The prophet's call is as contemporary as if were written yesterday. Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless into your house, when you see the naked to cover them and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? And this is the key: "Then will your light break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up speedily." (Isaiah 58:8) Isaiah understands that it's not the healing of those poor inner-city kids that’s at issue here, it’s our healing. And the college students are finding that the way to get your life together is to do something for somebody else.

Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite. We say, "You know, I'd like to do something. I'd like to get my life together. But first I want to...I want to do service but first I need to sort of get my own stuff straight." Isaiah says if you do that you’ll be stuck in a trap. The students are finding, and Isaiah is saying, the best way to get your life together is to do something for those who have been left out.

Now, we see in Barnes and Noble and all our bookstores, books and tapes about self-help. Isaiah is saying, "Save your money." He describes here in this 58th chapter a wonderful description of human fulfillment that would satisfy the desire of any self-help enthusiast. He says, "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 will be like the noon day. The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places." (Isaiah 58:10)

You got any parched places? Well, then this is for you. He says, "You'll be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt, you'll raise up the foundations of many generations. You will be called the repairer of the breech and the restorer of streets to live in." (Isaiah 58: 11-12)

Now who can't find time for that? This is not a demand to squeeze a little more time into an already overly busy life. This is an invitation to get our lives together. This is a chance for healing. Now I see it every time. At our Sojourners’ neighborhood center in Washington, D.C., there’s a 19-year-old college student from Howard University, next door to us, mentoring an 8-year-old little girl off the street. That little girl looks at that college sophomore and says, "She's a black woman just like I'm going to be. And she's smart. And she likes me. In fact, she thinks I'm smart and she thinks I should go to college. Maybe I will." The little girl thinks, "Maybe I will!" Then that college student looks at that little kid and says, "You know, the best two hours of my week are the time I spend with her. Then my life feels like it has some meaning or some purpose. I can't just pursue this road to prosperity and success and be satisfied or happy. I want to do something in my life that makes a difference in the lives of kids like her."

You see, the old paradigm is somebody doing something for somebody else. This is not that. This is two people being changed. It's a transformation. Everybody gets "different" in the process. Everybody gets healed.

Now, how do we take that dynamic and scale it up to a whole society? If we do that, you change a country. I believe that faith communities bring this contribution to a movement for social justice, this "Isaiah Connection," this promise of healing. That is what leads, I think, to the most important ingredient for social change, and that simply is hope. Everything else you can mobilize for and organize around, the one thing you can't do without, if you want to make a change, is hope. In neighborhoods like mine, full of drugs and danger and despair, when the kids get that vision of hope for their own lives, they can break the cycle of poverty, of violence, of crime, of all the things that work against them. They can break that cycle if they can get to that place of hope. But without hope, there isn't a social program in the world that’ll change poverty in my neighborhood, fourteen blocks from the White House, where the kids go to bed with the sound of gunfire at night.

Now how does that hope manifest itself? I see it happening all over the country and I’ve learned a lot about hope from the streets and I’ve learned a lot about hope in other places. I saw hope happening in South Africa in ways I had never seen it before, and I learned about hope through the churches in South Africa. I remember the difficult times when Nelson Mandela was still in prison and the only voices left standing were the church leaders. And I remember when they issued a call for help and I went over there. I was snuck into the country to support church leaders like Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I'll never forget my first day at St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town, South Africa. A political rally had been called and canceled by the government, so Archbishop Tutu said, "Okay, we're just going to have church then." And church he had. They gathered together in that Cathedral and the police were massing by the hundreds on the outside and they were there to intimidate, to threaten, to try and frighten all the worshipers. I will testify, being on the inside, that I was scared. You could feel the tension in that place. The police were so bold and arrogant they even came into that Cathedral and stood along the walls. They were writing down and tape recording every thing that Archbishop Tutu said. But he stood there to preach. And he stood up, a little man with long, flowing robes, and he said, "This system of apartheid cannot endure because it is evil." That's a wonderful thing to say, but very few people on the planet believed that statement at that point in time. But I could tell that he believed it. Then he pointed his finger at those police standing along the walls of his sanctuary and said, "You are powerful. You are very powerful, but you are not gods and I serve a God who cannot be mocked." Then he flashed that wonderful Desmond Tutu smile and said, "So, since you've already lost, since you've already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side!" And at that the congregation erupted. They began dancing in the church. They danced out into the streets and the police moved back because they didn't expect dancing worshipers.

I had the blessing of being at the inauguration of Nelson Mandela some years later and Archbishop Tutu was there. I said, "Bishop Tutu, do you remember that day at St. George's? Do you remember what you said?" And he smiled and he said, "I remember." I said, "Bishop, today they've all joined the winning side. They've all joined the winning side."

Hebrews 11 says that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," or my best paraphrase of that is this: hope is believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change.

The political solutions alone have not transformed or overcome poverty in my neighborhood. Now it's time for those who believe that spiritual power can change neighborhoods and nations beginning with people's lives. That hope is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change. I see it all over the country now. When my wife and I were pregnant with our little boy, one day we were reading in bed a book about what we could expect as parents and she said, "He can hear us now. The books say he can hear us now. We should be careful what we say." So I leaned down to him just instinctively and I put my head against her womb, and I said, "Luke,"—we knew he was a little boy, we knew his name would be Luke—"Luke, hope is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change. That's your dad's best line." And I really believe it and I do believe it. I see it happening across the country. Isaiah says, "In this movement, we all get healed." And Desmond Tutu says to us, "In this movement we can all be on the winning side."

Jim Wallis: What Isaiah is saying is that if you do the work, you find the spirit. So as long as we look at this as something extra to tack on to our busy lives. You hear a sermon, you say, "Oh, gee, now I'm going to have to...." I feel like sometimes the revivalist preacher with fire and brimstone. People are afraid. "Here comes the social activist! I’m going to have to, you know, what do I do? I'm too busy already!" What I'm trying to make people understand is that by connecting our best gift—not just extra time, but who we are, our best gift—to making a difference in the community, we all get healed, you know.

Talbot: But when did Jim Wallis first discover that kind of linkage?

Wallis: When I was a kid in Detroit and I was in this evangelical church. They just didn't understand, bless their hearts, that faith had to do with the world. Faith was just inside of here and so they said, "Racism has nothing to do with Christianity." I was a white kid in Detroit discovering the black church, discovering how life in black Detroit was so different from life in white Detroit. I made my pilgrimage into the city and I met the black churches. I didn't find this to be something that was daunting or frightening but very healing to me. It helped me to understand myself better and my country better. For me this kind of way of living is the best way to live.

Talbot: To experience solidarity with the poor, with the oppressed. And so you learned to read the Bible a different way.

Wallis: Yeah. Well, we held the Bible in high esteem in my church, but I'm not sure we read all those places where it talks about poor people, like Isaiah Chapter 58. In seminary we did a study of all the places in the Bible that talk about the poor. One of my classmates took a pair of scissors and cut out of the Bible all those passages. There were thousands in the Old Testament. It was the second most prominent theme. New Testament, one of every sixteen verses. And the Gospels, one of every ten. When he was done, our Bible was in shreds. It was full of holes. I would take it out with me to preach and I would hold it high above American churches and say, "This is the American Bible. It's full of holes." So, it’s rediscovering that biblical connection again. I think this cannot just change our lives, but change whole neighborhoods and whole cities. I'm seeing it all over the country now.

Talbot: There’s a hunger, isn't there, a spiritual hunger? But so many people who say they’re discovering a new kind of spirituality are centered in self-help kind of spirituality. How do you discern the difference between fulfillment, personal fulfillment, and the kind of spirituality that leads to justice?

Wallis: You know, self-help has become another, or even spirituality, another kind of commodity, another kind of consumer activity. I consume the book, the guru, the tape. And Isaiah is saying, you know this is a lot cheaper to do it Isaiah's way. You reach out to that inner-city kid like that college sophomore I talked about and her life was different. The college students say to me, "I'm finding my life gets better. I'm finding purpose in my life." I have so many stories in this book about lawyers and doctors and teachers and carpenters and my dentist and all these people who are not doing this because they feel they ought to or they're obligated or I'm Jim's friend and I’d better do it or he'll think less of me. They’re doing it because they’re finding a kind of meaning and purpose and healing and satisfaction they hadn't known before. They feel better about their lives and they're bringing their kids. You know, they’re involving their own children. And they're seeing that somehow this notion of community, you know, that we all win here. It doesn't have to be some win and some lose. We can all win here if we have this biblical notion of making room at the table. This wonderful notion of space at the table for all of us.

Talbot: Where all are welcome. You talk about community, vis-a-vis self-interest and greed and materialism, and so on. What we're talking about is shared humanity, aren't we?

Wallis: Yeah. And it's like here's a news flash: shopping doesn't satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart!

Talbot: If we all could embrace that notion of shared humanity, note how it might impact world peace and diplomacy?

Wallis: Well, I think it gets very practical. It gets practical on how to resolve conflicts between warring factions. I’ve done gang truce work, you know, Crypts and Bloods and Vice Lords. Then I've tried to get churches together on the issue of poverty. The former is not as hard as the latter, sometimes.

Talbot: Jim Wallis, you practice what you preach. You live in a part of Washington where there is gunfire. Your wife, Joy, and your two-year-old son, Luke, know about that, they live right there with you. How do you manage to deal with that kind of...is it fear? Or it is a kind of strength that comes from being there?

Wallis: I just watch my two-year-old son. He’s teaching me a lot about being in the neighborhood because we walk to that subway stop. Every kind of God's children are there: black and white and Latino and Asian and old and young. Everybody’s there. And he says "Hi!" to everybody. He insists on saying "Hi." And they will say "Hi" back. He just yells louder and finally they all laugh. This little two-year-old boy who says "Hi, hi, hi! and there is no discriminating in him about who he says "Hi" to. He says "Hi" to everybody he passes. Now, he builds community on the street unlike any organizer I've ever seen, just because he insists upon making a connection.

Talbot: A messenger for all God’s children. That is wonderful, Jim Wallis. Wonderful to have you here. Thank you.