 As we keep the Lenten journey, we follow Jesus in the way of the cross, sustained by the Scriptures and moving towards Holy Week, as we follow through the purposes of God. Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in right paths, for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long. Psalm 23 is perhaps one of the best known Psalms, one of the best known songs in the whole Jewish and Christian repertoire. And it's short, but it's clear, and it's profound, and at its heart it is Lenten. I haven't often thought of it that way, but here it is in the lectionary, and we're using it that way. Because at its heart, it's about going through the dark valley. And in preparation for going through the dark valley, in the older translations it sometimes said, the valley of the shadow of death. And it may be that that's really what the Hebrew text means. In preparation for that, we need to have those first two or three verses where the psalmist imagines himself as a sheep trusting the shepherd implicitly. Now, this is a good sheep in the psalm, because the shepherd says, let's go this way, and the sheep does it. But part of the point of having shepherds, and if you know anything about sheep, is that they're very good at wandering off, at going off through a hedge somewhere and getting themselves lost and needing to be rescued. And so the psalm begins with this sense that as we go through Lent, as we go through life, part of the point is to stick close by the shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd, and when it says I shall not want, it doesn't mean I won't want anything. It's want in the old-fashioned sense of I will not be lacking anything. I will, as we used to say, I will want for nothing. Everything I need will be provided. But it'll be provided if we stick with the shepherd. And that is part of the discipline of Lent to remind ourselves day by day, week by week, that we're sticking with Jesus. There's lots of distractions, lots of potential open gates and fields that the sheep might want to wander off into. But we must resist that because he leads me beside the still waters. If I'm thirsty, if I stick with him, he'll find me water. And he will find fresh pasture. And he will restore. The word for soul there really means my inner life, my sense of who I am, my sense of well-being. And he will lead me in right paths for his name's sake. So all that then prepares us for the times that come and they will come when we are called either for ourselves or with someone we love, or indeed when we look out at the world and see wars and rumors of wars and horrible things being done by wicked people to innocent people and so on. With all the complexities of life that we know only too much about as these days we can have wars and horrors and murders and sudden death beamed straight into our living rooms on our televisions. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil for you are with me. That's the great scriptural promise which comes back again and again, many times in the Old Testament and in the New, focused, of course, ultimately on Jesus himself, who is the Emmanuel, God with us, but again and again said by God, I am with you. And of course part of the need for that promise is that when we're going through the dark valley, it often feels as though God isn't with us. We don't have a strong sense of his presence, either because of physical illness or because of depression or because just circumstances are sweeping us off our feet and it's hard to stay focused on God. We need to cling on to this promise. You are with me and the sheep looks at the fact that the shepherds got his rod and his staff. They comfort him because he knows that any enemies that come to attack, the shepherd is going to deal with them. That's the knowledge that sustains us. And then it's as though the psalmist can't quite sustain the metaphor of the sheep all the way through because in verse 5, you prepare a table before me. I've never seen a sheep sitting at a table, maybe you have, and you anoint my head with oil. I'm not sure how a sheep would react to that and my cup overflows. Again, sheep do not normally drink from cups, I think. Maybe you could train one too, but still, you take the point. And so now we've broadened out away from the original metaphor into a place where the people of God are being royally entertained by God. And as we go through Lent looking ahead to Easter, he prepares a table before us and on the night Jesus was betrayed, the table was prepared and there he shared his supper with his friends and he spoke of his body and his blood. In the presence of my enemies says the psalmist, so yes, there are bad things happening, but God does this strange thing, this dramatic ritual in the middle of it all. And then comes the lesson as we've seen in other Lent themes as well. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. The point of Lent is not primarily that we sort ourselves out. It's that we learn to look again to the Lord who is our shepherd, whose goodness and mercy are not of somewhere else doing something else. They are following us, they're coming right behind to catch us if we fall, to nudge us when we're about to turn the wrong way and to lead us where we need to go. And so the psalm ends, I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life. In other words, I'm going to be in the presence of God, that's my firm conviction. It's tough in Lent, but that's the promise to be with the Lord where he is, all our life and all that is to come. And so we pray, gracious Lord, thank you for this wonderful psalm which has sustained so many people in faith and hope over the many years. We pray that we may be faithful to your calling and even though you do sometimes take us through the dark valleys that we will be comforted by your presence, by your protection and by the hope which you set before us. In Jesus' name, Amen.