The Responsibility

“If you remove the yoke from among you,

    the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry

    and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

then your light shall rise in the darkness

    and your gloom be like the noonday.

The Lord will guide you continually

    and satisfy your needs in parched places

    and make your bones strong,

and you shall be like a watered garden,

    like a spring of water

    whose waters never fail.”

-Isaiah 58:9b-11

When I was a boy we used to make frequent visits to my grandparents’ home in the Tennessee mountains. I had a job to do every time we visited. I loved it. I took it seriously. I’m also convinced that it was a way to keep me, an overly hyperactive child, occupied and out of everyone’s hair. Whenever we went to my grandparents’ house, my grandmother would always present me with an old metal teapot and send me out into her garden to fill it with the Japanese beetles that she was perpetually at war with. 

I grew up in the city with a family who abhorred guns, so this was as close to hunting as I ever got, and I approached it with the gusto of the most seasoned sportsman. There was a definite skill to it–Japanese beetles fly, so you had to approach slowly from behind or else they would take off and land in some far corner of the garden. I would spend hours stalking the garden and filling the teapot with the small iridescent insects, my concentration only breaking when some aunt or uncle came onto the back porch and called all the grandkids to lunch. 

I recognize now that my small role in my grandmother’s garden was beneficial to both the garden and myself. In tending to the needs of something other than myself, I was being shaped into who I would become. The prophet Isaiah recognized something similar. We cannot separate our own spiritual vitality from the way that we care for others. The passage above begins with God’s call to remove the yoke, stop the pointing of the finger, offer food to the hungry, and help to the afflicted. Then comes the promise: if we will do these things, God will water us like a garden. God tends to us as we become people through whom mercy, justice, and compassion flow outward. Spiritual growth is not a matter of inward nourishment alone; it is bound up with the life we help create around us.

In one of his most famous sermons, John Wesley wrote that there is “no such thing as a solitary Christian” and that there is “no holiness but social holiness.” What he meant was that our spiritual life is not personal and inward, but should bring about outward changes that are seen and felt through our interactions with one another. This idea was expressed another way in a letter penned from a Birmingham jail cell by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

Life in Christ is not life stored up and hoarded; it is shared life. The resurrected Jesus breathes peace on frightened disciples, restores the ashamed, feeds the hungry, and sends his followers into the world. Resurrection does not turn us away from human need; it sends us toward it with hope. So when we pray, worship, study scripture, and receive the sacraments, we are not simply maintaining our private faith. We are being watered by grace so that we may become a source of life for others. Our spiritual practices are not an escape from the world’s pain. They are how God roots us deeply enough to remain alive and fruitful in the midst of it. We are watered for the work of God’s Kingdom, and that work includes lifting burdens, loosening cruelty, feeding the hungry, and attending to those in distress. The soul grows only when it is opened in love.

Rev. Ryan Young