HIGHFIELD LUTHERAN CONGREGATION, HARARE, ZIMBABWE

AUGUST 4, 1996

TEXT: PSALM 23

PREACHER: FREDERICK J. GAISER

THE LORD IS MY MUFUDZI

One of the great gifts of living in a different culture, as I have been able to do here in Zimbabwe, is to see things with new eyes. It is a little like entering a child’s picture where the grass is blue and the sky is orange. Everything is a little strange. Coming to Africa, I knew I was still a human being on planet earth, but the trees and the flowers were different enough to make me notice. Those animals in the fields on our first bus trip were not Minnesota deer, they were baboons and ostriches. And the people! They carried amazing loads on their heads, they were a different color, and they drove on the wrong side of the road. By now, of course, though I will never be able to carry anything on my head, I can almost always remember to drive on the left, and, happily, I just don’t think about color any more in greeting another person.

Still, it’s not bad to remember the surprise of how things were when they were new. And one of the things that remains new here every day is reading the Bible. I don’t have to work at that, it just happens. In a different culture, you read with different images in your mind, and different things happen to you. Some of you will remember how that worked for me when I preached here in February. A familiar text from Malachi, describing God as a launderer, purifying his people, took on new meaning for me in Africa as I saw, in my mind, God as the African washer woman, caring for her family and making them pure and clean.

The surprise has happened to me again—with an even more familiar text. You know it as well as I; it is the 23rd Psalm:

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.

I have heard this psalm all my life, and I have always known that “the Lord is my shepherd.” But in Zimbabwe I heard something different: “Jehova ndiye mufudzi wangu—the Lord is my mufudzi.” What a surprise—because in Shona, I had been told that I, too, was a mufudzi. When people were giving Shona names to our students, it came out that my name, Gaiser, is a German word that, according to some, means “one who herds goats.” So, they said, “You are a mufudzi.” For in Shona, they said, a mufudzi is any kind of a herdsman: for cattle or sheep or goats—it doesn’t matter. Later, when I went to Kenya and visited the Masai nomads, I discovered the same thing was true. In Swahili, all of them, whether herding their cattle or their goats, are mchungaji. And so is God. In Swahili, the Lord is my mchungaji, just as, in Shona, the Lord is my mufudzi, and in Ndebele, the Lord is my umelusi—my shepherd, my goatherd, my cattleherd. Whatever kind of animal or person I am, the Lord provides my care.

What was happening as I thought about this, was that my picture of God as shepherd or mufudzi or mchungaji was expanding immensely. I went back to the Bible and realized, really for the first time, that the Hebrew text works the same as the African languages: The Lord is my ro`eh ( %39), says the Hebrew Bible, and in the Old Testament, too, a ro`eh is one who cares for any kind of flocks: cattle, sheep, goats, even donkeys (see Gen 36:24; 46:32). And now my image of God is a cup running over. If God can find a way to make a herd of donkeys obey and keep them out of trouble, surely he can take care of us. We must be in good hands!

In America, the pictures we see of God as the shepherd usually show a very clean and very gentle Jesus with a very clean and very gentle lamb tucked in his arm or on his shoulder. It is not a bad picture, but it is a very different image, say, from the shepherd God of Genesis, who, within one verse, is called a Shepherd and a Mighty One and a Rock (Gen 49:24); the shepherd of the artists is quite different from the angry shepherd God of Zechariah, who will take his flock and make them like a “proud war horse,” so that God’s sheep will now become “warriors in battle, trampling the foe in the mud of the streets” (Zech 10:3-5).

“The Lord is my shepherd” becomes a bigger and more powerful and exciting image the more we examine it, whether with new images from the Bible itself or new images from cultural experience. If we go to Britain, we might see the gentleman shepherd, wearing tweed cap and knickerbockers and keeping perfectly white sheep on perfectly green meadows between perfectly straight hedgerows in perfectly square pens with a perfectly trained dog. Can this be an image of God? Surely it can, in the sense of Psalm 148, where all chaos is tamed at last, all danger put aside, and all creatures sing forever the praise of God who has “fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed” (Psalm 148:6). And someday, when God makes a new heaven and a new earth, we will be like perfect sheep grazing in perfect safety; but for now, most of us need a different shepherd image because our lives in this world are not nearly so neat.

What, then, of the Masai shepherd warrior, guarding his cattle on the rolling hills of southern Kenya? Thin and tall, standing ramrod straight, terrible in his red hair and red face—colored with ochre to match his red robe—with a knife in his belt, a rungu (or club) in his hand, a spear at his side, and a bow and arrows at his feet, defying anyone to bother him or his cattle. Is this an image of God? Surely it is. It is like the young David who told Saul that he was not afraid of the giant Goliath because as a shepherd boy he had had to kill lions and bears to protect the flock (1 Sam 17:34-37). Psalm 23 says that God’s rod and staff comfort me; but it works just as well with a spear and a rungu. With a Masai warrior at my side, there are not many places I would not feel safe. In the Bible, that same shepherd image also carries over to the king. The king, the great chief, is still the mufudzi, the one commissioned to make sure the flock is secure. According to the psalmist, God “took [David] from the sheepfolds; from tending the nursing ewes he brought him to be the shepherd of his people Jacob” (Psalm 78:70-71). Both as shepherd-boy and as shepherd-king, David shows us something of God’s care for us.

In Germany, I remember driving over the top of a hill, going fast on a good German road, only to find the way totally blocked by hundreds of sheep and a totally out-of-place shepherd, dressed in a black cloak, uncaring about the modern technology and the modern need for speed that he and his sheep lazily impeded. This man was not unlike the image of the shepherd when Jesus lived. In some ways, it is surprising for Jesus to call himself the good shepherd, for in Jesus’ Palestinian culture, the shepherd was something of a rogue, not totally under control, independent, a social misfit, maybe dangerous. In Jewish rabbinic literature a shepherd was not regarded as a reliable witness because of this social stigma and isolation. Is that, too, an image of God? Maybe so. For, like the shepherd standing in the way of the German Mercedes or the shepherd that stood outside of the law in first-century Palestine, God, too, is not under our control. God will not get out of the way because of our needs and our desires. God is always the wild one, the one we meet when we don’t expect it, the one who will do what God will do. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to say that God is so unpredictable that he might, for example, decide not to love us any more. God will love us because God is love and because God will not break God’s divine promises, but God will not be controlled by our norms or our schemes or our doctrines. “I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst,” says Hosea (Hos 11:9)—but it is just that Holy God who is our loving mufudzi.

Another image that comes to mind from trips to the rural villages of Zimbabwe is the little boys and girls tending the goats. It appears to be half work and half play, and you can’t tell who is dirtier, the goats or the children. The children and the kid goats are all mixed up together in a great jumble of life. Are those children, too, those very young vafudzi (shepherds), an image of God? I think they are. The good shepherd knows his own, we are told (John 10:11-14); and he knows them because he is with them, loving them, being part of them, living and even dying with them. God is distant and holy, but in Christ God is also present and ready to play with us, as one of us. The children, too, are images of God. In their youthful play, they are like the young lovers in the Song of Solomon, both of whom were also shepherds (Song 1:7-8), and whose playful passion for one another reminds us of God’s passionate love for us. The willingness of young people in Africa or in the Bible to tumble and wrestle with the goats reminds us of Jesus, the Good Shepherd’s, willingness to tumble with us and to wrestle for us, finally giving his life for the sake of the flock.

In Masai country, in the evening, when the cattle and goats return to the boma (or kraal), they are no longer the concern of men. Now they are women’s work, to be milked, cared for, and bedded down. There is dung to save and water to carry and work without end. Unlike the men, the Masai women (like women all over Africa), are never off duty. And they, too, are an image of God. A God who is willing to do the dirty work, the all-night work, the unglamourous work of caring for people when they are tired and worn, when they are dirty and cranky, when they need a nurse or a mother more than a warrior or a king. Isaiah describes God like this, a God who refuses to be defined by roles of work or gender or custom. Yes, God’s arms are the strong arms of the warrior; but those same arms lead the mother sheep and gather the lambs and hold them in God’s own bosom—in Isaiah’s imagery, even holding them up to God’s nursing breast (Isa 40:10-11; 66:10-13).

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” This has always been a rich and important image for me—both in my own life and as a word and a promise to share with others in pastoral care. Now that I have seen Shona vafudzi, now that I have seen the children caring for the goats in the Zimbabwe bush, now that I have talked with a Masai mchungaji, the image is richer still. I am happier than ever to be known myself as a mufudzi. But I am absolutely delighted to know that the Lord is my mufudzi.

The goal of Psalm 23, as we know, is that we might “lie down in green pastures” and “dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” With God as my mufudzi, I will lie down more easily tonight, and you can, too, and together we can hope more fully tomorrow for a life with God that begins now and lasts forever.

Jehova ndiye mufudzi wangu! Yakanaka vangeri! (The LORD is my shepherd. The gospel is good news!) AMEN