Don't hide
Share your food with the hungry,
and give shelter to the homeless.
Give clothes to those who need them,
and do not hide from relatives who need your help.
—Isaiah 58:7 NLT
I love hanging out with children! Their innocence helps to rebuke adult cynicism. Their imaginations encourage us to think beyond the tried and true and our rigid boundaries. I also love children because, well, because they do such funny things! For instance, I love it when toddlers meet someone they don’t know. The adults start talking in baby talk trying to engage the child with their antics. The kids want nothing to do with them. So, what do the toddlers do? They look away or hide their faces. Children do this with the belief that when they can’t see the person, then that person actually disappears!
I love teaching classes and interacting with students! Why? Well, one of the reasons is that I find it so comical how graduate students react when you ask them a question that they don’t really want to answer. They do exactly what a toddler does! They look away to avert eye contact with me and they think I disappear!
Let’s pause for a moment and take stock of our personal actions and reactions. It’s not just toddlers and students who act like this. Adults do, too. In all honesty, I have acted in this manner. I have averted my gaze away from homeless people at intersection stops holding up cardboard signs asking for money. I have pretended not to “see” individuals that I wanted to avoid as they walked toward me on the sidewalk. Why did I do that? Perhaps I didn’t want to take the time to get involved. Perhaps I felt it would have been a messy interaction. Maybe I just didn’t want to be bothered. Yet, whatever the reason, the bottom line is that I didn’t want to get involved.
Our text for today found in Isaiah 58:7 speaks directly to my acts of avoidance. I can’t say that I am following Jesus if I don’t act like he acts and go where he goes. I cannot say that he is God if I constantly try to recreate him in my image. It makes no sense to say that I believe him and then turn around and act in ways that are diametrically opposed to his. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus laid out the abstract of his mission:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,
that the blind will see,
that the oppressed will be set free,
and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.
—Luke 4:18, 19 NLT
To “continue the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus” means that we cannot just proclaim it, we must LIVE it. We cannot “cancel” or “ghost” people. We cannot make them “invisible” because we disagree with them or are uncomfortable with them. We cannot make them “less” because we feel that we are “more.”
Love does not tolerate these wounds. Rather, it heals them.
—Terry Swenson, DMin, is director of University Spiritual Care.
