Psalm 23 as adapted by Ryan Kearse
The Lord is all that, I need for nothing.
He allows me to chill.
He keeps me from being heated and allows me to breathe easy.
He guides my life so that I can represent and give shouts out in his Name.
And even though I walk through the Hood of death,
I don't back down for you have my back.
The fact that you have me covered allows me to chill.
He provides me with back-up in front of my player-haters
and I know that I am a baller and life will be phat.
I fall back in the Lord's crib for the rest of my life.
I recognize the effort that went into making the Book of Common Prayer relevant to a specific group that is underserved and in need. But I'm not hearing the poetry or the beats in it. It's kind of a toe-curler, and I wonder what a teen seriously into rap would make of it – nod their heads approvingly, or wave it off like a bad smell?
I guarantee — since it was being chattered about last fall — it is *so* over and passe, if it ever wasn’t.
As I said Way Back Then: No, my objection is that it just feels … stupid. Artificially hip and trendy, adults trying to sound “hep,†in a way that the youth they are seeking to reach this way will find goofy and unrealistic. I may well be wrong — it’s not my idiom or age bracket — but I find it more aesthetically and liturgically unpleasant than theologically so.
But, then, I’m not the target audience, I suspect.
I ran across it when reading about the 4 Canadian bishops nominated for primate – one of them a woman – and an Amazon link was Adsensed into the side column of the Canadian news site I happened to be on.
I suspect that being in a Google ad is a clue that it’s peaked a while back. 🙂