December 14: An Invitation to Share What You Have
♫ Music:
Day 12 - Thursday, December 14
Title: AN INVITATION TO SHARE WHAT YOU HAVE
Scripture: Isaiah 58:6–11 (NKJV)
“Is this not the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; When you see the naked, that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh? Then your light shall break forth like the morning, your healing shall spring forth speedily, and your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, if you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones; you shall be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.”
Poetry & Poet:
“Beatitudes”
by Andrew Hudgins
Blessed is the Eritrean child
flies rooting at his eyes for moisture. Blessed
the remote control with which I flipped on past.
Blessed the flies whose thirst is satisfied.
Blessed the parents, too weak to brush away
the vibrant flies.
Blessed the camera crew
and blessed the gravity of Dan Rather, whose voice
grows stranger with every death he sees. Blessed
My silence and my wife’s as we chewed our hot
Three-cheese lasagna.
Blessed the comedies
we watched that night, the bed we slept in, the work
we rose to and completed before we sat
once more to supper before the television
a day during which the one child died
and many like him. Blessed is the small check
we wrote and mailed. Blessed is our horror.
AN INVITATION TO HORROR
We scroll. We change channels. We glance at headlines and look away because we are weary.
We see more than we can possibly solve. With exposure to so much brokenness in the world, we feel powerless. And so we fill the seconds with cat memes and pictures of heaping plates of food and jabs at others in our tribe whose ideas we don’t like.
We guard our hearts against feeling too deeply what we fear we can do nothing about. And the algorithm shifts to show us more cuteness and less suffering.
Consequently, we see less than we need to.
And we wonder why God doesn’t seem to answer our prayers.
Isaiah holds out to us a new way forward, a new kind of “fasting”—a fasting from self-centeredness and preoccupation with our own needs. He calls us to turn to the needs of others. He warns us that prayers are hollow when they come from an echo chamber of our own making.
If we want our own cries of help to be heard, then we need to be people who respond to the cries of others. As Justo González brought to my attention in his book, Teach Us to Pray, the prayer is not “Give me my daily bread” but “Give us ours.” If God answers my prayer by sending more than I need, then my responsibility is to share.
We cannot release everyone from poverty, but we can share our food with some.
We cannot clothe the whole world, but we can clothe some.
What if we looked up from our screens? What if we walked instead? What if we saw with our own eyes, three-dimensionally and unhurried, the ways that fellow humans are trapped in cycles of injustice or under heavy burdens? What if we let these things provoke horror—the sex addictions and the victims whose lives are wrecked to fill an unquenchable thirst? —the disparities of resources to which we are blind because we live in a society where different classes no longer interact? —the hopelessness of those plagued by depression and anxiety?
What if we looked one another in the eye and noticed the shadow of grief or the pinch of pain? What if we didn’t look away? What if we rearranged our lives so that we are not insulated from the cries of the helpless? What if we sat with them in horror and wept?
According to Isaiah, this is the key to answered prayer. Perhaps because God’s plan for answering prayer has arms and legs.
Ours.
Prayer:
Lord,
We are simultaneously overwhelmed by the needs around us and insulated from them. Renew in us a commitment to walk alongside others in their suffering, to make space for their cries. Teach us how to act on behalf of others, not in order to feel better about ourselves but in order to truly set them free. May your light and your healing appear, and may we have the courage to be present to witness it.
Amen
Dr. Carmen Joy Imes
Associate Professor of Old Testament
Talbot School of Theology
Biola University
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Art:
Feed the Hungry
John Flaxman
Pen & ink with grey & brown wash over pencil outline
27.3 x 25.4 cm
UCL Art Museum
South Cloisters, Wilkins Building
University College London
London, England
About the Artist:
John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draftsman, and a leading figure in British and European neoclassicism. Early in his career, he worked as a modeler for Josiah Wedgwood's pottery, modeling reliefs for use on the company's jasperware and basalt ware. He spent several years in Rome, where he produced his first book illustrations. He was a prolific maker of funerary monuments. His best monumental work was admired for its pathos and simplicity, and for the combination of a truly Greek instinct for rhythmical design and composition with a spirit of domestic tenderness and innocence. Flaxman created one hundred and eleven illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, which served as an inspiration for such artists as Goya and Ingres and were used as an academic source for nineteenth-century art students. In the last six years of his life, Flaxman designed decorations for the facades of Buckingham Palace in London. Some of his drawings for this commission are now held by the Royal Collection Trust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Flaxman
About the Music:
“Isaiah 58” from the album No Longer Strangers
Lyrics:
Time passes on,
We see life in time.
We change and we grow,
We laugh and we cry.
And then when our sorrow
Seems too much to bear
We turn to the Father
We offer our prayers.
We say. Lord, give us comfort,
Lord, give us peace.
We pray and we fast,
Lord, can’t you see
We seek Your ways so eagerly.
Yes, my people,
I hear all you ask.
I know how you pray,
I see how you fast.
But I also see children,
Who wander in tears,
See small swollen bodies,
Starving in fear.
And I see how they call you.
But you’ve turned from their cries.
To fast in your free and affluent lives,
While the world dies in hunger,
You have closed your eyes.
Shout it aloud.
Let your voices rise,
The Lord will defend the afflicted.
And don’t turn away,
From their innocent cries.
Jesus will come, they’ll be lifted,
Over all, over all.
We cannot go on living a lie,
And expect our voice,
To be heard on high.
We say we are humble,
We bow like a reed.
Yet we turn from,
The wandering refugee.
And we try to pretend,
That they don't exist.
While we claim to the world,
That Jesus lives,
We play the proud evangelist.
Now our Lord says,
I will hear you,
As you hear Me,
I call you to fast,
In truth and deed
Loose the chains of injustice,
Share what you’ve stored.
Shelter the homeless,
Feed the poor.
Then your righteousness,
Shall be revealed.
And like a blossoming garden,
You will be healed.
Shout it aloud
Let your voices rise.
The Lord will defend the afflicted,
And don’t turn away,
From their innocent cries.
Jesus, will come, they’ll be lifted,
Over all, over all.
Time passes on,
We see life in time.
We change and we grow,
We laugh and we cry.
And then when our sorrow
Seems too much to bear
We turn to the Father
We offer our prayers.
We say, Lord, give us comfort,
Lord give us peace.
Lord , heal our nation.
Can’t you see.
About the Composers:
John Michael Talbot and Terry Talbot
Terry Talbot is an American singer-songwriter. Terry and his brother John began performing in the country rock band Mason Proffit. Mason Proffit released thirty albums and together the Talbot brothers recorded five albums and their opening acts included John Denver, the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, and Dan Fogelberg. Terry's production skills and onstage energy were a foundational component of the band’s reputation as pioneers and innovators in the emerging country rock movement of the late 1960s. Terry has been nominated for several Grammy and Dove awards. In the last few years, he has released six CDs and a live video. Terry is still heralded by many critics to be one of folk-rock’s finest acoustic guitarists. He now spends his time in Fresno, California, where he teaches guitar and produces music for various artists. He is also the worship director at Golden Valley Church. He often performs around Central California.
https://www.christianmusicarchive.com/artist/terry-talbot
About the Performer:
John Michael Talbot (b. 1954) is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, author, and founder of a monastic community known as the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. His songs were the first by a Catholic artist to cross well-defined boundaries and gain acceptance by Protestant listeners. Talbot won the Dove Award for Worship Album of the Year for his album Light Eternal with producer and longtime friend, Phil Perkins. He is one of only nine artists to receive the President's Merit Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. In 1988 he was named the No. 1 Christian Artist by Billboard. Today, Talbot is one of the most active monk/ministers alive, traveling over nine months per year throughout the world, inspiring and renewing the faith of Christians of all denominations through sacred music, teaching, and motivational speaking.
https://johnmichaeltalbot.com/
About the Poetry and Poet:
Andrew Hudgins (b. 1951) is an American poet. He earned a B.A. at Huntingdon College, an M.A. at the University of Alabama, and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry and essays, many of which have received high critical praise, including The Never-Ending: New Poems (1991), which was a finalist for the National Book Awards; After the Lost War: A Narrative (1988), which received the Poets' Prize; and Saints and Strangers (1985), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Hudgins is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a frequent Sewanee Writers' Conference faculty member. He is currently Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University. He previously taught at Baylor University and the University of Cincinnati.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/andrew-hudgins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Hudgins
About the Devotion Author:
Dr. Carmen Joy Imes
Associate Professor of Old Testament
Talbot School of Theology
Biola University
Carmen is in her second year at Biola University, where she loves helping students fall in love with the Old Testament Scriptures. She is the author of Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters and Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters. She had no idea she’d become a YouTuber when she grew up!