“If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.” So reads a final line from Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems, one of our favorite kids books.
It’s a tongue-in-cheek riff on the classic Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but in this goofy version it’s a family of dinosaurs who own the house, and they want Goldilocks (who is clearly trespassing) to fill herself up with chocolate so they can eat her like a bon-bon. But they forget to lock the back door, and (spoiler alert) she gets away. And then on the next-to-last page, the author gives you the moral of the tale: “If you find yourself in the wrong story, leave.”1
I have watched several unsuspecting adults get to that last page of reading aloud and have their voice suddenly catch in their throat with emotion. Because leaving the wrong story is so hard.
So many Christians find themselves in churches or families who are telling the wrong story. And without denying the complexity of our struggles, we are invited to leave the wrong story. From within the ancient witness of scripture, we can learn how to Go Out in Joy.
Let me connect the dots here, and then we’ll get back to leaving wrong stories. “Go Out in Joy” is a phrase from Isaiah 55.12, a little past the middle in a Christian Bible (located in the Prophets within the Hebrew Bible). The book of Isaiah has 66 chapters total, but it’s really more like three books nested together under the name of the 8th century BCE prophet Isaiah known for the first section (chapters 1-39). In that first section, a prophet named Isaiah is commissioned by God to give messages to the people of Judah (but especially the kings) about the impending consequences of their idolatry and injustice. If they keep putting all their trust in political allies, they’ll end up ensnared and indebted and captive to outside powers, and that is exactly what happens.2
But then, just past the middle of the book of Isaiah, over a hundred years pass between chapters 39 and 40. In those in-between decades, Babylon invades and destroys Judah’s capital city of Jerusalem, violently uprooting most of the people and taking them into exile. 3
And then in chapter 40, another prophet (or group of prophets) brings words from God, after a whole generation has been trying to figure out life as captives in a foreign land. Sometimes called Second Isaiah, this anonymous prophet’s ministry and messages are found in the middle of the book, in chapters 40-55.4 Second Isaiah is both reopening the messages of the earlier Isaiah and giving the people new instructions.
With all the intense messages prophets bring, Isaiah 40-55 also weaves hope into the poetic testimony. Chapter 40 begins with messages of comfort:
The years in exile are coming to an end!
God is doing a new thing!
It’s time to go back to the homeland!
Much of the poetry in these chapters builds on imagery that echoes the Exodus from Egypt, which is Israel’s core identity story from centuries before.5 Maybe leaving exile will be like their ancestors leaving Egypt — the audience is reminded that leaving false kingdoms built on oppression is already part of their story.
Then chapter 55 closes this middle section of Isaiah with a sweet symphony of hope. The thirsty are invited into relief, and those who listen will find life. God’s covenant faithfulness has not ended but will continue to shape the people to be a witness to the world.6 They are urged to seek God and return into this mercy, because God sees the widest possible view of what is going on in the world. In a beautiful image of completion, God’s faithfulness is compared to the ever-replenishing water cycle of falling rain that doesn’t return to the clouds without first soaking the ground. God’s faithfulness to the Word that goes out from God’s own mouth is like that - God will be the one to ensure the completion of the covenant story. And then in v. 12 we hear that leaving is good news:
“For you will go out in joy and be led back in peace.”
This is not about heading out the door pleasantly to work each day; this is about a whole people’s impending exodus from exile - going home from captivity. Trees and hills are pictured dancing along the way, and the land responds with vegetation, all pointing to God’s faithfulness to this permanent promise that will not be cut off.
But this is not a naive, “Yay, look it’s all about to be fixed!” section of scripture. Because something did get cut off along the way. Within Isaiah 40-55 we read anguish in the testimony of the prophet. Zooming in closer, in chapters 48-53 we find glimpses of the tortured experiences of a prophet who was rejected and eventually killed for a message the people did not want to hear.
We can’t know all the details. Maybe some in the audience had decided they liked their homes in Babylon and didn’t want to uproot again. Maybe some were offended that God might use the foreign king of Persia to deliver them out from under Babylon. Whatever the complex factors were, some in the community reacted violently, and that prophet bore their sins on his body and died. Many Christians have been taught that Isaiah 52-53 is mostly about predicting Jesus’s suffering, but that robs the people of Israel at the time of their primary experience and testimony concerning this scapegoating violence against one of their own.7
We should always read ancient scripture within its historical and cultural contexts before we import our own meaning from our own contexts. So many of the eloquent passages of beautiful hope in our Bibles are actually found within situations of anguish and loss. If we only read the happy hope verses out of context, we will be malnourishing each other’s faith and only have anemic responses to deep struggle within our own communities.
So the hope found in Isaiah 55 is complicated. God is inviting the people into a new thing, and at least part of the community has responded with violent rejection.
But even after violence and rejection the commission from God is not canceled.
The invitation and instructions are still that hope and healing will be found in leaving.
They will go out in joy and be led back in peace.
Leaving the wrong story is always hard. But it is always more faithful to leave the wrong story than to stay in a fake story, or a dangerous story, or a too-tiny story. Though leaving wrong stories is hard work, there is also much more joy in growing into larger stories with God.
I was raised in a church culture that was pretty sure we had arrived at all the right answers — all that was left was just to convince everyone else how right we were about God. However, many of us had such a minimal appreciation for history that we could not see how the context that shaped our inherited ideas and doctrines played a huge part in the conclusions that we had been given. 8How could we assume that late 18th century theology (repackaged for the 20th) was the ultimate understanding of truth for all times?
Even some in the generation before me who have rejected the legalism of the generation before them are still loyal to the exceptionalism they were taught. They don’t seem to realize that they need to look much wider to understand the historical shifts they find themselves in. They don’t seem to realize that their participation in the exceptionalism is what their neighbors and their adult children and their grandchildren don’t want anything to do with.
No century of Christian faith can claim they’ve fully figured out correct-for-all-time belief and practice. No denomination, no nation, no region, no university, no generation, no congregation can make that claim either.
Every generation in every place should expect to both be standing on the shoulders of those who taught them and be invited to humbly reevaluate everything they were taught, even after decades of faith.
Every generation should be prepared to Go Out In Joy, leaving broken and harmful doctrines and practices and leadership structures, and looking to be led back in peace by God’s Spirit.
Some churches have mostly been preparing people to “stay the course.” They haven’t been preparing people for change. However, many writers have been describing the decline of religious affiliation in Europe and the US over recent decades and offered their perspective. Fewer writers have also described the exponential growth of Christian faith in the Global South. But even fewer have interpreted recent shifts as predictable, necessary, and on-time within church history. I’m convinced by those who point to giant shifts every 500 years and show how we are in one now.9 It is good and wise to leave behind unhealthy theology and practice – multiple times in church history, some Christians have walked away from (corrupt or civic or political or wealthy) institutional church to reinvent communities of peace, trying to start over with Jesus.10 The reset button has been pushed before.
A global pandemic has revealed and accelerated what was already happening. Pastors and preachers who are trying to get people to come back are displaying their lack of awareness. Sometimes with good intention, they want to be able to attract the “none”s (those who check “None” on a religious affiliation survey), but they aren’t aware that a high percentage of “None”s are actually “Done”s – people who have de-converted from faith they no longer want.11
Instead, ministers and teachers should be preparing people for a generation in the wilderness, navigating transition into a reality that doesn’t exist yet.
Together we can Go Out In Joy!
The God who Jesus shows us is big enough to host all our unknowns and heal all our fear. God’s Spirit inhabiting our bodies will lead us back in peace, teaching us what it means to cultivate the peace of Jesus wherever we find ourselves.
The moral of the story for dinosaurs is “Lock the back door!” You can find the book here.
The Bible Project has a great two-part video series on Isaiah: Isaiah Part One and Isaiah Part Two
You’ll have to read 2 Kings 24-25 and the book of Jeremiah to get the stories of those in between years.
See the introduction to The Theology of the Book of Isaiah by John Goldingay.
The book of Exodus retells the ancient story of descendants of Jacob defying and rejecting Pharaoh and being delivered from slavery and oppression in Egypt. Scholars debate the scope and timing of an exodus event that lies behind the testimony in the book of Exodus; see Five Views of the Exodus: Historicity, Chronology, and Theological Implications.
See Genesis 12 and Exodus 19 for God’s earlier commitments to covenant
See The Book Called Isaiah: Deutero-Isaiah's Role in Composition and Redaction by H. G. M. Williamson. See also Isaiah 40-55 by Joseph Blenkinsopp, especially p. 344-357.
I was raised in Churches of Christ, within the Stone-Campbell Movement; many of their earliest emphases are understandable in the context of late 18th, early 19th century white Protestantism. For more information see Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America. See also Searching for the Pattern: My Journey in Interpreting the Bible by John Mark Hicks. See also my first Masters research project: The Holy Spirit and Biblical Interpretation: Alexander Campbell and Contemporary Hermeneutics.
500 years ago, multiple reformations sought to overhaul the medieval European imperial church. 500 years before that gets us to the “Great Schism” between the Eastern and Western church. 500 years before that we find the aftermath of the disintegration of the Roman Empire. For this birds-eye view, see The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why by Phyllis Tickle, you can listen to Phyllis Tickle’s interview on the Nomad podcast here. A similar perspective is found Serene Jones's interview with On Being. Esau McCaulley also shares his perspective on historical trends in interpretation his interview with OnScript podcast.
See The Story of Christianity: Part 1 by Justo Gonzalez especially p. 131-172.