In my summation delivered at the end of my report to last week’s Annual Meeting, I warned that all our extensive ministries must always be more than good works by good people doing what good people do. We need a larger context in which to situate our activity. This is the collaboration with God in the unfolding of the divine dream of the world’s healing. So that which has been made low will be raised up, that which has grown old will be renewed, and that which is wrong about our world, the perpetuation of injustice and oppression, will be put to rights.
Which leads me to the question quietly pulsing beneath both Isaiah 58 and Matthew 5. It is not a question about belief, sincerity, or religious effort. It is a far more unsettling question: What does faith look like when it becomes visible?
Both Isaiah and Jesus are wary of private devotion. They are suspicious of religious practices that leave the world unchanged. And both insist—each in their own way—that when faith does not show up in how we live with others, something essential has gone missing.
Isaiah offers the diagnosis with unsettling clarity. The people are doing everything right—or so they believe. They fast. They humble themselves. They seek God daily and delight to draw near. Their religious lives are active, intentional, and disciplined.
And yet God interrupts them with a piercing question: Why do you fast, but do not see? Why do you humble yourselves, but do not notice?
What is striking is what God does not say. God does not accuse them of bad faith. God does not dismiss their prayers as insincere. The problem is not that their devotion is false; it is that it has been carefully contained. Their religious practices have been sealed off from the rest of their lives.
Even on their fast days, they pursue their own interests. They pray while preserving systems that exploit others. They bow their heads in humility while keeping their hands closed. Repentance is performed, but never allowed to reorganize how they live, relate, or share power.
Isaiah’s critique endures because it names a temptation that never quite disappears—the temptation to mistake religious performance for faithfulness.
God’s response is blunt: This is not the fast I choose.
The fast God desires loosens the bonds of injustice. It breaks the yoke of oppression. It feeds the hungry, shelters the homeless, and honors the fragile web of human responsibility that binds us to one another. True devotion, Isaiah insists, is not measured by how much we withdraw from the world, but by how deeply we enter into its suffering with courage and generosity.
Only then—only then—does the promise appear: Then your light shall break forth like the dawn. Then healing shall spring up quickly. Then I will hear when you cry.
Light, in Isaiah, is the consequence when justice lies at the heart of religious practice.
It is at precisely this point that Jesus speaks.
“You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”
Jesus does not tell his listeners to become light. He assumes they already are. Light is not something the disciples manufacture; it is something entrusted to them. The danger Jesus names is not weakness, but concealment—light rendered harmless by being hidden or contained.
Salt only matters when it dissolves or is used to season. We have the expression to cast light on something. Jesus is asking us to cast light on the practice of our faith.
When Jesus says, Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven, he is not inviting religious self-display. He is decrying religious invisibility. He stands firmly in Isaiah’s tradition: “good works” must be more than random acts of kindness. They must be justice-shaped, mercy-grounded, community-forming practices that make God’s character visible in the world.
Light shines not because we talk about God. Light shines through the way we choose to live our lives.
This is why Jesus immediately turns to the commandments. He is not abolishing them, nor replacing obedience with stricter rule-keeping, but a deeper commitment to faith as action. Being right with God happens when worship, ethics, prayer, money, power, and relationships stop being sealed off in compartments and begin to inform one another in our daily lives.
In this sense, Jesus echoes Isaiah in warning against devotion without justice. Jesus warns against faith that insists on remaining hidden. Both insist that a faithful life must be recognizable—not because it draws attention to itself, but because it changes the texture of the world around it.
These texts press on us because they name our own habits so precisely. We are adept at faith that stays interior, at spirituality that comforts without challenging, at worship that lifts our hearts while leaving our habits untouched. Scripture refuses to let us linger there.
The question is not whether we believe the right things. The question is whether our belief is reorganizing our lives in ways others can see. Does our fasting loosen anyone’s burden? Does our worship make room for others to come to the table? Does our faithfulness cast light on the shadows?
Isaiah promises that when justice takes root, light breaks forth. Jesus trusts that when lives are aligned with God’s purposes, light cannot help but shine. The world does not need more self-preoccupied religion. It needs faithful witness.
And the promise that holds these readings together is simple and demanding: when faith stops being something we perform and becomes something we practice—when devotion reshapes how we live with others—then light illuminates a world where what has been made low is being raised up, that which has grown old is being renewed, and where wrongs – the perpetuation of injustice and oppression, are being put to rights.
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