5th Sunday after Epiphany Year A

5th Sunday after the Epiphany-Year A February 5, 2023 “Have you heard the story about the life house?” my husband said to me when we were talking about preaching this Sunday. Once there was a community by the sea, and they realized that so many people kept drowning. They decided they needed to do something, so they built a life-house and they trained life guards to go out and save people who were drowning. They were very successful in their mission, and all the people were glad. A generation went by, and the people of the life house spent all of their time sitting around and talking about the good old days of when they founded the life house. And while they were busy talking and reminiscing, people began drowning again, and there was no one to save them. Some members of the life house noticed this and asked for change, but others didn’t want to give up their stories and their time for reminiscing. So a fight broke out. One group argued that there are souls out there drowning, and we need to get back out there because we can save them, and the other group was comfortable and not really up for the risk of life-guarding any more. So, the ones who wanted to save the people from drowning went a little ways down the beach and built a new life house, and a generation later, the same thing happened. Our Old Testament reading for today is a reading from the book of Isaiah. Isaiah is a long book that scholars think was written by at least three different people during three different time periods. The first portion of Isaiah-what scholars call First Isaiah- takes place when Israel is headed for trouble, the enemies are at the gates and the kingdom is about to fall to foreign invaders. The second portion—Second Isaiah—is written to the people of Israel who have been taken into captivity by the foreign invaders into Babylon. They are trying to figure out how to be the people of God removed from their land which had been promised by God, trying to figure out how to continue to be God’s chosen people when it seems God has forsaken them. The portion for today—Third Isaiah-- is what is happening after the people in exile have been allowed to return to Israel. They have come home and find their homeland is in ruins: the temple is destroyed; there is no infrastructure; they have to completely rebuild the trappings of both their common life and their worship. In today’s passage, the prophet is writing to them that they are spending too much energy on the trappings of worship; they are trying to influence God in their fasting, and they are quarreling with one another and mistreating their workers and the most vulnerable among them. The prophet reminds them of what God’s priorities are and therefore, what their priorities should be: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.” The gospel reading for today is the second portion of Jesus’s famous teaching known as the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has started with the beatitudes (which we heard last week), and he is now teaching about discipleship—how to maintain our “saltiness.” In the Beatitudes, Jesus is teaching that blessing is closely connected with our relationships with both God and our neighbor, and in our portion for today, he is teaching about the mission of his followers must be to serve others through their example. We are to be bearers of God’s light in the world’s dark places, and our self-offerings will be signs of God’s presence and redemptive work. Jesus is reminding us and his disciples that there are people out there who are drowning, and he have the gifts and abilities to help save them. Several years ago, when my husband David and I got to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, we went to the site where people think Jesus gave the sermon on the mount. It was actually one of my least favorite sites that we visited, and I felt unsettled the whole time I was there. There’s a monastery that exists near the site of the sermon on the mount now. And there’s a church on the site that was very clearly built sometime in the 60’s. It is a shrine to 1960’s church architecture and 1960’s religious decoration and opulence—strangely frozen in time on this timeless spot. All around the church on the grassy hillside are sidewalks, so much concrete, that lead up steps to the monastery, to restrooms near the parking lot and to a gift shop. The church is built to look out over the side of the hill where the disciples and crowds would have gathered, but there’s no way to get down to that area as a pedestrian. After visiting that site, I felt completely disconnected from what we know of Jesus’s teachings in the sermon on the mount and about the topsy-turvy nature of the kingdom of God and the good news to those who are perishing. It’s easy to see how we as the church can insulate ourselves from risk, from change, from believing that we are bold and brave enough to make a difference, to help save the lives of people who are drowning. All churches can fall into that trap from time to time. We gather here, week after week, to engage together in the public act of worship. When we worship together, we participate in, give our hearts fully to the saving mission that God has begun and continues to carry out through Jesus Christ. We open ourselves to being drawn closer to God in and through our worship, to being drawn closer to the rest of human kind. In and through worship, our desires become a little more closely aligned with God’s desires: that every person will have all that they need to live whole-hearted and healthy lives. And then, transformed, we go out into the world to try to do our part, working with the Holy Spirit, to make that a reality. This week, I invite you to pay attention to how you are transformed in worship of God today, and look through that lens on the world around you in the coming days.