Will you follow?

A homily offered on Epiphany 3 (Religious Life Sunday), Year A

It is Religious Life Sunday, and It is good to be here with you today (cold as it is) as I personally reflect on over a decade in vowed life. For me, the calling to join the Community of the Mother of Jesus was a response to know God more fully. It is a continuing journey, marked by moments of spiritual growth even as I sometimes struggle to see where God is moving in this fragile world, and that searching, that illuminating of God in this time and space is really what keeps me moving forward.

The season of Epiphany is, at its heart, a season of light. It is a season of unveiling—of God made visible, God made known, God stepping into the world not in abstraction but in flesh and history and geography. And today’s readings insist that when God’s light appears, it does not shine in safe or comfortable places. It shines precisely where the darkness feels most entrenched. 

It is important to note that this poetic language of light and dark, so prevalent in scripture, must be explored gently, humbly, so as not to fall into applications and patterns which have led to systemic harm, placing whole groups of people into camps of good and bad, light and dark. Yet, it is within this very poetic language that we find ourselves this morning.

Isaiah tells us, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Not the people who escaped the darkness. Not the people who solved it. But the people who walked in it—who lived there, who knew it from the inside.

Matthew is very intentional about where Jesus begins his ministry. He does not start in Jerusalem, the religious center. He does not begin among the powerful or the polished. He goes to Galilee—“Galilee of the Gentiles”—a borderland, a place of mixed cultures and contested identities, a region long marked by poverty, occupation, and neglect. If Isaiah’s prophecy is being fulfilled, it is not with fanfare but with presence.

And this tells us something essential about the justice of God.

God’s justice does not begin by rearranging the powerful. It begins by illuminating the overlooked. God’s justice is not abstract fairness; it is embodied mercy that shows up in real places, among real people, under real systems of harm.

Jesus’ first proclamation is simple: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Repentance here is not about private guilt or moral failure. The Greek word used is metanoia, meaning more like a changing of heart or mind. It is about turning—turning our lives, our priorities, our sense of what is possible—because God is already near, doing something new among us. 

And immediately, Jesus calls people.

Not scholars. Not religious elites. Fishermen.

Simon Peter and Andrew. James and John. People with calloused hands, whose lives were shaped by uncertainty, by daily labor, by systems they did not control. People who knew the rhythms of scarcity and risk. People whose work was already entangled with economic injustice and imperial power.

Jesus does not invite them to admire him. He does not ask them to sign on to a set of beliefs. He says, “Follow me.” And that call is both deeply personal and profoundly communal. It asks for trust before understanding.

And here, on Religious Life Sunday– a Sunday that the church has lifted up to highlight and celebrate the many gifts and facets of vowed religious life, we can glimpse a parallel to this expression of vocation in the Church.

Those first disciples are not called because they are exceptional; they are called because they are available. And when they leave their nets, their boats, even their family structures, they are not rejecting the world—they are responding to a summons that reorders their relationship to it.

Vowed religious life has always been one way the Church embodies this Gospel pattern. Not as a higher calling, but as a visible sign. A sign that God can be trusted. A sign that the kingdom of heaven is close enough to build a life around—to build a community around. A sign that letting go—of possessions, status, control, even certain forms of security—can make space for deeper freedom and deeper solidarity.

When Jesus says, “I will make you fish for people,” he is not talking about recruitment. He is talking about participation in God’s work of drawing people out of the waters of despair, exploitation, and invisibility. Religious life makes this visible by its very shape: lives oriented toward prayer, community, and mission; lives that say, again and again, God is enough, and God is faithful.

And then Matthew tells us what Jesus actually does. He teaches. He proclaims. He heals.

Teaching forms conscience and imagination. Proclaiming challenges systems of meaning and power. Healing restores bodies and communities broken by neglect and injustice. This is the pattern of God’s justice: spiritual, social, and embodied all at once.

Historically, vowed religious communities have lived at this intersection—educating where knowledge was denied, healing where care was unavailable, standing with the poor when society looked away. Not because they were immune to the world’s brokenness, but because they chose to remain present within it.

And that presence matters now.

Because Epiphany light does not only reveal God—it reveals us.

It reveals the ways we have grown accustomed to darkness. The ways injustice becomes normalized. The ways we protect our nets and our boats—our comfort, our privilege, our carefully balanced lives—even when others are drowning.

Vowed religious life stands as a gentle but persistent question to the whole Church: What might we need to loosen our grip on in order to follow Christ more freely and how can we serve our neighbors in need? Not everyone is called to religious vows. But all who are baptized are called to live as if the kingdom of heaven has truly come near.

We live in a time when sorrow and tragedy can feel overwhelming—violence that refuses to end, systems that privilege some while crushing others, rhetoric that dehumanizes, policies that forget the poor, the migrant, the imprisoned, and the earth itself. It is tempting to believe the light is too small to matter.

But Isaiah does not say the darkness disappears. He says that in that darkness, a light is given.

And Matthew shows us how that light moves: one call at a time, one life at a time, one community at a time, willing to trust that God’s justice begins exactly where we are.

The good news is not that we are capable of fixing the world. The good news is that Christ has already entered its darkest places—and continues to call companions. Some respond through family life, some through activism and education, some through vowed religious life, and some by working together to build new community spaces of welcome and healing. Each vocation becomes a different way the light takes flesh.

So the question Epiphany places before us is not, Do we believe in the light?
The question is, Will we follow it?

What nets might we need to loosen?
What boats might we need to step out of?
Where is Christ already at work—calling us not just to see injustice, but to live differently because of it?

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. That light has a name. And that light is still calling. “Follow me.” Amen.