Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Isaiah 58.1-12
Psalm 112
1 Corinthians 2.1-13
Matthew 5.13-20
8 February 2026
©Suzanne Grimmett
What does it mean to be human? This is a question coming under new scrutiny with the advent of Artificial Intelligence. AI is proving a confronting mirror whenever it reproduces the same biases as it finds in human society- prejudices against gender, race, social status and sexuality. There are many AI failures being documented of course. Failures that are hilarious – like the short-lived AI experiment used in McDonald’s drive-throughs which saw one couple pleading with the machine to stop adding chicken nuggets to their order (they ended up with 260!) Others are enraging, like the hiring tools of big corporations that biased employment of men over women, and white people over anyone of colour. We also have our country’s tragic failure of Robodebt which miscalculated debts partly due to biased evaluations of working patterns and disproportionately harassed those who were most financially and socially vulnerable. If all we are as a society can be programmed into a machine, there would be reason to despair for ourselves and our world.
Perhaps some of the alarm around AI is because we believe the lie that who we are is contained in our head and our brains are some kind of machine. Straight away with a metaphor like this, we can see the potential for judgements about human worth and value to be determined by our functionality. It is also this idea that our being is represented by the neurons firing in our brain that leads to the fantasy that all we are could somehow by uploaded to the cloud to attain an eternal existence. This ignores the fact that who we are is always a process of becoming- relationally and contextually. Who you are is a unique and never to be repeated event of biology, relationships, context, culture and lived experience. Who you are here today is also a product of who we are together.
And who we are together right now is people coming together to worship the God is both one of us and greater than us, immanent and transcendent. Seeking God and the revelation of God found in Jesus the Human One, has led Christianity to develop customs and symbols, traditions and sacraments, all growing from place and culture across the world. These represent a rich treasure house of resources for the human spirit. But over time the temptation is always there to make worship about us- getting our liturgy right, our expressions of faith and our personal practices of piety. It is just this kind of human tendency that is being called out by God through the voice of the prophet Isaiah. God is strong in judgment of what amounts to hypocrisy when attention is paid to religious observance but divorced from the communal responsibilities of justice;
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
We don’t need to look very hard to know that it is not only the ancient communities in the lands of Judah who could sound religious while maintaining systems that exclude and oppress, who pray while instigating acts of violence. The words of Isaiah speak a challenge to all of us today who would make of our religion a purely performative, private thing. Here God’s voice rings clearly;
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?
Jesus comes teaching in that same prophetic spirit of Isaiah, calling on all who would come after him not just to obey the law but fulfil it- a higher righteousness of the kind that makes real God’s dream for humanity. Worship is central to who we are, but it is not the goal. The purpose of church is not creating services for a Sunday. Jesus calls us to be light for the world, shining into dark places and salt, enabling the good gifts of the earth to remain fresh and nourishing. We come together to be strengthened and to share in the beauty of God’s grace found in word, sacrament and one another, but our work is in the world.
We might then think of the good work we do here in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. This is good and sadly necessary work. But I have been reminded lately that if this is all we do, then we are only providing a band-aid, supporting unjust systems. We also need eyes to see the dynamics of power and to challenge the assumptions of the unchangeability of systems where someone always misses out.
How we do that can seem unclear, but because we are interconnected creatures, how to respond to human need meaningfully only emerges as you engage not as keyboard warriors but with real people in real time. As you feed the hungry and clothe the naked and, even more importantly, get to know those whom you are feeding and clothing, you begin to get a sense of the systems of poverty but also of waste. For instance, in building relationships with local supermarkets, it becomes very clear just how much good food we are still throwing away and adding to landfill. The United Nations climate change research states that food waste accounts for between 8-10% of global greenhouse emissions. Meanwhile, there are people whose nutritional needs are not being met because they don’t have access to those same foods we are throwing on landfill. It is why obtaining food from rubbish bins becomes something people do to survive- and what does that fact say about how we value the humanity of each other?
Throughout history there has always been the evil that creates groups of entitlement and power, always in every culture and time finding ways to ignore and exclude those who are left without what they need to flourish. All too often their existence on the bottom rung is the means through which the affluence of others higher in this stratified system can be maintained. When Paul was writing to the churches in Corinth, the people were living under Pax Romana, the kind of peace that came at a price. The military presence was strong and the threat of military violence never far away. It was also a presence that maintained a strong hierarchy and class of elites. As we look around the world we see this same truth that hierarchical societies- whether that be hierarchies of wealth, or social division – are inherently violent. Evil reigns wherever some individuals or groups are considered less human than others or even dispensable. This is a truth we are seeing lived out in Ukraine, Sudan and the Gaza strip to name three places of terrible suffering. Gaza has been named by UNICEF as the most dangerous place on earth to be a child. It is the little ones who always pay the price for those whose will to dominate is greater than their humanity.
Paul, sharing the good news of Jesus, is aghast when he discovers not a transformed and transforming community of faith in Corinth, but a bunch of people upholding the same stratification and prejudices that marked Roman society. There were rivalries, and people vying for status and power.[1] So he writes to show the Corinthians a better way;
When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
All of our pride and posturing falls away before the foolishness of the cross. Rowan Williams has said Jesus did not come to be “a competitor for space in the world”. Rather, in his life, death, and resurrection “the human map is being redrawn, the world turned upside down,” and “the whole world of rivalry and defense” is put into question.[2]
This is the higher righteousness of Jesus’ call on our lives. This is the fulfilling of the law where to live justly is an act of worship, allowing our lives to be reordered from the hierarchies we have known to God’s priorities. We follow a crucified Messiah whose death reveals the violence of all our rivalries and calls us into a new way of being. This new way is a participation in the very life of Christ, living humbly and with integrity, doing justice, standing with the oppressed and being peacemakers. In short, the call of Christianity is to live into our full humanity, not as solitary individuals but acknowledging the truth that we become human only through our relationships with God and one another, in place and in time.
Your brain is not a second-rate computer, and you are not your thoughts. You are not an end in yourself but part of the fabric of the universe and you belong here. You are a child of God, breathed by love into being and into life through creation and the beloved community.
In this place and in this time you are called to be salt. You are called to be light. You are called to be human.
May the Spirit give us the courage to live into this greatest of callings. +Amen
[1] Roger J. Gench in Bartlett David L. and Taylor, Barbara Brown, Feasting on the Word: Year A Volume 1, Westminister John Knox Press: 2010, Kindle edn. 778
[2] Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial, (Grand Rapids Eerdmans 2000), 6, 52, 69