A Big(ger) Tent

God made salvation to be such that the one way you're supposed to respond to God's gift of grace is unadulterated joy. It's like, no way. Are you kidding me? Me? You? In his exuberance, God is creating a boisterous new world of joy. And for us to hold back means something's wrong with our cold hearts. There's something wrong with us, and we need the Lord to come and do work in us. Genuine joy is a sign of people who understand Jesus, who know Jesus.

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You all may be seated. I hope that you'll join us after service like they did in the first century. We have a sheet cake with some very recognizable faces perhaps on that. So please join us for that after service today. It is a time to celebrate, and that's why we do that, just like the first century.

So we're gonna turn our attention to God's word. This functions as part of the same service as a charge to the congregation. And so we're gonna read together. We're gonna be in Isaiah one last time this spring, Isaiah 54 verses one through 13. This is the RSV version that's in the pew, page 634, and it's our custom to read God's word aloud together. So if you join your voices with mine.

Sing, O barren one who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in travail! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her that is married, says the Lord. Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitation be stretched out; hold not back, lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes; for you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your descendants will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities. Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be put to shame; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called. For the Lord has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off, says your God. For a moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer. For this is like the days of Noah to me: as I swore that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you and will not rebuke you. For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you. O afflicted one, storm-tossed, and not comforted, behold, I will set your stones in antimony, and lay your foundation with sapphires. I will make your pinnacles of agate and your gates of carbuncles, and all your walls of precious stones. All your sons shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the prosperity of your sons. — Isaiah 54:1-13, RSV

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

It's a passage that follows one that we preach every year, regularly during the last week as we celebrate Jesus' walk to the cross, and this is the one that comes right after it. And it's a passage that I'm picking today. This is sort of Pastor's Choice Sunday. We're supposed to be done with that series in Isaiah, but this is the last time I'll be speaking to you for four months. I'm about to go on a sabbatical, and this is a very appropriate one for this day, for our church, and for me personally. And I'm sort of using this as a prayer request in preaching this today. So if you'll bear with me, we're gonna be in Isaiah 54 talking about joy today. This is what I'm praying for you. This is what I want you to pray for me.

When was the last time that you just whooped? You know, you just woo hoo. You just broke out and didn't care what other people thought about you. You just rejoiced. This passage is a call to joy. It's a call to rejoicing. And in a lot of translations, the word goes back to the original word here, which is "yulealet." I don't even know if I'm saying that right. It means this deep-throated expression of joy. We don't even have this in our culture. So I'm going to not do this for you, but play this for you. This is what this sounds like.

It's like a woo hoo, like that just keeps going. And it's an expression of, like, I don't care what you think. And it's this high-pitched just joy.

Isaiah says in verse one, you could put it this way: break forth in singing and cry aloud. Let a joyful sound explode out of you. He's telling us to rejoice in such a way that there's no decorum, and there's no restraint, and there's no embarrassment. It's shameless. It's a full-bodied expression of joy.

To be honest, I'm not good at this. If you've been around this church for any length of time, you're like, "Bald guy's kinda reserved." I am. I've got a resting face which isn't joyful. I'm not good at expressing either sadness or joy. And no offense, but neither are y'all. We're a Presbyterian church.

I remember our beloved worship leader, Danny Yancey, spent years trying to figure out what is the deal with this church and expression. Then he went to General Assembly and he understood it all because when Presbyterians get really moved by the spirit, we raise our hands this way. They go from in the pockets to out of the pockets. That's it.

We're not good at rejoicing. One pastor—an older guy I greatly respect—says this might be the most disobeyed verse in the whole Bible. Our exaggerated sense of decorum or reservedness may actually be a form of pride. There may be something really wrong with that, and I'm the first to confess it. We've made this decorum sort of a virtue. This Presbyterian thing. But restraint is not in God's vocabulary.

In his exuberance, God made salvation to be such that the one way you're supposed to respond to God's gift of grace is unadulterated joy. It's like, "No way. Are you kidding me? Me? You?" In his exuberance, God is creating a boisterous new world of joy. For us to hold back means something's wrong with our cold hearts. There's something wrong with us, and we need the Lord to come and do work in us.

Genuine joy is a sign of people who understand Jesus, who know Jesus. Two weeks ago was Palm Sunday. We had the kids up doing the palm branches thing. But the first Palm Sunday, people didn't like it. We love it—we're like, take pictures. But the religious leaders were like, "This is not okay." Their sense of decorum, and they told Jesus to stop it. And Jesus said this:

If they don't do this, the rocks are gonna start singing. The rocks are gonna cry out.

This breaks all of us down to the level of children. If you find yourself in our church and you're upset with the lack of decorum among children in our space, watch out. That's a Pharisee's heart.

Ray Ortlund says this: "All face-saving moralists take warning. Within these doors, your chilly pride is in danger of melting into exuberant joy. Enter at your own risk. All sinners who are depressed with guilt are welcome."

Maybe you don't feel joyful this morning, but I've got two reasons to give you a message of joy. Two reasons for you to rejoice today. These are gonna be up on the screen behind me: Funky Math for the Fruitless and Five Stars for the Faithless.

Funky Math for the Fruitless

This passage is about two women, and it's hard to read these words. If you find yourself being described in either of these words—barren or alone—our hearts go out to you. Your condition is one that we really care about as a church. Yet this isn't a description of two individual people. These are metaphors that are throughout the Bible to describe what God's people were like. Isaiah is saying, Israel, God's people, you've been like a barren woman. You've been like a woman who's alone.

Let me contrast these. The first is a barren woman. The second is a separated wife. The first is a fruitless woman. The second is a faithless woman. The first woman has a dead family line. The second's in a dead marriage.

So let's start with the barren woman. This is a picture given to God's people in exile, and it explains why they're where they are. How did the people of God end up in exile in Babylon? This is the description. It's embedded in Isaiah's metaphor—fruitlessness, barrenness. In Isaiah's culture, to be without children was shameful. That's a description of the religion of God's people. There's been all show and a lot of talk, but not a lot of substance to it.

Jesus quotes from the prophets when he says:

These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

That's what God's people were saying over and over. You read the Old Testament, the end of the Old Testament—all those prophets saying, "You guys love yourselves, but you don't love the widow, the poor, the alien, the stranger. You love me with all your words, but you don't actually love me in your heart, and you're really stingy, and you're chasing after lots of other things." Barren. Spiritually barren.

And the same could be said of us too. If you're in your late teens or early twenties, something begins to form in your head of the you you want to be. This is the kind of person I'm gonna be, especially over against your parents. I'm gonna outdo that. I'm gonna be something different. And you have this ought in your heart—this is who I wanna be in the world. Yet one of the things that happens with aging is realizing you are not the you you intended to be. You can't even step up to this vision you had for yourself. You're also barren.

But God doesn't choose us and doesn't love us because we're fruitful, because of what we can do for him. Anybody ever seen the movie or the play Annie? It's an older one. It's about a girl who is an orphan in an orphanage. She's got this bright red hair, and she's full of life. This guy comes to adopt a child from the orphanage—his name is Daddy Warbucks, bald guy. I know. We're everywhere. But Daddy Warbucks comes to adopt her, and she gets to visit his mansion for the first time, sort of a test run of the relationship. The housekeeper is showing her around from room to room, and they go to this playroom filled with toys. Annie knows what to do in a playroom. But as she's looking around, she turns to the housekeeper and says, "Well, where do you want me to start? The windows over there?" And the housekeeper pauses for a moment. "Annie, you're not here to work. You're here to play."

What if the most important thing about you to God is not what you can do for him? I've said this a thousand times in this church: God loves you because he loves you because he loves you. Not what you can do for him. Not because he really needs your gifts on this team. He loves you because he loves you because he loves you.

Years ago, I saw a stage production of Annie, and I'm gonna come down here to do this. There's this moment where Daddy Warbucks finally decides he's going to adopt Annie. He turns to his butler and explains, "Go make the preparations necessary." And the butler says, "Very good, sir," and begins to walk slowly across the stage. This takes too long. The eyes of the whole crowd are watching as he comes to the end of the stage and does one of these—I couldn't do that up there, I'd fall off. And the crowd does what you do. Why? Because you know Annie's gonna be okay. She's gonna have a family now.

So do you. God could not be more delighted to have you in his family. The angels in heaven click their heels in joy that you're included. That's the rejoicing in heaven over you. And that's not all.

This image of a barren woman—she's not just brought into a family, she's made fruitful in a way that she never was before. So it jives with all the stories in the Old Testament. Sarah and Rachel and Rebecca and Hannah—these barren women who suddenly bear children, but children of the covenant, children of the promise, children who carry a family line that's way beyond them.

In the New Testament, Paul writes this in Galatians about the Gentiles, which is most everybody in this room. This is about what God is doing through these people. God is continuing to expand his kingdom.

The metaphor is like this: your tent, you're gonna have to make your tent bigger. In our day and age, that's like adding a couple extra bedrooms, finishing the basement. But they're like, "Widen the tent pegs. You're gonna have to have a lot more room for the spiritual fruit that you're going to bear."

One of the things about what God does with fruitless people is this: when we begin to get a hold and understand the love of God in Christ for us—that he loves us not because we're useful to him, but because he loves us because he loves us because he loves us—somehow that begins to produce fruit. This is God's funky math.

So remember your math classes in school. When you get to multiplication, anything times zero is what? Zero. Right? One times zero is zero. A hundred times zero is zero. One billion times zero is zero. But that's regular math. Divine math works a different way.

Divine math works differently. Anything times God is fruitful. Anything times God, even zeros are fruitful. That's good news for me. That's good news for y'all. Anything times God, God can make zeros fruitful. And ironically, when we get this picture, this kind of love, this kind of being brought in—fruitless as we are, not because we think we're fruitful, in spite of it—that God can produce fruit in us, lives of ourselves and other people. Not because we have to, because we get to. So that's funky math for the fruitless.

Five Stars for the Faithless

What about five stars for the faithless? Let's consider the second woman—the faithless woman, the separated wife, in verses four through eight. Now this is a woman who's in a dead marriage. You can't tell it from this passage, but if you go back a couple of chapters, what you realize is that she's in a dead marriage of her own making. She's been faithless. She has wandered away from her marriage and her marriage vows. And this is again a metaphor for God's people. They abandoned God to go after other gods.

And the fascinating thing about your Bible is that every time they do that, it's not just called idolatry—like worshiping idols, other gods—it's called adultery. That's a marriage word. We use that when somebody has stepped out on their marriage and has not been faithful. God is saying, that's how I am with my people. Y'all have abandoned me. So He's like a wounded husband. He shrinks back for a time. He's like, we can't be together right now. But He's like, I haven't forgotten you. I haven't forgotten you.

God could say the same to us in our faithlessness. Some of you grew up in traditions where you thought that your relationship with God was entirely up to you to keep God close to you. You know what I'm talking about? Where you thought that it was all up to you to keep God close. And there are lots of these performative, working, serving traditions where it's all about what you do. You're constantly insecure. There's a Southern Baptist version of this. Some of y'all know that. There's a Catholic version of some of this. Some of y'all know that one. There's a Campus Outreach version of this. There's a lot of versions of "it's up to me to keep God close."

But what if it wasn't up to you to keep God close to you? What if it wasn't up to you? Because in reality, none of us is faithful. This is what God actually says toward His wayward wife:

Your maker is your husband. The Holy One, the Lord Almighty, is His name. The Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer. He is called the God of all the earth. With everlasting kindness, I'll have compassion on you. — Isaiah 54

God is faithful even to the faithless. He loves us. This metaphor in the Bible is over and over. It's from Genesis to Revelation. This is in your Bible where God describes His relationship to His people as a marriage. And this is hard for lots of people, whether you don't have a marriage, you have a bad marriage, you used to be married—in all stages, there's no perfect marriage. But this picture is given to us of a perfect marriage.

God's love for His people from the first pages of Genesis to the last pages of Revelation is given to us as this picture for how God loves. No other relationship in human experience is so vulnerable. Not to be too graphic, but this is the only one where people get naked together. It's vulnerable. No other relationship has such a power to shape another person's self-image. There's a deliberate choosing in a marriage relationship that like no other. No other marriage relationship in human experience is so permanent. I'm gonna do a wedding next Sunday, and people are gonna say "till death do us part," right? You never say that to your coach or your boss. No other relationship provides such security. And God said, this is how I am toward you. I am like this toward you. I'll never abandon you. I never walk away. With everlasting kindness, I will have compassion on you, says the word your God.

But, man, we don't believe it. There's one thing we don't believe. It's the faithful love of God toward His people. We still operate as if God's love is conditional. It's based on our performance. It's up to us to keep God close. We're insecure. It's as fickle as we are.

One of my favorite parts of Saturday Night Live over the last couple years has been digital shorts—these are like little TV shows within the TV show. There's this one from several years ago that's about an Uber driver. The comedian Aziz Ansari is in it, and he plays a passenger who's getting ready to get into an Uber. He looks down and realizes his rating out of five stars as a passenger is 3.9. He's like, oh, gotta do something about this. This is really low. But what he doesn't know is that the driver of the Uber is looking at his rating online. He's like, 3.9.

I gotta do something to raise my rating. So both of them unconscious, unaware of the other one, get in this ride together where they're trying to outperform one another. The driver offers Aziza a mint. When Aziza says sure, he has to dig around in his glove compartment and pulls out this box of old melted Russian mints called Mouth Helper. They've been in there for a long time. He offers them to Aziz, and Aziz takes one and puts it in his mouth. Of course, he needs the five-star rating, so he's definitely gonna take it. He's like, "This is great." Finally has to spit it out. And the driver's like, "Oh, no. My rating's gonna go down."

Then Aziz is like, "Well, I'm gonna give my driver a back rub." So he starts giving his driver a back rub, and the driver, not to be outdone, grabs Aziz's foot from the back seat, pulls it up, and gives him a foot rub. It just goes back and forth in one-upmanship and performance. It's funny and it's not funny because this is what we do all the time.

The reason why that video is so ridiculous is we're walking around thinking that we've got to up our ratings all the time. We gotta do something. What's sad about the video, which also makes it funny, is it's like a mirror. Aren't we all incredibly insecure and wanting to be liked and wanting to feel validated and approved of? There's a Christian version of this in busyness that's just like doing the same thing—let me give God a back rub and a foot rub, give him a mint, try to up my ratings with the Lord.

What if your relationship with God was not up to you to keep close? It's absolutely always a five-star rating. Your maker is your husband. On the cross, Jesus was abandoned so that you will never ever be abandoned. On the cross, Jesus lost the intimacy of the heavenly family so that you will always have a family, a spiritual family, the Trinity. You're forever in. You're forever apart, faithless as you are, fruitless as you are, and me too. And yet you get the five-star rating. You get in on God's funky math.

Call to Joy

It's time to freak out. So here's my conclusion: freak out. Burst into song for joy. This is my simple prayer for you this summer, and I ask you to pray this for me this summer. That God would renew my joy, and I'd live into that, press into that.

There was a missionary and a guy who ran orphanages in the eighteen hundreds named George Muir. His motto was like, "It is the great business of every day to make myself happy in the Lord." He meant that like, to find the reasons to reconnect with the joy of my salvation, to remember: I'm part of this. His love is this good.

Would you pray that for me this summer? And I'm gonna pray the same for you.

John Calvin, who was not known as the most joyful person, says this: "The church is the place where the gospel is preached. Gospel is good news. Good news makes people happy. Happy people sing."

So let's sing. Amen? Amen. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Would you pray with me? Father, thaw us, shake us up, remind us, Lord. Teach us Presbyterians to shout. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

I'm gonna invite you to do what we just talked about doing, which is singing. It's the best thing we can do. Let's stand and sing in response to God's goodness to us.