Sermon Title: "Driving With God Through the Darkest Valley"
Date:   May 15, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Psalm 23

Death Valley, California, is the lowest, driest and hottest desert in the United States.  Since we began keeping records, the hottest temperature in this country—134 degrees—occurred there, and it isn’t uncommon to have day after day of 120 degrees in the summer.  Yet that dangerously high heat is exactly the reason many car makers send their prototype models to Death Valley in high summer:  They want to see how the vehicles perform under the intense conditions in the valley named Death.

A year ago last August, a team of engineers from South Korean automaker Kia put three of its proposed new models—a sporty crossover and two seven-passenger SUVs—through a series of grueling tests.  Those included frequent starting and stopping, prolonged idling, towing 7,000-pound loads up and down the steep mountain roads surrounding the valley, leaving the cars in direct sun with the windows rolled up and then clocking how long it took for the air conditioners to cool the interior and additional tests designed to push the engines, transmissions and other components to the limits.

There’s good reason for all this testing, of course.  Although the car companies know most of their vehicles will spend little, if any, time in Death Valley-like conditions, they deliberately overtax them to help ensure their customers won’t have problems in normal service.

All this test-driving in an extreme environment is an attempt to take the scary out of the driving we car owners do in rough weather.  And when we think of it that way, we have a somewhat different entry point into Psalm 23, which also talks about moving through a valley named Death.

The 23rd Psalm is probably the best-known passage from the Bible.  Even people who don’t regularly read the Bible may be able to quote it, most likely in the poetic cadence of the King James Version—“He maketh me… he leadeth me…”—so familiar because they’ve heard it so often at funerals.  It is indeed a comforting passage for mourners.  Yet if we think of it only as a funeral text, we miss the fact that the 23rd Psalm is mostly about living.  I would like to walk through the dark valley verses with you today so that we might see this beloved Psalm in a new light.

Shepherds, both in the past and today, are to be herders and tenders of sheep, but back in Biblical times, “shepherd” was also a metaphor for the role kings were to play.  They were to tend their subjects, providing for them and protecting them.  The problem was, many of the kings were lousy shepherds of their people, either inept or more concerned with their own aggrandizement.  The prophets had charged Israel’s kingly “shepherds” with failing to care for the flock entrusted to them.

Thus, for someone in that culture to say, “The Lord is my shepherd” was similar to saying, “The Lord is my king,” meaning that God does what a king/shepherd is supposed to do.  The person was declaring an intention to live under God’s rule, and the rest of the Psalm then becomes a description of the good things that come to that person as a subject of this king.

Thus, because the Lord is a good shepherd and I am a member of his flock, I shall not be in want.  I will have what I need.  The references to lying down in green pastures, being led beside still waters and fearing no evil in the valley of the shadow of death are poetic ways of saying the Shepherd-King provides what I need to stay alive.

Although we’re used to hearing verse 4 in the King James Version as “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...,” the underlying Hebrew can also mean simply “place of deep darkness.”  Thus, the translators of the New Revised Standard Version in the pew went back to the original Hebrew and rendered this verse:  “Even though I walk through the darkest valley…”  Reading it that way, the Psalm becomes a statement of God’s shepherding us in the difficult, frightening, troubled and hard stretches we go through in life itself.

I like that translation more.  I have prayed at many a bedside of a person with a terminal disease or near death for the Good Shepherd God to be with them as they as they walk “through the valley of the shadow of death,” but I believe we face many more dark valleys throughout our lives that have nothing to do with death:  a failed marriage, separation and divorce, a wayward and troubled teenager, loss of job, bankruptcy, a dear friend turning against you, a devastating medical diagnosis.  Incidents such as these, and a dozen more, occur, most often unexpectedly, and we suddenly find ourselves deep down in a dark valley searching for a way out.

The psalmist says the reason for not being overcome by fear while in the dark valley is that God the Shepherd is with him.  The psalmist takes comfort that the Shepherd has a rod and staff at the ready to protect him, but another fear-reducing factor was likely that the Shepherd had been through this valley before.  Only a foolhardy shepherd would take his flock into a dark valley he’d never been in before.  The only reason for leading sheep into or through a valley where there might be risk to the sheep is because the shepherd knows there’s something the flock needs—grass or water or shelter—in the valley or at the other end of it and that he can handle whatever threats to the sheep might occur there.  We could say the shepherd has already taken a “test drive” through the valley and knows that the rod and staff will be sufficient to handle the threats therein.

Thus, the 23rd Psalm becomes a statement of confidence in God.  Whether our dark valleys are times of trouble or the actual passage through death itself, we believe God is not only with us but is more than equal to whatever threats to our spiritual well-being may lurk within that darkness.

Of course, that isn’t the kind of thing you can prove ahead of time.  The matters that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are most interested in are not the sort that lend themselves to the kinds of proof that skeptics seek.  That’s why Psalm 23 is a song of confidence, not a treatise on proof.

And isn’t that the way faith functions for us as well?  We have nothing resembling proof that God will be with us in the dark places of life, but we do have the testimony of Scripture and of other Christians that God has been there before us and knows the way through it.  The depth of the darkness sometimes shakes our confidence, but the testimony of people of faith and of the Scripture is that God doesn’t leave us alone in the darkest valleys.

There were plenty of witnesses to Kia’s road tests in Death Valley that blazing hot summer.  A hoard of freelance photographers captured them with cameras.  But when it comes to our journeys through life’s darkest valleys, we have no photos of God in the valley.  We have only the testimony of others who have been there and our interpretation of what they tell us.  The 23rd Psalm is one such testimony with these familiar words:  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

That allows us to trust that God is never overcome by the darkness.  It gives us the confidence that when we’re in a dark valley, we’ll find God is there with us, and God’s rod and staff are a source of comfort and guidance.  The Good Shepherd will help us get through every darkness.

(Portions of this sermon adapted from “Driving in the Valley of Death,”

sermon suggestions from Homiletics, May-June 2011, pp.25-27.)