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.

Psalm 23:1-3 (NRSV)

We often regard the 23^rd Psalm as a reassuring, safe passage of scripture, but I was scheduled to preach recently at a service while the kids at church were to be going outside enjoying a Muddy Church activity based on its first three verses. Reading those verses as I started to prepare what I was going to say, I was struck by how radical they are.

The first phrase that struck me was “He makes me lie down in still waters”. God has not just created green pastures that I might choose to lie down in. God is not just suggesting that it would be good for me if I lay down. No, God is making me lie down. This is an instruction or possibly a commandment. If we look for wider Biblical resonances it mirrors the fourth commandment that we should “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy”.

We live in a 24-7 world that never stops. The world keeps on going and those people employed to keep that world going are called to work incessantly as well. But the words of this psalm command us to stop and lie down. This is such a precious command, if only we could honour it today as the Jews honoured it in the past.

Of course, Jesus himself saw that this is not as simple as it might seem. He recognised that observing the Sabbath rigorously is a conceit of the better off who lead ordered lives. Such obedience is not possible for those who live a hand to mouth existence and are always hungry and searching for food. Those living with disease and disability do not get offered a day off and need to be supported on every day of the week. When Jesus saw a need to break the Sabbath, he broke it. “Sabbath was created for man, not man for the sabbath”. But just because Jesus broke the Sabbath on occasions does not mean that he did not recognise the need for all of us to stop and lie down periodically. There are several occasions in the Gospels when he himself clearly need to stop and find some space. After all, even God, after six days of creation, felt the need to take some time out.

The church lost the battle to keep Sunday as a special day reserved for worship and rest a long time ago. There is not much point trying to fight against this and I suspect few of us do. But we are all called to remind ourselves and the world that, at times, we all need to stop and turn off from the busyness of our everyday lives. We need to support working people in being able to turn off their mobile phones and internet connections for periods of time that they can once more call their own. As consumers of services that are available 24-7 we need to acknowledge that this requires those who provide the service to be working 24-7. Is this really the world we want to live in? Many of us, and particularly our stewards, find that Sunday is a day of exaggerated busyness and pressure, and we need to ensure, if this is the case, that there are other days of the week when we can stop and recuperate instead.

The demand to “lie down in green pastures” is a radical challenge to the modern lifestyle that most of us have come to acknowledge as inevitable. It is not inevitable, and it is not what God wants.

One of the reasons we find this difficult, one of the reasons that the world is driven to this 24-7 frenzy, is because we are always looking for more. There is always another experience we would like to cram into our lives. There is always another object that we would like to acquire. The more services and products we strive for, the longer we have to work in order to pay for them. The world economic system is driven by growth which generates returns that will attract new investment. That growth can only continue in a world in which we are all led to crave for more.

Which brings us to the second phrase I want to explore. “I shall not want”. Again, this phrase resonates with so many other passages in the Bible which stress how God has given us all we need. Jesus’ parable of how God clothes the lilies in the field or feeds the birds in the air is a good example. Another is his teaching that we should pray for the daily bread that we need and not for all the sumptuous food that we desire.   

If we are going to stop and give ourselves time to recuperate, we need first to acknowledge that God has given most of us all that we need. We need to be thankful for what we have got and recognise that we don’t need any more. This won’t be easy. The dark forces of this world are spending enormous amounts of money advertising their goods and services and persuading us that we need to buy them. But we are told to fight against dark forces and called to be the light of the world.

When we take the gospel to the world, let us take the message that we have enough, that we don’t need more, that we need to find the value in what we have already received. This will be a shock to the world, it will demand an economy that is not driven by the endless economic growth that is so destructive to the planet and its people. It will require the coming of an alternative way of living, a way of living that we call the Kingdom of God.

So next time you hear those two phrases “I shall not want” and “he makes me lie down” be reassured and comforted by familiar words but also be challenged and empowered by the glimpse they offer of a better world, of God’s Kingdom. A Kingdom in which all people are satisfied with what they have been given and have ample time to lie down and appreciate the value of those gifts. A Kingdom on earth, as it is in heaven.