Psalm 23, Part 2 - Follow The Shepherd
Where
are your still waters? Where are your
green pastures? For some of us it may be
along a lake or a riverbank where the water is as slick as glass or a field of
green, maybe filled with colorful flowers.
For me, still waters are anything but still, my still waters are
crashing with wave after wave hitting my green pastures of sand and shells. Still waters and green pastures are about places
of peace and refreshment…and while I will admit that sitting on a boat in the
middle of a river or lake on a cool fall morning is peaceful and refreshing,
trust me, real green pastures, dotted with ragweed this time of year are
anything but peaceful and refreshing for me.
Last
time we gathered together, we began exploring what it means to live with the Lord
as our Shepherd. Just why has this
Psalm, one of a hundred fifty we have in the Bible, become the one that so many
of us, so much of the world, has adopted as the one we know better than any of
the rest? Is it because Jesus identifies
himself as the Good Shepherd and so we connect the two? It is because the images within this Psalm resonate
beautifully for us? Is it because this
Psalm covers a broad swath of our lives—from need to rest to guidance to
darkness to protection to provision? Or
is it all of these…and more?
We
began by considering what it means to say, “I shall not want.” We counteracted the idea that it was an
eleventh commandment mean to be added to “The Big Ten” and it got left out
because God and Moses ran out of room on the stone tablets and couldn’t shrink
the font to get it to fit. To say “I
shall not want,” is not a commitment to make ourselves void of all desires to
avoid sinning. We also considered and
eliminated the idea, that this verse, coupled with Jesus’s words about
“seeking, asking, and knocking” and the promise that whatever we prayed for and
asked in His Name we would receive, is about God granting our every wish. As we listened to translations other than the
King James and Revised Standard (and their newer versions) we heard a different
translation of the phrase…rather than “I shall not want,” we heard, “I lack
nothing” and “I have everything I need.”
Rather than this verse meaning that we will have everything we ever
want, it is about realizing that God has provided everything that we truly
need. God doesn’t grant our wishes like
a genie in a lamp, but God does provide all we need.
One
of those things that we need is rest and peace.
How many of you have ever had those days, those weeks, those years, when
you felt all you really needed was some rest and some peace and everything would
be okay? We find ourselves in the midst
of one of those times now. As we
continue to live in the aftermath of Florence with blue tarped houses,
roadsides littered with debris, homes and sanctuaries still uninhabitable. For
nearly two months now we have longed for rest and peace.
Yet
hurricanes are not the only things that weary us. There are things that happen in our daily
lives, times of personal and family crisis that no one else knows about that
wear us down, leaving us physically, emotionally, and spiritually
exhausted—longing for still waters and green pastures. We have work, community, household demands
that leave us feeling completely drained.
We rush from a day of handling complaints over the phone and filling out
one requisition after another or lifting and carrying load after load of
building materials from one site to another to pick up the kids and help them
with their homework or to mow the grass and trim the shrubs…then we prepare
supper, either from our own labors or someone else's…from there we rush to parent-teacher
conferences, taking our children to music lessons or sports practice…if it is
not one of those, it is a Homeowners, community, or even church meeting…then
it's back home to take care of laundry and the days dishes. This doesn’t even include the unexpected…like
the call to tell you about “Aunt Sally,” or the call from the doctor’s office
confirming the diagnosis you didn’t want to hear…
We
want to scream…God…bring on those green pastures and still waters…and I don’t
care if they have ragweed or water moccasins…We want to cry out with the
Psalmist:
“Give
ear to my prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from my supplication. Attend to me, and answer me; I am troubled in
my complaint. I am distraught by the
noise of the enemy, because of the clamor of the wicked. For they bring trouble upon me, and in anger
they cherish enmity against me…Fear and trembling have come upon me, and horror
overwhelms me…I would hurry to find a shelter for myself from the raging wind
and tempest.”[i]
This sounds like a person in need of
green pastures and still waters…he has enemies attacking and later on he
expresses anguish as a friend betrays him.
And
God hears those cries and brings us to places of green pastures and still
waters, without the allergens and poisonous snakes.
He
invites us to come and find rest:
God’s
word invites, “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will
never permit the righteous to be moved.”[ii]
Jesus
invites, “Come to me, all of you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest. Take my yoke
upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will
find rest for your souls. For my yoke is
easy, and my burden is light.”[iii]
Beyond
inviting, God’s Word commands that we experience the still waters and green
pastures. In the longest of God’s Top
Ten—The Ten Commandments, God says, “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it
holy. Six days you shall labor and do
all your work. But the seventh day is a
sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your
daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in
your towns. For in six days the Lord
made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh
day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.”[iv]
That
Sabbath day of rest is not about God demanding that day of us because He needs
us to stop and worship Him, it is about God giving us a gift that we need, it
is about God providing still waters and green pastures in the dry, taxing desert
of our week. Jesus makes that clear: “’The
Sabbath was made for humankind, and not mankind for the Sabbath….”[v] God did not create the Sabbath because He
needed it, He created it because He knew we needed it.
Cast
your burdens…
Come
to me…I will give you rest…
Remember
the sabbath day…
“In
grassy meadows he lets me lie. By tranquil streams he leads me to restore my
spirit.”
Why
is it that if God provides and even commands these opportunities for grassy
meadows and tranquil streams, we constantly feel overwhelmed, tired, and worn
out?
There's
an old phrase that many of us, if not all of us are familiar with, “You can
lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.” Or in this case, “You can lead a sheep to
water, but you can’t make them drink.”
God
provides us with the Sabbath. Now, most
Christians have moved that day set apart as sacred from the Jewish celebration
of Sabbath, which means “seventh day,” to the first day of the week, Sunday,
remembering that Jesus rose on the first day of the week. Yet how many of us truly observe this time of
green pastures and tranquil waters? How
many of us truly take the time to stop working for an entire day and devote it
to worship, family, and rest? I’ve had folks
that talk of having to work for thirty or more days without a day off—sometimes
it was difficult to know whether they were bragging about their endurance or
talking about how weary they were. They
chose to not stop and take a sabbath rest, to skip by the green pastures and
still waters…and just keep right own laboring.
Others might stop for an hour or two and head right back to work,
thinking, a little glimpse of the pastures and water will do me and I really
have too much to do to stop for an entire day.
Other times we might let extra demands creep in and still that time
away…at times the church has been guilty of not letting folks take that
Sabbath—a day of worship, family, and fellowship—that is why I would discourage
and avoid committee meetings on Sunday afternoons or evenings. When we refuse stop and observe the Sabbath
and take the gift of rest God offers, we are saying, “No thanks God, you have
offered me this opportunity and gift, but I don't really want to lie down in
your grassy meadows or sit by your tranquil streams.”
God
invites us to cast our burdens, Jesus tells come to him when we are weary and
unload our burdens and take up his yoke.
God offers us this opportunity of lying in the green pastures and still
waters with these opportunities. Yet
sometimes we refuse or only halfway appreciate the gift. How many times do we bring our burdens, our
heavy loads, and lay them before the throne of God, enjoying the rest for just
a moment, and then when we get up to leave whatever time of prayer we are
offering them to God, rather than leave the burdens with Him, or take up the
easy yoke that Jesus offers, we pick those heavy loads of stress, worry, and
anxiety up again and take them with us once more, possibly feeling more weighed
down that when we first walked in—choosing to be weighed down, refusing the still
waters and green pastures that God so freely answers.
My
brothers and sisters, we cannot ignore the opportunities that God gives us to
take a Sabbath break. It is a precious
gift from God that He gives us for a reason.
God wants to give us rest, He seeks to restore us. Why?
In order that we might respond to the calling that He is placing upon
us. The green pastures and still waters
are a temporary stop in the desert of life.
They are an opportunity to refuel and refresh ourselves, they are not an
invitation to retire from life itself.
We are restored because God is preparing us to labor in His Name. We might come to the garden alone while the
dew is still on the roses…yet in the end, He bids us go…
We
most often hear verse three in the language of the King James and Revised
Standard, “He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake” or
“He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” If you are like me, you haven’t thought much
about this part of God’s leading in our lives, or simply thought of it in terms
of God setting us on the right path---helping us turn from the sinful ways of
our past to living obedient lives. That
is part of it, but as we talked a few Sundays ago about hungering and thirsting
for righteousness, the righteousness of God is found in God’s efforts to
restore our world to its original design at the point of Creation—a world free
of sin, disease, and scarcity. As God
sets us on paths of righteousness, God sends us be part of, as the New
Jerusalem Bible translates it, his saving justice. God gives us rest that we might be part of
His efforts to restore all the world.
It
is where last week ties into our last gathering and answers the question that
we left hanging. We talked about how we
do not lack anything we need…that whether it be clothes, shelter, food, safety,
or opportunity, God is our shepherd and we do not want, we do not lack anything
we truly need. Yet we acknowledged that there
are those throughout the world, from Mexico Beach to Cedar Island to Indonesia
to the Philippines, and everywhere in between, where people do not have clean
clothing, a roof over their heads, enough food to eat, or the security to live
from day to day. God gives us rest in
order that we might labor for Him, that we might work alongside Him to truly
make His presence known, that we might look into the world, see the need, and
pursue (and offer) God’s saving justice.
We are to be about clothing the naked, providing shelter for the
homeless, giving food to the hungry, finding refuge for the oppressed, and so
on. It means that we are to be about the
work of God, responding to injustice wherever we see it, in the same manner
that Christ would respond…we are to be the presence of the Great Shepherd,
offering His love and His grace, that all may be able to say, “Yahweh is my shepherd,
I lack nothing—I shall not want—I have everything I need.” We offer them places of green pastures and
still water that they might rest alongside us and join us on the paths of God’s
righteousness.”
In
the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment