God.

We need your rest. Give us your peace.

Amen.

+++

My friend Bill said Sunday night that we always read the 23^rd Psalm, but that we don’t pay attention to the 22nd or the 24th. I think it came from a sermon he’d heard. I smiled and nodded and racked my brain to remember what those other two psalms are.

I think the point of the three psalms, at least for the preacher, was that together they tell a story. We know about the shepherd, we are grateful for the promise of rest and leading. We think often, some of us, about the valley of the shadow of death.

It is a nice poem to read, a nice song to sing.

I scrolled one psalm earlier.

And quickly remembered why I couldn’t remember it on a quiet Sunday evening after a hymn sing.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The psalm starts with the words Jesus quoted, with the words Jesus incarnated, with the words that suddenly came alive shortly before they died with him. The shepherd of psalm 23 is the one who is despised and rejected in psalm 22.

I talked with a woman in the ED a couple hours before I talked with Bill. “If this pain doesn’t stop, God, I want to die,” she said. She felt like psalm 22 far more than 23. I told her that the team was coming with some meds. I could have read the psalm, and she may have been encouraged in that strange way that we are encouraged when we know it’s not wrong to hurt, to know that even God hurt.

And the meds. They would help, too.

I’ll look at psalm 24 and its part of the story some other time. But knowing the forsaken one is helpful tonight.