(Here’s the tenth post in my continuing series on the Psalms for All Seasons Sunday school class I co-teach with Andrew Friend. Each week we sing psalm settings from Psalms for All Seasons, Lift Up Your Hearts, and other CRC hymnals. Previous posts is the series focused on Psalm 121, Psalm 122, Psalms 2/99, Psalm 72, Psalm 95, Psalm 147,  Psalm 112,  Psalm 29 and Psalm 40.)

Today (Jan. 12) we kicked off the new semester in grand fashion with Psalm 23, which is the most beloved psalm for good reason. It’s build around a simple, comforting narrative: God is our shepherd and we are his sheep. It contains striking images: “the valley of the shadow of death,” “my cup overflows.” The shepherd story has connections to Israel’s history—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses were all shepherds before David—and is picked up by Jesus, who calls himself the Good Shepherd (John 10) and tells the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3-7) as an illustration of God’s love. In Christian preaching, art and music, the different shepherd images get mixed together and illuminate one another.

The Revised Common Lectionary assigns Psalm 23 to the fourth Sunday of Easter during all three years and also assigns it to the fourth Sunday of Lent in Year A—which is why we took it up today.

Psalm 23 is well represented in CRC hymnals. Psalms for all Seasons contains 11 musical settings of Psalm 23. (The others in double digits: Psalms 51 and 119 with 15, Psalm 118 with 11, and Psalms 27 and 150 with 10.) Lift Up Your Hearts contains five complete versifications of Psalm 23, more than any other psalm (Psalm 117 gets six versifications but two cover only one verse. Psalms 103, 116, and 119 each get five versifications and Psalms 22, 42, and 95 four, but, again, none of them are complete.) All the Psalm 23 hymns in LUYH and the gray Psalter Hymnal are also included in PFAS.

Of the traditional hymn settings, our class favorites were the first three settings in PFAS, all of which we recognized from the Psalter Hymnal. Andrew played all of them on the organ.

“My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” (PFAS #23A/LUYH #369/PH87 #550), with lyrics by Isaac Watts, is set to RESIGNATION. (RESIGNATION is also the tune to “My Only Comfort” (LUYH #781), a hymn based on the Heidelberg Catechism’s Q&A 1 that we used as the theme song for our most recent summer book club.) A sample is here.

Watts’ third verse finishes a versification of the psalm and closes with a striking interpretation of what it means to live in the house of the Lord:

The sure provisions of my God attend me all my days;
O may your house be my abode and all my work be praise.
There would I find a settled rest, while others go and come
no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home.

“The LORD’s My Shepherd” (PFAS #23C/PH87 #161/PH57 #38/HFW #2), set to BROTHER JAMES’ AIR, has lyrics from the 1650 Scottish Psalter, making it even older than the Watts’s version. (A sample is here.) The lyrics are not modernized:

My soul He doth restore again;
And me to walk doth make
Within the paths of righteousness,
E’en for His own name’s sake.

PFAS includes the lyrics translated into Spanish and Korean. The hymn doesn’t appear in Lift Up Your Hearts.

“The LORD, My Shepherd, Rules My Life” (PFAS #23B/LUYH #732/PH87 #23)
is set to a traditional hymn tune (CRIMOND) but with a modern versification by Christopher M. Idle “to provide a version of the twenty-third Psalm in familiar meter which would avoid the archaisms and inversions of the established sixteenth-century version from the Scottish Psalter” [=“The LORD’s My Shepherd”?]. A sample is here.

Psalms for All Seasons also contains three other traditional hymns with tunes less familiar to us. “The King of Love My Shepherd Is” (PFAS #23D/LUYH #824) (set to ST. COLUMBA) and “Such Perfect Love My Shepherd Shows” (PFAS #23E) (set to DOMINUS REGIT ME) are two versions of Henry William Baker’s 19th Century hymn.  According to the Psalm 23 notes on the Psalms For All Season web site, “the compilers of the 1906 English Hymnal were denied permission to use Dykes’s original tune [DOMINUS REGIT ME]” so they substituted ST. COLUMBA; now both are associated with the song.

The third (of fifth) verses is based not on Psalm 23, but on the Lost Sheep:

Perverse and foolish, oft I strayed,
but yet in love he sought me;
and on his shoulder gently laid,
and home, rejoicing, brought me.

“Such Perfect Love My Shepherd Shows” modernizes the lyrics, eliminating “thees” and “thys” and changing the opening lines. I couldn’t find an explanation of who altered the lyrics or why  PFAS included both versions. (A sample is of “The King of Love My Shepherd Is” here.) Given the strengths of the other traditional settings, I’d only consider using one of these in a worship service to make the connection between the psalm and the New Testament shepherd images.

“The God of Love My Shepherd Is” (PFAS #23J) has the very oldest lyrics (1633) of any Psalm 23 setting in Psalms for All Seasons but is set to a modern tune by Roy Hopp.

The God of love my Shepherd is, and he that doth me feed:
while he is mine and I am his, what can I want or need?

Of the more contemporary sounding hymns, we most appreciated “Shepherd Me, O God” (PFAS #23H/LUYH #456), a modern versification of Psalm 23 by Marty Haugen with a haunting chorus:

Shepherd me, O God, beyond my wants,
beyond my fears, from death into life.

A sample is here. It would probably work best to have soloists or a choir sing the stanzas and the congregation sing the chorus. The chorus of “Shepherd Me, O God” (PFAS #23G/SNC #181) is Psalm for All Seasons’ responsorial setting.

“The Lord’s My Shepherd” (PFAS #23F) is Stuart Townend’s versification of Psalm 23 with a chorus that also draws on Psalm 56:3:

And I will trust in your alone.
And I will trust in you alone,
for your endless mercy follows me,
your goodness will lead me home.

Townend, who co-authored such great 21st Century hymns as “In Christ Alone” (LUYH #770/SWM #208/HFW #254), “The Power of the Cross” (LUYH #177), “Speak, O Lord” (LUYH), and “Behold the Lamb” (LUYH #840), has two other hymns in Psalms for All Seasons: “My Soul Finds Rest in God Alone” (PFAS #62B/LUYH #370) and “My Soul Will Sing” (PFAS #103E). (A sample of Townend’s “The Lord’s My Shepherd” is here.)

“El Señor es mi pastor/My Shepherd Is the Lord” (PFAS #23I/LUYH #368/PH87 #162) is a versification of verses 1-5 (why leave out 6?) translated from Spanish with a short chorus (“My Shepherd is the LORD; nothing indeed shall I want”). A sample is here.

“The Lord Is My Shepherd” (PFAS #23K/SWM #192) is a short round based on vv. 1-2. I can imagine it as a closing song or a response to a confession or other litany. A sample is here.

The Lord is my shepherd; I’ll walk with him always.
He leads me by still waters; I’ll walk with him always
Always, always, I’ll walk with him always.
Always, always, I’ll walk with him always.

The blue Psalter Hymnal has two Psalm 23 settings that don’t appear in CRC subsequent hymnals: “My Shepherd Is the Lord” (PH57 #39) and “The Lord, My Shepherd Holds Me” (PH57 #40). We didn’t sing either of them in class.

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.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.