Bishops’ News: Living deeply with Psalm 23
We have all lived through so many different layers of disorientation and distress in 2020. For each one of us it will be different. For some the global pandemic will have been magnified in grief through personal loss in countries far from these shores. For some it will be economic vulnerability, plans put down and lost dreams. We need to grieve and intercede for the world made strange. Both individually and collectively we have been walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
For me 2020 has been a year of unfolding revelation and then ongoing restoration of a damaged spinal cord. Some things happened very decisively and urgently as the medical professionals understood what was needed. Yet there have also been long periods of uncertainty and isolation, long periods of slowness and pain and the shadow of difficult prospects yet to come. I have also known joy unspeakable as I walk through the valley.
During this season Jesus asked me to dwell with him in Psalm 23. He asked me to live deeply into its truth and reality and, in doing so, he honoured my truth and my reality. I often speak about my calling to preach or teach from scripture being akin to tasting and seeing that God is good: it is not until I have been able to fully digest and wrestle with scripture that I can speak fully from it. In other words, if aspects ‘stick in my throat’, so to speak, I must wrestle with them with God until they can become a part of me. This was my journey with Psalm 23. Often when this happens with a particular part of scripture, God is inviting me to find new treasure and depth intended not just for myself but for us, for our church. It is a personal, often painful, but a prophetic invitation to live and then speak from the belly of God – a particular expression of the call to die to ourselves and become alive in Christ.
Join Bishop Ellie on her “The Lord is My Shepherd” tour:
Ellie’s mum Jane Chapman with sheep
I am still very much in the rehabilitation phase of my recovery. But, Jesus has asked me to come and share amongst us all some of the gifts that I have found in this very familiar psalm and to pray together for fresh graces of God’s mercy and goodness to be released amongst us. In the coming weeks and months, I will come to each region of our Diocese to share my reflections on this psalm and to gather with our local ministry leaders to minister in the goodness of the Holy Spirit for each other. My hope is that these evenings will be ones that you can invite people to who may not yet know and trust in the goodness of God as their shepherd. More details about the timing and location of these will be released in due course – keep an eye out for them.
As a young child growing up in a farming community, but without a farm, it was always my dream to be a shepherd. My best friend had a pet sheep called Lettuce that lived well into our older teenage years (and bizarrely loved being given bread to eat!). My mother, my grandfather and I would walk the land together daily. When spring came we knew the fields where the new born lambs were kept and each year there would always be a few who had had to be hand reared who would come running over to us which made my young heart leap with joy. I joined my mother on many of her visits to farms as part of her role in the Peak District National Park leading the farm and conservation programme, supporting environmentally sustainable and conservation modes of agriculture.
Since I have been living in Aotearoa my mother has retired and now become a shepherd with her own farm, rearing rare breed Derbyshire Gritstone sheep. It was a dream come true for me to spend a lambing season with her a few years ago; being the gentle companion for ewes as they went into labour, watching and learning the different characteristic of the sheep and lambs and how those characteristics help or hinder them. When you spend a lot of time with sheep, you get a particular sense of why it is that God uses them as the metaphor for us, for the children of God. It is very humbling and very helpful, but, above all, it is filled with love.
The symbolism of shepherds surrounds our relationship together in our Anglican Church. Let us remember that it was to the shepherds that the angels announced the good news of Christ’s birth: “we bring you tidings of great joy… Glory to God in the highest and peace to God’s people on earth”. I look forward to continuing to live into the truth of those words from the angels together as God’s people in this particular part of God’s earth.
+ Ellie
