The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany – February 8, 2026
Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112:1-10, 2 Corinthians 1-16, Matthew 5:13-20
The Season of Epiphany is for big thinkers and big actors and those who go from self-interest to world loyalty. Epiphany is the season of global spirituality which invites us to see divine revelation as both infinite and intimate and global and personal. Going beyond religious, national, and cultural parochialism, Epiphany charts a global faith, in which God’s light enlightens everyone, and it is only our own waywardness that prevents us from experience God’s healing presence in our lives and communities.
The Season of Epiphany calls us to creative transformation and to move from self-interest to world loyalty. An antidote to the small spirited and divisive religion of our time, Epiphany is the time of God’s revealing – the revealing of God’s vision, the unveiling of hidden truths in unexpected places, and the illuminating of how far we have strayed from God’s vision of Shalom, of the peaceable realm joining humankind and the non-human world, as the basis for healing the world.
God’s revealing is diagnostic as well as inspirational. In recognizing how far we have strayed from God’s vision, we can commit to transforming our lives, living by new values, and joining God in healing the world. God’s revealing challenges progressives as well as conservatives, socialists as well as capitalists, social activists as well as corporate board members, to be people of light, revealing God’s light in the maelstrom of our cultural and political lives, and calling us from polarization to prophetic healing.
In light of God’s global vision, we recognize our holiness and brokenness alike and discover that there is no “us” versus “them.” It is all “us” – we are all in the same storm and must be in the same boat. We have all fallen short and most of us who are reading this are benefiting from, complicit in, a system that places the Earth and its people in jeopardy. We are all, as Thomas Merton notes, “guilty bystanders,” regardless of our level of activism. And yet are all, despite our dim spirits, illuminated deep down by the light of God. We can begin again and take our place as God’s companions in healing the world.
The prophet Isaiah takes no prisoners in his denunciation of religious life, then and now. Speaking to people of faith in Judah and the United States, he calls us to abandon self-interest and become large spirited and empathetic. To gain the blessing of divine revelation, we must become compassionate, empathetic, and generous people. Our apparent institutional and religious generosity can’t save us – our spiritual practices can’t save us – if we immunize ourselves to the cries of the poor and the pain of creation. Apathy deadens us to the voices of the vulnerable and eventually to the voice of God.
Religious practices must be mated with care for the Earth’s most vulnerable. Worship without compassion is destructive to our souls and the lives of others. The people protest God’s judgment, “We are going to Temple, we are fasting and celebrating the holy days, why don’t you listen to us?” To which the Holy One responds, “Spirituality is both/and, not either/or. You need to be both heavenly minded and earthly good. Prayers must be joined with protest. Fasting must be complemented by fairness. Otherwise, your spiritual practices and institutional support are in vain.” You cannot worship God and support government inspired violence and the disenfranchisement and persecution of vulnerable and marginalized people.
It is important to note that these words are most likely addressed to the elite of the nation and privileged orthodox worshippers. While the poor of the earth and the working class are also challenged to follow their better angels, they typically are not the earth and nation destroyers. They don’t call out the troops and harass the vulnerable. Large scale destruction is the work of the powerful and privileged, then and now, whose misuse of resources and commitment to the status quo destroys the nation and the world.
Religion is profoundly political in the prophetic age, and it still is today. There is no such thing as isolated individualism or faith without works for Isaiah. Our religion can heal or harm, restore or destroy. Heaven-oriented and authoritarian religion – and the quest to chart the Second Coming of Jesus – draws us away from the pain of the Earth. Adulation of prevaricating and self-interested political leaders and the virus of Christian exceptionalism alienates us from the earth and those who differ from us. Religion becomes a tool to be manipulated for political and financial gain and to silence those we feel to be moral inferiors. What happens to Right Whales, endangered by human artifices, off Cape Cod, and the state of polar ice caps or undocumented workers and political opponents is of no consequence if heaven is our destination or at the last trumpet God will return in destructive force, and we are God’s chosen worshippers, while others perish and are excluded from grace.
In Isaiah’s time and ours the words of prophets are drowned out by the call for profits, power, and privilege, even among those who claim to be most pious! Moreover, such apathetic, unfeeling binary theologies, justify inhumane policies at our borderland and denial of rights to Muslims, the LGBTQ community, and anyone perceived to threaten the Christian way. You can love fetuses all you want but you must love with equal fervor the child of the asylum seeker and the child whose parents receive government aid.
Authentic, holistic faith comes from going beyond binary theologies to world loyalty, evident in our caring for the vulnerable, and insuring that every parent or child, regardless of citizenship, nation, race, or sexual identity, has human rights, a home and an income. God’s guidance comes through the voices of the vulnerable, not in isolation from them. Peace, as Alfred North Whitehead notes, comes from an expansion of self-interest to include the well-being of others, the identification of our individual self with the Self of the Universe, our good with the good of creation.
The words of Psalm 112 connect happiness – or better yet, blessedness – with generosity and fairness. Our wealth and prosperity are for the well-being of others as well as ourselves. True and lasting prosperity emerges when we are generous in our time and in terms of future generations, who will benefit from our wise stewardship. This should not be seen as justification for a rewards-punishments prosperity gospel but an invitation to discover that true happiness is grounded in inner spirituality and empathy with the vulnerable. The happiness the Psalmist is talking about mirrors Jesus’ blessedness described in the Beatitudes. Joy comes from relationship with God does not power over or possession.
Paul’s words to the Christians at Corinth contrast divine and human wisdom. Divine wisdom is foolishness to those for whom profit, power, and consumption are the final ends of life. God’s way is always countercultural and critical of our “way of life.” Those who “have it all” scoff at sacrificial living and downward mobility, and at a politics of compassion. “More” is their mantra – more things, more power, more success, and more notoriety. Winning and bullying – silencing the voices of opponents and the vulnerable – is their way. In contrast, the way of Christ, the mind of Christ, is more like the Tao, flowing through all things, moving in all things, gently providing, flourishing by sacrificing. The mind of Christ, noted by Paul, is the “fat soul,” described by Patricia Adams Farmer, the soul large enough to embrace the pain and joy of others and look beyond immediate gratification to the well-being of generations to come.
Sacrificial living expands rather than contracts the soul. The cross looks like the way of death to the powerful for whom any sacrifice or word of confession is a form of weakness, but the cross of sacrificial love is the way of life for us and future generations of human and non-human companions. On the cross, Jesus forgives the foolishness of the powerful and identifies with the suffering of the vulnerable and tears of the forgotten. The cross is the symbol of stature, of the largeness of spirit that seeks healing for the whole as much as self-interest. The cross-shaped mind of Christ embraces pain and sees beauty in simplicity and invites us to spiritual maturity and stature embracing the whole earth. Following Christ, we privilege the power of love over the love of power.
The mind of Christ, Paul yearns for, is “epiphanic” in nature: all things even in their concealing reveal the divine. Inspired by daily epiphanies, those who have the mind of Christ are committed to midwifing holiness and beauty wherever they are and that includes marching against state sponsored violence, calling out prevaricating politicians, and giving shelter to traumatized and vulnerable persons, often the victims of institutional and economic violence.
Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount are both affirmative and challenging. “You are the salt of the earth…you are the light of the world…let your light shine.” Don’t play small; you are about God’s business. Don’t minimize your impact; one act of love can change the world. Your deepest nature is enlightenment, the revealing light of God. Expect great things from God and great things from yourself and your congregation. We can let our light shine not out of ego or the quest for notoriety but to give light and direction to the world and to proclaim God’s glory.
Jesus challenges his listeners to take the moral high ground, and to exceed the religious teachers in their righteousness and morality. These days the bar is set low in the body politic. Major religious leaders bow down before the authoritarian, capitalist, earth-destroying agenda of politicians. They overlook personal and institutional greed, immorality, state sponsored violence and racism, and authoritarianism, to further their quest for a “Christian” America. In a time in which environmental law and human rights may be at risk, in which politicians and religious leaders implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – advocate racist policies, we need to set our own moral compasses in alignment with God’s vision of Shalom. We need to be the change we want to see in the world as we chart ways to live more simply, to exceed the standards set by the Paris Accords in our lifestyles, to reach out to persons of different religions, and to provide hospitality to the forgotten and traumatized, and sanctuary to those who are at risk.
The lack of moral compass in our national and corporate leaders is reason to be anxious, but we need to go from anxiety to affirmation and find our true path as God’s light and salt in the world even as we pray and protest.
Today’s words are political, spiritual, and trans-partisan. They challenge us to listen for God’s voice in a challenging time when leaders have lost their reason and many of our Christian kin bow down in worship of the purveyors of authoritarian politics and state sponsored violence. They challenge us to be light-bearers and prophetic healers for just such a time as this, recognizing our complicity in social and economic injustice and ecological destruction, and then setting our feet on a higher and healthier path for the planet and its diverse and wondrous communities.
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Bruce Epperly is Theologian in Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, Bethesda, MD and a professor in theology and spirituality at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington DC. He is the author of over eighty books, including Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet; Creation Sings: Forty Days of Spiritual Wisdom from the Non-Human World; Messy Incarnation: Meditations on Christ in Process; and Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation with the Healing Wisdom of America’s Visionaries. His latest books are Creation Sings: Forty Days of Spiritual Wisdom from the Non-human World and Three Wise Wisdom: The Twelve Days of Christmas with Mary, Elizabeth, and Anna (volume seven in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” series along with the recently released Lenten devotional, Just a Little Walk with Jesus: A Spiritual Saunter with Mark’s Gospel and Whitehead and Jesus: An Adventure in Spiritual Transformation. He is married to Rev. Kate Epperly, D.Min. and lives in Potomac, Maryland.
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