How to be the light of your world

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Jesus tells us today, “You are the light of the world… set on a lampstand, it gives light to all in the house.” (Mt 5:13-16)  Most of the lights in my house have dimmer switches. They’re rarely at full brightness. They’re usually somewhere in the middle—enough to see, but not enough to dazzle.

And if I’m honest, my own discipleship works the same way. My light is on a dimmer switch. Some days it shines brightly. Other days it’s barely glowing under a bushel basket. I suspect many of us live somewhere in between.

The invitation in today’s readings is simple and challenging: turn up the dimmer switch.

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Isaiah (58:7-10) tells us exactly what happens when we turn the light all the way up:  “Your light shall break forth like the dawn.” 

He also tells us how to get there:

• Share your bread with the hungry.
• Shelter the oppressed and the homeless.
• Remove from your midst oppression.
• Clothe the naked when you see them.

These aren’t abstract ideals. They’re concrete actions that make God’s light visible in the world.

And when we look around our own community, we see the places where that light is needed: 

Hunger.  Food insecurity in Catawba County still affects far too many children. Eleven-point-eight percent of kids don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That’s not a statistic—it’s a child going to bed hungry.

Homelessness.  Our shelters are full. Three hundred of our neighbors sleep in cars, alleys, or the woods. This week’s cold snap was brutal. On Wednesday, when the temperature hovered around freezing with rain, no emergency shelters opened. I spent the morning at the day shelter, listening to the fear and desperation. When I left, I met with my spiritual direction.  I burst into tears during the opening prayer.  Their wound becomes our wound.

Oppression.  Isaiah’s words echo through every system that crushes the vulnerable:  immigration barriers, unaffordable housing, racism, bureaucratic hurdles that punish the poor.  Today is the Super Bowl, when the church highlights the horror of human trafficking.  It coincidently falls on the feast of St. Josephine Bakhita, the patron saint of human trafficking.  Once trafficked, she now intercedes for those still enslaved. Human trafficking doesn’t happen once a year; it happens every day. Some who pass through our shelters carry that trauma in their eyes.

These are the places where Jesus asks each of us:  Can you turn your dimmer switch up just one notch?  Through giving, volunteering, advocacy, prayer, or simple compassion.

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After calling us to be light for others, Isaiah says something astonishing:  “Then your wound shall quickly be healed.”  Not their wound—your wound.  When we draw close to those who suffer, we discover our own brokenness. And somehow, mysteriously, God heals us in the very act of loving others.

Pope Leo in his inaugural exhortation Dilexi Te, says it this way:  In the act of healing a wound, the Church proclaims that the Kingdom of God begins among the most vulnerable.  (52)

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In the same document —echoing centuries of Church teaching— Leo puts it bluntly:  “Love for the Lord is one with love for the poor.”  (5) You cannot say you love Jesus if you do not love the poor.  And by love, he means the love that Jesus taught, “to lay one’s life down for another.”  (Jn 15:13)

And he names two attitudes that turn up the brightness of our light:

Attentiveness.  The option for the poor demands of us an attitude of attentiveness to others.  (101)  A willingness to notice. To see the person in front of us. To refuse to look away.   

Closeness.  Only on the basis of this real and sincere closeness can we properly accompany the poor on their path of liberation.  (101)  Not charity from a distance, but relationship. Presence.

He even says something that should unsettle us—in a good way:  The poor evangelize us.  All of us must ‘let ourselves be evangelized’ by the poor. (102)  They reveal God’s wisdom. They teach us what trust, perseverance, and hope look like.

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Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.”  In various ways, you have been a light by being generous, charitable, and compassionate.  But your light is on a dimmer switch.  The question is, “How can you make it a little brighter?”  If you’re not sure, pray with this very passage from Isaiah (58:7-10). At the end of the passage, the prophet offers a promise:

If you remove from your midst oppression…
if you bestow your bread on the hungry
[if you] satisfy the afflicted,
then light shall rise for you in the darkness,
and the gloom shall become for you like midday.