it, “I am with you.”
So hear the good news:
As you wander in what Origen called “the pastures of the scriptures,” you will not always find “quiet waters” and pastoral scenes.
At times, you will want to take the shepherd’s rod and, like Moses, strike a passage in the hopes it will yield a leak of living water.
Often, you will want for a word.
Even worse, it is not easy to frequent the vale of other people’s deaths.
And in the Lord’s dark humor, the table he regularly sets out in the face of your foes is the loaf and the cup between you and your hearers.
Nevertheless! He who is the Word is with you in your words.
In this House of the Lord, he promises his Father, “Lord, I am their Shepherd.”
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