A homily for Epiphany 5, Year A

In the name of the living God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Good morning! It is a joy to be here with you today, back at St. Peter’s, which was my first parish family in Chicago some 24 years ago. I look forward to sharing more with you after the service, but know that this good place provided fertile soil for me to learn to listen to God and ultimately to hear a call to religious life. In many ways, parish communities like this one form people in the same quiet and faithful rhythms that monastic communities do—through shared prayer and mission, and the steady practice of showing up for God and for one another.

The season of Epiphany is a season of revelation. It is about what is made visible—who God is, and who we are becoming in the light of Christ. And Epiphany insists on telling this truth: light matters because darkness exists. At its heart, Epiphany is a season about love made visible—divine love no longer hidden, but embodied and set down in a world that often resists it. Today’s readings invite us to uncover the deep connection between love and justice, devotion and daily life, prayer and our common life.

The prophet Isaiah speaks with startling clarity this morning. The people are fasting, praying, showing all the outward signs of religious devotion—and yet something is wrong. They are frustrated that God does not seem to notice. And God responds, not gently, but truthfully: “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day… Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice… to share your bread with the hungry?”

Isaiah’s words feel uncomfortably current. We live in a time of deep spiritual exhaustion, when many are praying harder precisely because the world feels harsher—when inequality widens, violence feels relentless, truth itself feels fragile, and whole communities live under the weight of fear and neglect. God’s answer then is God’s answer now: faith that does not interrupt injustice is incomplete.

Worship that opens our hearts to God is meant to open our hands to one another.

What God reveals here is that love is meant to take shape in the world. Worship that opens our hearts to God is meant to open our hands to one another. God delights in prayer and devotion, but God longs for those practices to form us into people who build mercy, who repair what is broken, and who create space where dignity can flourish.

Dorothy Day, whose vowed life refused to look away from the suffering of her time, once wrote, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” That line refuses denial. It names how easy it is to spiritualize love while leaving injustice intact. It insists that love must descend into the real, the messy, the painful places of human life.

Then, and only then, “your light shall break forth like the dawn.” Justice is not an add-on to our faith. It is love illuminated. It is love refusing to retreat into abstraction while the world burns.

That image of light carries us straight into the Gospel. Jesus stands before his disciples and tells them something astonishing: “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world.” Not you will be someday. Not when the world improves. You are. This is not a compliment. This is a commissioning. 

Light does not exist for itself. Salt does not exist for its own preservation. Both are given away. Light reveals what must be revealed; salt preserves food and heals wounds. Jesus is telling us that love, if it is real, reveals what God is already doing and protects what is life-giving. Love that follows Christ does not look away from injustice—it stays, it witnesses, it acts.

This is especially clear in the witness of vowed religious life within the Church. Our Rule of Life and our vows are not means by which we escape the world’s pain. They are commitments to remain present within it. They foster lives which are shaped to say, again and again, God is enough and God is faithful. In times of difficulty and divide, vowed life stands as a stubborn sign that another way of loving is possible.

Now notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say, “Create the light.” He does not say, “Fix everything.” He says, “Let your light shine.” The light already exists in us because it comes from Christ. Light does not argue with darkness, it simply shines. Justice, then, is not about heroic perfection. It is about refusing to hide love when hiding would be easier.

The Psalm today describes the faithful person as one who is “gracious and merciful,” who conducts their affairs with justice, who gives freely to the poor. This is not naïve optimism. It is resilient love. It is the quiet, defiant goodness that persists even when headlines are grim and hope feels thin.

Paul echoes this same realism in his letter to the Corinthians. He reminds them that he came not with confidence or polish, but with weakness and fear, trusting God’s power rather than his own. Love shaped by the Gospel does not dominate a broken world—it accompanies it. This is the love vowed religious and lay disciples alike are called to embody: love that stays when it would be easier to withdraw, because presence matters more than we often realize.

Taken together, these readings confront a temptation that is especially strong in dark times: the temptation to separate belief from behavior, prayer from public life, love from justice. The Gospel refuses that separation. Love without justice becomes sentimentality. Justice without love becomes cruelty. In Christ, the two are bound together, even when the cost is real.

Biblical justice is not abstract. It is about upright and loving relationship in a world where relationships are fractured. It is about love ordering our lives toward God’s insistence that no one be disposable. It presses us to ask not only, “Am I faithful?” but, “Who is being harmed—and where is God asking me to stand?”

And this is where Epiphany meets vocation. Each of us shines light differently. Some through advocacy, some through teaching, some through quiet, faithful presence, some through vowed commitment that becomes a living protest against despair. Jesus does not ask us all to shine the same way—but he does ask us not to extinguish the light entrusted to us and to remember that small, faithful acts can preserve hope and reveal grace.

So, beloved of God: you are the light of the world—precisely because darkness persists, and because Christ, who is Love itself, has entered that darkness and has never left it. Let that love shine. Let it trouble indifference. Let it expose injustice. Let it warm those who have been left in the cold.

And as that light shines, even now, may the world glimpse—not our strength—but the fierce, faithful love of God, breaking forth like the dawn.

Amen.