The Rev. Brad Sullivan
Lord of the Streets, Houston
February 8, 2026
5 Epiphany
Isaiah 58:1-9a, [9b-12]
Psalm 112:1-9, [10]
Matthew 5:13-20
Jesus said, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. Let your light so shine, that others may see your good works and give glory to God. This is more than getting someone to say, “Yay, God is good,” because they see your good works.
Giving glory to God is not the same as giving a “like” to someone’s good works. That person was kind; they were a light in the darkness. “Like,” and God is glorified. That’s not exactly giving glory to God. Seeing goodness and kindness in others and then giving glory to God comes through following in those same ways of life. When we see goodness and kindness in others, giving glory to God means loving others and showing kindness as well, living as God hopes for us to live.
The way God hopes for us to live, is to live in ways that minimize harm to each other and give the greatest healing and love that we can. We’re all God’s children, and God looks at us all with love, care, and concern. So when we talk about God’s way and God’s will for us, we’re talking about God desiring peace, community, and love for our lives. God desires healing and reconciliation for us so that we can love even our enemies.
That’s no small task, living as God desires for us to live. Following God’s will and God’s ways requires work on our parts. Daily, hourly, giving glory to God through our actions, through treating others with honor and love, respecting the dignity of every human being.
Glorifying God is not through words and religious practice, but through actions. Those words and religious practices are good, so long as they help guide our actions, to love and honor others, and respect this dignity of every human being. So, when Jesus said that he came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them, that’s what he was talking about, how we live our lives.
We heard what the prophets had to say about the law and how we live our lives in our reading from Isaiah. He said that following religious practices just to get you right with God isn’t the deal. When Isaiah spoke to the people, they were fasting, praying, making sacrifices…doing all the right things to make God pleased with them.
If we were to translate these practices into our life as Christians, you could say they were going to church every Sunday, giving to the church, studying the Bible, praying and turning their lives over to Jesus, doing everything they were supposed to do. Unfortunately, none of that was translating into how they lived their lives minute by minute, day by day. They were doing all the right religious stuff, but actually caring about other people enough to be a light for them, to heal them, to be healed together, that’s the part they were missing. Actually caring about other people enough to be a light for the, to heal them, to be healed together, that’s at the heart of the Gospel.
I came to fulfill the law and the prophets, Jesus said. The law and the prophets’ interpretation of the law were given by God for our sake, out of care and concern for us. The law and the prophets were given to help us learn how to walk in the light. The law and the prophets were given to help to minimize the damage we cause from generation to generation and to heal the damage we cause from generation to generation, because the damage and the healing we cause echoes throughout generations.
We know the harm we cause one another echoes throughout generations because we live that harm every day. We are still living to this day the echoes of the harm caused when the first human being was chained and sold as a slave in this nation. We are living the echoes of the generational trauma that came as hundreds of thousands of people were stolen from their homes in Africa, chained, and sold as slaves here in America, as the slavers used up and discarded the bodies of human beings as nothing more things to make them money.
Slavers used the law, or rather misused the law, to justify their captivity, beating, killing, raping, and terrorizing Africans who were taken from their lands and sold into slavery. The slavers would say, “There were slaves in scripture, therefore we can have slaves now,” but they could only say that by misunderstanding the scriptures and using the scriptures selfishly, rather than seeking to fulfill the law and prophets like Jesus did.
Those slavers built a nation on torture, rape, and murder of human beings. Those slavers built an economy on torture, rape, and murder of human beings. Those slavers built an economy on treating human beings as disposable things, used to make money and then discarded. Generations and generations later, our economy still works that way. Billionaires have luxury surpassing kings and pharaohs of legend, while the lowest of their workers don’t make enough even to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Sure, we don’t have slavery anymore, but the grossly wealthy, like the slavers of yore, still create their great wealth by using up and discarding the bodies of the human beings as nothing more than things to make them money. The way our economy was built is the way our economy still is. The echoes of the harm done to even one person reverberate throughout generations.
For example, Genesis 4:10 says, “For anybody who destroys a single life it is counted as if he destroyed an entire world, and for anybody who preserves a single life it is counted as if he preserved an entire world.”
- https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.4.10?lang=bi&with=Jerusalem%20Talmud%20Sanhedrin&lang2=en
Now, those words may not sound like anything you’ve ever read in the Bible, because they’re not. The actual words of Genesis 4:10 are, “And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!” That was God speaking to Cain after he had killed Abel. What have you done, Cain, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground?
I said that Genesis 4:10 says, “Anybody who destroys a single life is counted as if he destroyed an entire world,” because that is a rabbinic teaching about Genesis 4:10 in the Talmud. The Talmud is called the oral Torah, teachings of rabbis on the first five books of the Bible over centuries. In Genesis 4:10, rabbis teach that the word for blood was not singular, but plural. Your brother’s bloods are crying to me from the ground. The life-bloods of Abel were crying to God from the ground, meaning that all of Abel’s descendants who would never now be born, were crying to God from the ground.
Cain had not just killed his brother Abel. He had killed the countless generations of people, the world of people, who could have come from him. “Anybody who destroys a single life is counted as if he destroyed an entire world.”
Fulfilling the law and the prophets requires caring about people enough and looking deeply at scripture enough to realize that the harm we do to one another echoes through centuries and millennia. Jesus understood this when he taught that it isn’t enough simply not to murder someone else. Even if you hate someone, it brings generational harm, like slavery did. When you traumatize a single life, you traumatize an entire world. The hurt we inflict on one another is passed down to our children, and to their children, and to their children’s children, spreading and echoing for countless generations…and so does healing.
Remember, the full teaching from Genesis 4:10 is “Anybody who destroys a single life is counted as if he destroyed an entire world, and anybody who preserves a single life is counted as if he preserved an entire world.”
Jesus came to heal the wounds we inflict on one another, and Jesus came to lead us into healing those same wounds and hopefully causing fewer and fewer of those wounds. We are the light of the world, Jesus said, and that means we are hoping to help cause less harm and to heal others in this life so that healing and light will follow for generations.
That is the work of the church. You are light, Jesus said, so let that light shine before others. Show them, teach them, offer the light of the ways of God. We don’t do that with condemnation and threats, telling people how sinful we think they are. Jesus didn’t you are a light to burn people with or to set them on fire till they finally listen to you. That doesn’t glorify God. That just causes more harm.
Jesus said to be the light by how you live, and offer that way to others. That will glorify God. When we help one another heal from the hurts of our lives, and from the generational hurts of the world, that will glorify God. When we look upon one another and choose to see each person as beloved, that glorifies God.
As far as religious practice goes, that’s what we do to keep kindling the light within us. We keep connecting to God. We keep giving over fears and anxieties to God. We keep turning every day over to God’s guidance. Then we live that nearness and peace, loving others, honoring others, and respecting the dignity of every human being, even our enemies. When we glorify God in those ways, then the hurt that is echoing throughout generations is soothed and lessened as the healing we bring echoes throughout generations as well.
