“You are the light of the world. … [L]et your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”[1]

Last week, I read this story on Facebook:

I own a small bakery. Business has been slow. Rent is up. I was thinking about closing. Last Friday, a teenager came in. He looked nervous. He counted out change for a cookie. He was short 50 cents. “It’s okay,” I said. “Take it.” He ate it at a table, looking at his math homework. I walked over. “Quadratic equations?” He nodded. “I don’t get it.” I sat down and helped him for 20 minutes. He got it. He left smiling. The next day, he came back with two friends. They bought cookies. The day after that, five kids came. Apparently, he told the school, “The lady at the bakery helps with homework.” Now, my bakery is the after-school hang-out spot. It’s loud. It’s messy. There are backpacks everywhere, Yesterday, I found a note in the tip jar. It was wrapped around a $20 bill. “Thanks for helping my son pass math. A Mom.” I’m not closing the bakery. I think I finally found my purpose. It’s not cookies. It’s community.

This baker is a light shining before others. I think that both Jesus and the prophet Isaiah would have approved of this baker.

About twenty-five hundred years ago, Isaiah spoke to the leaders of Israel, addressing them as “you who serve your own interests”[2] and condemning their institutions, their routines, their ways of living, particularly their religious practices, which benefited only the individual and which tended to lead to quarrels and fights among the people. He spoke on God’s behalf recommending a different sort of religious observance:

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?[3]

In other words, God favors social institutions, religious and secular, as well as personal and business practices, like those of the baker, which foster connection and attachment, relationship and community. Isaiah’s prophecy speaks directly to our time and place.

In early January, the op-ed section of the New York Times published an essay by David Brooks about what he called “the great detachment.”[4] He made note of several surveys which have shown that, in the last three decades, the values Americans place on patriotism, religion, having children, and community involvement have all plummeted. “The only value Americans [have come] to care more about … [is] making money,” “We’re seeing,” Brooks wrote, “a systematic weakening of the loving bonds that hold society together — for community, for nation, for friends and on and on.” So he asked, “What’s going on?”

Being, at heart, a political commentator, Brooks tried to find a political origin for this, but other than noting that “conservatives believe in economic freedom” while “[p]rogressives tend to … [opt for] more social autonomy,” he wasn’t able to lay blame for “the great detachment” at the feet of any group on the political spectrum. Frankly, I think he was misguided to try to do so. The push to solitude and detachment is bigger and broader and more pervasive than politics.

Brooks seemed to recognize this, so he turned away from politics and focused on, of all things, romance. He concluded that the problem is that people aren’t romantic enough. The “great detachment” has happened, he argued, because people are not dating enough; they’re not getting married enough. “Married people,” he observed, “are happier than unmarried people.” So, he concluded, “if you want to lead a fulfilling life, fill it with loving attachments…. Resist the autonomy ethos and put loving passion at the center of your philosophy of life.” As a man happily married for 46 years, I can’t argue against the importance of romance and marriage, but I think the decrease in romantic attachments that Brooks documented is a symptom, not the cause of “the great detachment.”

A couple of years ago the U.S. Surgeon General published an 82-page report entitled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.[5] It documented that Brooks’s “great detachment” is a long-term phenomenon. “Americans,” the report said, “appear to be becoming less socially connected over time. This is not a new problem—certain declines have been occurring for decades.”[6]

As you might expect, our isolation from one another affects not only the individual, but society as a whole. According to the report, along with the rise in individual loneliness there has been a corresponding “fraying of the social fabric … more broadly.”

Trust in each other and major institutions is at near historic lows. Polls conducted in 1972 showed that roughly 45% of Americans felt they could reliably trust other Americans; however, that proportion shrank to roughly 30% in 2016. This corresponds with levels of polarization being at near historic highs.[7]

So Brooks was right to ask, “Why? Why are we separating from one another?”

I think the answer is really rather simple: because we’ve been told to. Powerful elites for millennia, since Isaiah’s time and even before, have engaged in what Isaiah called “the pointing of the finger” and “the speaking of evil.”[8] The haves of every society have always known that the way to maintain their position is to encourage the have-nots to separate and stay disconnected. “Where there is envy and selfish ambition,” wrote the Apostle James, “there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.”[9]

In Jesus time, the Roman empire practiced intense individualism and maintained a rigid social hierarchy keeping the classes separated so that, as the statesman-philosopher Cicero put it, “The men who administer public affairs [could] see that everyone holds on to what is his, and that … men are never deprived of their goods.”[10] Amongst the Jews, the Pharisees (whose name even means “the Separated Ones”) taught a highly individualistic religion and fostered conflict by their highly critical and intolerant attitude toward anyone who did not meet their standards.

Graham Kendrick, the composer of Shine, Jesus, Shine, which we just sang, has observed: “[T]he spirit of [our] age [also] thrives on division and provokes us to adopt adversarial poses.”[11] Just as in Isaiah’s and Jesus’ times, the politics of resentment and divisiveness is still very much with us and, just as in Isaiah’s and Jesus’ times, it is practiced and encouraged by those at the highest levels of society, with increasing frequency and growing volume.

We have heard American leaders describe other Americans as “lunatics,” “crazy,” “corrupt,” “shifty,” and “stupid,” and as “the enemy within.” We have heard Americans, themselves descendants of immigrants, call immigrants “rapists,” “vermin,” and “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”[12] We have seen representatives of our federal government beat, tear gas, pepper spray, shoot, and kill American citizens with apparent impunity.[13]

It’s no wonder that Americans are drowning in loneliness and increasingly falling into a morass of isolation and social disconnection. But that should not be us, not we who follow Jesus. It cannot be us! Because, as St. Paul said in today’s epistle lesson, “we have the mind of Christ,”[14] and the mind of Christ condemns and rejects such divisive rhetoric and violent behavior.

What is the mind of Christ? Echoing what he had written to the Corinthians, St. Paul wrote to the Philippians a few years later saying, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” He then described the mind of Christ as humble, thoughtful, obedient, and dedicated to the service of others, even (when required) to the point of death. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit,” he told the Philippians, “but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.”[15] The mind of Christ spurns isolation, rejects disconnection, and overcomes division.

We have seen the mind of Christ in action in the streets of Minneapolis and many other cities where neighbors have stepped forward to help and protect neighbors; to advocate for accountability, transparency, and protection of human rights; to provide emergency groceries, rent assistance, and safe-access to resources; or to reach out with legal guidance and support for marginalized communities.[16]

When today’s Psalm praises the righteous who “hold up their heads with honor”[17] and who “will be kept in everlasting remembrance,”[18] it is celebrating such acts of neighborly love. Like Isaiah, the Psalmist is praising those who “offer [their] food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.”[19]

In his teaching, Jesus echoed Isaiah’s condemnation of political and religious leadership that fosters quarreling, fighting, and (as the prophet put it) “striking with a wicked fist.”[20] Of the Pharisees, those “Separated Ones,” who ignored the needs and conditions of their people, Jesus told his followers

Do whatever they teach you and follow it, but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others, but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.[21]

In our gospel lesson today, Jesus tells us we must do better:  “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”[22]

Jesus is not talking about losing some afterlife reward. The rabbis of Jesus’ time coined the term malkut samayim, “the kingdom of heaven,” to “refer to God’s reign in this present age.”[23] Jesus uses it in the same way. When the Pharisees asked him when the kingdom was coming, he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming … the kingdom of God is among you.”[24] When Jesus tells us to be more righteous than the Pharisees, he is talking about how we are to live in the here-and-now. The community of connection that Jesus called “the kingdom of heaven,” or “the kingdom of God,” or “eternal life” is not something we are simply to hope for and await, or something to expect after death; it is something we are supposed to build and live in right now, today.

David Brooks is not wrong when he commends putting loving passion at the center of our lives, but it is not eros, romantic love, as he argues; it is agape, that love of neighbor which, in the words of our Baptismal Covenant, “strives for justice and peace among all people, and respects the dignity of every human being.”[25] As our Prayer Book Catechism teaches, it is “our duty to love [our neighbors] as ourselves, and to do to other people as we wish them to do to us;”[26] it is our mission as the church “to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ;”[27] and it is our ministry as baptized Christians “to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation.”[28]

Like the baker whose story I began with, we are to act in ways that model righteousness, encourage connection, and overcome isolation and loneliness. As the Surgeon General wrote in his report: “If we fail to do so, we will … continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.”[29] “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste,” said Jesus, “and no city or house divided against itself [can] stand.”[30] 

You know… that song we sang before (and after) the gospel lesson. It’s a nice song. Bright, catchy tune. Fun to sing. “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” But, you know what? He’s not gonna do it. He’s not gonna “fill this land with glory” or “flood the nation with grace and mercy.” He’s not gonna do it unless we do it, because it’s not his job anymore. He gave it to us. It’s our job now. “You are the light of the world!” That’s what he said to his followers; that’s what he says to us.

“You are the light of the world … let your light shine before others.” Then this land will be filled with glory, and grace, and mercy, and in Isaiah’s words, “you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”[31] Amen.

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This homily was offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 8, 2026, to the people of St. Hubert’s Episccopal Church, Kirtland Hills, Ohio, where Fr. Funston was guest presider and preacher.

The lessons for the service were Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112:1-10, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, and St. Matthew 5:13-20. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.

The illustration is an AI generated image.

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Scripture are from the New Revised Version Updated Edition.

[1] Matthew 5:14,16

[2] Isaiah 58:3

[3] Isaiah 58:6-7

[4] David Brooks, We’re Living Through the Great Detachment, The New York Times, January 3, 2026

[5] Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (2023)

[6] Ibid. page 12

[7] Ibid. page 13

[8] Isaiah 58:9

[9] James 3:17

[10] Cicero, De Officiis, 2.73

[11] Quoted in Tony Cummings, Graham Kendrick – Shine, Jesus, Shine: Classic songs of Christian music history, Cross Rhythms, April 6, 2012

[12] See, e.g., Ashley Murray, Trump more than ever mixes anger, fear and insults to stir supporters, say researchers, Utah News Dispatch, November 1, 2024

[13] See, e.g., Joshua Barajas, Shooting deaths climb in Trump’s mass deportation effort, PBS News, January 29, 2026

[14] 1 Corinthians 2:16

[15] Philippians 2:3-8

[16] Ways to Support Neighbors, Families, and Communities, Minnesota Monthly, January 16, 2026

[17] Psalm 112:9 (BCP version)

[18] Psalm 112:6 (BCP version)

[19] Isaiah 58:7

[20] Isaiah 58:4

[21] Matthew 23:3-4

[22] Matthew 5:20

[23] Margaret Mowczko, The Kingdom of Heaven in the Here and Now and Future, Exploring the biblical theology of Christian egalitarianism, June 3, 2013

[24] Luke 17:20-21

[25] The Baptisml Covenant, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 305

[26] The Catechism, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 848

[27] Ibid., page 855

[28] Ibid.

[29] Out Epidemic of Loneliness, op. cit., page 4

[30] Matthew 12:25

[31] Isaiah 58:12