Lengthen Your Cords

Lengthen Your Cords (5/25/2008)

"Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes.” Isaiah 54:2

There are “hidden gems” in the scriptures which deserve a sermon but never appear in the lectionary and are overlooked. This is one of them. If I had my druthers I would inscribe this “on the forehead”, as the scripture says, of every young person.  

The context is  an appeal to the returning exiles to put down their roots and expand their living quarters and stop living as if they were still in exile. It comes from the prophet we know as Second Isaiah, whose work begins in the 40^th chapter  of that book, and who is arguably the most farsighted and expansive figures of the Old Testament. The Old  Testament lesson today is from Second Isaiah: “Sing for joy,  O heavens, and exult, O earth. Break forth, O mountains, into singing!”  Even as he wrote or spoke these lines about lengthening your cords and strengthening your stakes and not holding back he was undoubtedly thinking far beyond literally building bigger  tents. If you want a bigger tent you have to have longer cords and deeper stakes. And if you want a bigger tent of your life you also have to have longer cords and deeper stakes. 

I can recall a college chapel speaker some 50 years ago using this text for a talk. I don’t remember what he said, but I do remember this text: “Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of  your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back, lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes.”  I am sure he was talking about the the necessity of a wider vision, a deeper purpose.  Jesus taught the same thing when he told the disciples who were fishing to cast their nets  out into  deeper waters. He also said we should build the house of our lives not on shifting sand but on solid rock. And he taught that we cannot serve both God and Mammon and that we should seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.  

I have often cited the first question of the famed Westminster shorter catechism: what is the chief end of Man?  Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.  Now that is a great question and a great answer because it bids us to lead lives with larger purposes, and to put down stakes and lengthen cords in order to do that.

Yesterday the New Times columnist Bob Herbert, thinking about Senator Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer, reminisced about the Kennedys in the 60s. John Kennedy  will always be remembered for his inaugural statement, which has never since been duplicated for inspiration: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Bob Herbert wrote: “Whatever their personal and even tragic failings, the Kennedy message (the message that resonated so powerfully with the young back in the 1960s) was that we could step beyond our narrow personal concerns to achieve great things, that we could do better, be better, if only we had the strength and courage to work harder and dream bigger.” 

Lengthen the cords, strengthen the stakes.  

Every church has to ask itself if it is doing the job of helping people lengthen cords and strengthen stakes, or  if it is just settling for the status quo in people’s lives, giving them a little comfort now and then, and then pretty much sticking to business as usual. Lengthening cords and strengthening stakes means helping people see that larger purpose and bigger dreams for why they are here in this world to begin with, with giving them a faith to live by, a trust in God that goes far beyond the passing sounds bites of the day.  We are not saved by our own efforts,  it is true, but it is still necessary for us to take charge of lengthening those cords and strengthening those stakes.  

If we want a bigger tent for our souls then lengthening cords is crucial. Certainly it will mean attention to a more disciplined prayer life. It will mean commitment to children and youth, such as we have with our wonderful Sunday School teachers who are here each week for our kids. It will mean reaching out beyond “the four cozy walls”, as we do with such things as the Vacation Bible School and our Mission giving program. It will mean dedicated giving and commitment to Christian stewardship to support the work of the church and not settling simply for fund raising. These are all lengthening cords and strengthening stakes for the cause of a larger tent – the tent of our church family as well as the tent of our own individual lives, growing in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.  

There are many fine causes and organizations out there in the world today doing good to help many people, but I believe that there is nothing which quite puts before people on a regular and systematic basis the claims of a deeper life and a “larger tent” for our lives than the Church. The Church alone has the incomparable message of a God who enters our world to save us by his grace in Christ and the empowering Holy Spirit who comes from the Father  and the Son to guide us and strengthen us, andt asks us only to respond with our own commitment. We do that through regular participation in the life of the church, a deeper commitment to it, a consistency of effort – not off again, on again – and bearing witness to one another of what God is doing in our lives.  

Isaiah says “do  not  hold back.”   How prophetic is that?  Many people do exactly that. They wait and wait, or they look for other options.  I love the story Milton and Irene Balram tell of finding this church, knowing right away this is where they wanted to be, and jumping right in.  Gaby Barnstyn tells the same story. She brought Brenda here for Sunday School and found herself teaching the class herself! That’s what’s called “not holding back.” Before long she was involved. For some reason, many today hold back, or they want to check out all the options, or they want to be absolutely sure.  When Jesus came to the disciples by the lakeside he didn’t offer them a thirty-day money back guarantee if they would try following him, he simply said, Follow me, and the gospels say they left their nets and did just tht. Isaiah says, don’t hold back, lengthen those cords, strengthen those stakes. Take charge of the spiritual tent of your life. Do something!!  

William Carey, the  English cobbler who became, against all odds, one of the greatest missionaries in the history of  the Church after he went to India, said: “Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.” 

The history of the church is filled with ordinary people who did extraordinary things.   In the civil rights struggles in our country everyone is familiar with people like Dr. King  and Rosa Parks. One person,  especially in this political year, who deserves to be better known is Fannie Lou Hamer, born in 1917, the daughter of sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, who grew up in the church and absorbed all its teaching and when the right time came she didn’t hold back. In 1962 she attended a civil rights rally and heard a call for blacks to register and vote. In 1962 in Mississippi this was a real challenge. People who did this defied death itself. She was more than once jailed and beaten. In 1964 she led what was called the Mississippi “Freedom Delegation” to the national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where  they tried  to challenge the seating of the official all-white  delegation. They failed because President Johnson would  have nothing  of it. But in the course of failing in Atlantic City she literally touched the nation with her accounts of what was happening to blacks in Mississippi. She would quote the book of Ephesians: “Put on the  whole armor of God so that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers.” Four years later, in Chicago, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was seated, and she came to be known as “the prophet of Freedom.” 

Here was someone who definitely did not  hold back. She had lengthened her cords and strengthened her stakes, and  in the right time God used her for a mighty  and unforgettable work.  

“Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes.”  Isaiah 54:2  

Notes:

Robert Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time, Crossroad Books, 2001, page 116-117.

Charles