Travel just isn’t as safe as it used to be, is it? Actually, for most of human history, travel has been a very dangerous business, especially in the Middle East where danger in one form or another has been around for thousands of years.

As Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.” The Bible is full of stories of the problems travelers faced. Frequently, when ancient travelers went from one town to another, they passed through territory that was inhabited by bandits and marauders. Travelers took their lives in their hands when they went on journeys. I remind you that King David, when he was a young man before he became king, led a band of outlaws. The Bible tends to romanticize that period of his life making him into a sort of Old Testament Robin Hood but he really was an outlaw. He was the head of a band of terrorists who extorted whatever they needed. Because of the murderous jealousy of King Saul, David had to retreat to the wilderness, to the border near Philistia, and hide there in the caves. There he raised a private army of fugitives and “ne’er-do-wells.” The book of I Samuel describes them this way: “Everyone who was distressed, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontent,” went out to be with David in the mountains. With that private army of about 400 men, he raided villages, or extorted payment from them, robbed travelers and caravans to support his gang until the time when he could challenge King Saul.

As in Old Testament times so also in the New Testament period. One of the best known parables of Jesus – “The Good Samaritan” – tells of an incident along a dangerous road. A certain traveler is beaten by robbers and left to die beside the road. It probably occurred near the border since it involves a Samaritan. It is unlikely that a Samaritan would ever have been found in the interior of Israel.

To travel away from the familiar to the borders of life is always dangerous. To travel into the unknown, to foreign lands; only the brave were willing to do that. That experience was so universal that the journey became a metaphor for human existence. We are pilgrims in this life on a difficult and sometimes dangerous journey from birth to death.

In our culture, the metaphor of the journey is the subject of folk tales and fairy tales, those stories that teach children and adults what life is all about. There are fairy tales about children having to travel through dark and forbidding woods to grandmother’s house, and the woods are filled with witches and wolves. The children do not want to make that journey, but they must. The journey they make is something like growing up. It is something we have to do whether we want to or not.

Of course, fairy tales are not only for children, but for adults as well. They tell stories about very common, often very timid, people who are called to leave their comfortable and secure existence and go on a journey in search of a treasure. Their pilgrimage takes them through the netherworld, and then into the swamp, and finally to the high mountain. Along the way, they meet demons, ogres, giants, and other horrible creatures, only to get to the treasure on the mountain and find that the cave is guarded by a dragon! When it is all over and they return from their journey they are different human beings. Outwardly they seem the same. Anyone looking at them would probably not know that anything is different, but inwardly there has been a profound change. They may or may not have gained the treasure on the mountain, but they have found something more important. They have gained the priceless treasure of wisdom, patience, courage, bravery, and self-confidence – gifts that are greater than any material treasure.

The point of all these stories is the same: life is a journey from birth to death. If we don’t move with it, if we try to settle down and make the present permanent, if we try to fight the inevitable changes and challenges that come, then life is going to be a jarring, wrenching experience. Because someday life is going to put all of us on a journey that we would rather not take.

It will be like waking up some morning and finding yourself in a dark wood faced with what seem to you to be demonic forces threatening to undo you. Or it will be like having to confront giants in your life you cannot overcome. But the message of these stories is always the same. If you try, if you make the effort, you will discover that these enemies are not as fearsome as they appear. And someday when your life returns to normal, you will discover you have gained a treasure, some knowledge about yourself and life, that you could never have gained in any other way.

I want us to see this morning that biblical literature is similar to that. The whole of the Old Testament is a story of a people called by God through Abraham and Moses to make a journey to the Promised Land. The New Testament is the story of a people called by God through Jesus to make a journey to the Kingdom of God. The whole Bible is the story of how God tries to get us to take a journey – to move from where we are to where God wants us to be.

That’s why when Jesus called his disciples, he didn’t say to them: “Come and sit with me for a while.” Instead he said, “Come and follow me…” all the days of your life. When he describes what a disciple looks like, he describes a traveler, someone who needs only the barest necessities for the journey. Jesus is saddened by those who will not make that journey. He weeps over the city because they don’t understand, or don’t have the courage to trust the promise that life is found only at the end of the journey. He tells his followers: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things (you worry about so much) will be added unto you.” Which means, I take it, that the Christian life is an adventure of trust into the unknown. The Christian life is a journey toward a great treasure, a treasure that is only discovered by those who are not afraid to leave the present behind, and move into the future in faith.

But the Bible says something else about that journey. It says that when we begin to take it in trust, we will discover that we do not travel alone. God accompanies us on our journey just as surely as God was with the Hebrews marching through the wilderness of Sinai toward their Promised Land.

That’s the message of the Twenty-Third Psalm, the simplest and greatest of all the psalms. It’s so simple a child can memorize it. It’s about the journey of life. It says that from beginning to end we are guided as a shepherd leads his sheep.

Like all great tales, it is honest about life. It points out that life has not only the good times when it is as though we are dwelling in green pastures beside still waters. It is also realistic about the times when life forces us to go on a journey “… through the valley of the shadow of death…”

The image of the dark valley is the land where danger lurks. Some scholars think this psalm was sung by Jewish pilgrims who had to travel great distances to Jerusalem in order to attend the festivals at the Temple. They had to cross through deep, dark valleys with high mountains on either side where bandits lurked ready to make them their prey.

This psalm is a powerful image of that time in everyone’s life when we must make a journey we don’t want to make. Such a time is a time of uncertainty. When some event takes us to the extremity of life’s experience, when we go to the border of existence where death casts its shadow, we are aware as at no other time that we are, in fact, dependent on a power greater than our own.

At the extremity of life’s experience, at the border of our human existence, is the place where we are all threatened. And the psalmist is honest about those places. He says that such moments are just as fearful for the religious as for anyone else.

It’s then, he says, that we are to remember that while there are places in this life that are strange to us, no place in this life is alien to God. The same shepherd who is with us all our lives, who led us into green pastures and beside still waters, will lead us also through dark valleys. So we need fear no evil, “for thou are with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me…”

That line in the Twenty-Third Psalm reminds me of the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John” “My sheep hear my voice and I know them, and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them from my hand.” He must have had the Twenty-Third Psalm in mind when he said that, “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.”

Then the psalmist changes the metaphor from the shepherd to the host. “Thou prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.”

The image of the host was as familiar to a Middle Eastern audience as the image of a shepherd. There were strict laws of hospitality in the deserts of the Near East so that if a traveler were welcomed into camp, fed and taken care of, he was safe from any enemies trying to get him. There is something like sanctuary for fugitives in the desert. A man who is being hunted by his enemy needs only enter the tent of someone who is willing to give him refuge, and the pursuers dare not enter.

That’s the scene the psalmist paints for us. He says that God is like that desert host who protects us from the enemies of life. “Thou prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”

“Thou anointest my head with oil.” That’s a gesture extended to travelers to refresh them from the weariness of their journey. “My cup runneth over,” another symbol of generous hospitality.

The image of the host was used by Jesus to describe his relationship with us as much as he used the image of the shepherd. The image of the shepherd predominates in the gospels. We also see the image of the host. Jesus is our host at a banquet. Think of all those stories he told about banquets. And, of course, we immediately think of the Last Supper, where Jesus is the host, the pattern for Holy Communion.

It is said that in London during the Second World War during the Blitz, when Christians gathered in their churches to receive Holy Communion, the priest would often read these words of the Twenty-Third Psalm: “Thou prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”

These are powerful images, shepherd and host, but I want you to see that they are used very carefully. They don’t say that if we only have enough faith, God will get rid of our enemies, or that God will prevent us from entering dark valleys. They say that God leads us through such times, and that God gives us refreshment, that is, grace and strength, to enable us to continue our journey. Everyone, someday, must make that journey, and at the end of it there is a treasure.

I have seen that personally. Oh, sure, I have seen some people who have been spared danger and peril in what seemed like almost a miraculous fashion, but it was only for a season. In time, life is going to take them from the green pasture to the dark valley. It will happen. Their present tranquility is not evidence of their faith, but only of their good fortune.

The psalmist knows that our faith is not really a factor in our life until we begin the perilous journey. When we go through the dark valley, then we will see what faith can do. I have known people journeying through terrible times in their lives with a steady confidence that things will turn out all right. I have known others who lived with a host of dangers around them, and were able to do it in a celebration of the life given to them. They knew they were never alone, never abandoned. They knew the dangers they faced, but they lived as if they were guests at a banquet. They enjoy the life that is given to them now, caring nothing about the time that is to come. That’s what faith, real faith, looks like: celebrating life as it is given to you and me right now, even while a host of enemies encamp around us.

It’s been my privilege as a pastor to know such people. I visited in their homes or hospital rooms. As I walked up to the door, I could almost see all those enemies of life encamped around them. Death is there waiting. Pain is there, too. Loneliness, she’s pitching her tent for a long siege right beside her twin brother, despair. They are all there, just outside, waiting.

I go in and say, “You know what’s waiting outside the door, don’t you?” And they say, “Yes,” they know. “They almost caught up with me some months ago, but I trust that the Lord is with me. And that gives me a strange peace. A peace that I have never really known before in my life. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but I know now that I can face it. I am enjoying each day as if it were a gift from God. I’ve never seen my life that way before, but I see it now.

I heard one old Christian I knew years ago say, “I learned the 23^rd psalm when I was just a child. Every morning when I woke up, I said the first line in the psalm, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…’ but now that I have passed my eightieth birthday, I have turned to the last verse. Now when I wake up, I say, ‘… Surely goodness and mercy (have) followed me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”