1/25/2026 - Epiphany 3 - Joy That Breaks the Yoke
Joy That Breaks the Yoke
I don’t usually choose to bring what is happening in the world directly into my homilies. Not because they don’t shape my preaching — they very much do — I do this because I want us to leave this place fed. You are already carrying so much. You are already receiving the news. The last thing I want is to pile more weight onto bodies that are already tired.
And — my body is full. Full of rage. Full of fear. Full of a bone-deep helplessness.
Renée Good. Alex Pretti. Keith Porter — killed by ICE in the last 25 days. More than thirty people have died in detention facilities across this country. Children — as young as two — are being detained by DHS.
This is not normal.
This is not the country that once taught my body what safety felt like.
And I need to say this out loud, in a place committed to truth: I do not consent to this.
So today, I want to be honest with you. Hope, joy, peace, love, light — this vision of the Kingdom of God, the Beloved Community our faith calls us toward — it feels far away. Not absent, but very distorted.
These readings from Isaiah and Matthew were the readings at my ordination to the priesthood. “Will You Come and Follow Me” was the Gospel hymn that day — earlier this week I asked Bill if we could sing it because it calls us back to our baptismal covenant, and that vow I made. Baptismal Covenant, Ordination vows — they are ultimately about consent: what we choose, again and again, to say yes to. We consent to renounce the wickedness and evil powers of this world; to strive for justice and peace; to proclaim the Good News by word and example; to seek and serve Christ in all persons; to love our neighbors as ourselves; and to respect the dignity of every human being.
Which is why I’m grateful that Isaiah does not rush us to joy this morning.
Isaiah begins by naming land and history.
“Zebulun and Naphtali… Galilee of the nations.”
These places had deep scars and fresh wounds. Borderlands. Militarized zones. The first regions conquered by the Assyrian Empire in the eighth century BCE — treated as expendable, overrun by violence, defined by loss. Isaiah’s first listeners would have heard those names and felt it in their bodies.
Before promise, before light, before hope — Isaiah tells the truth about where the pain lives.
So when Isaiah speaks of darkness, he is not describing inner doubt or spiritual confusion. Darkness is imperial domination — forced labor, heavy taxation, displacement. That is why the images that follow are so concrete: the yoke on the neck, the bar across the shoulders, the rod of the oppressor. Tools laid on bodies. Tools that injure. Tools that kill.
The annoying magic of the scriptures for me is its power to create from the pieces of disaster.
That, the creative act, creates joy.
Over and over again joy is found in making something — a story, a relationship, a memory, a ritual—during and after devastation. Creation itself becomes resistance. Because, when enslaved, traumatized, or marginalized people delight, laugh, love, sing, make, remember beauty, they are quietly defying a world that said they should not survive, much less flourish.
Joy says: You tried to make us disappear. We are still here — and still making. Making a world that claims love and dignity. Making the Beloved Community.
Isaiah does not say joy replaces suffering. It is not abstract.
Isaiah says joy walks with the suffering, it increases when oppression is broken.
Joy is resistance. Joy is the social consequence of liberation.
Matthew knows exactly what he is doing when he opens Jesus’ ministry by quoting this passage.
“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
light has dawned.”
Jesus does not begin in Jerusalem, the religious and political center. Matthew insists he begins in Galilee — the same wounded geography Isaiah named centuries earlier. Matthew is telling us how to read Jesus’ ministry: as God’s light deliberately entering colonized space.
The timing matters too. Jesus begins preaching after John is arrested. The machinery of repression is already active. Rome is tightening its grip. And into that reality, Jesus proclaims, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
This is not optimism. It is confrontation.
Metanoeō, repent, does not mean private guilt or moral self-improvement it is an embodied reorientation—a turning toward a different way of being in the world. Jesus is announcing not a spiritual feeling, but a competing order.
Then Matthew tells us what that order looks like: Jesus heals “every disease and every sickness among the people.”
This is crucial. In the ancient world, illness was inseparable from poverty, labor conditions, and social exclusion. In a colonized economy, bodies absorb the cost of domination first — through exhaustion, injury, hunger, and untreated disease. These healings are not random acts of compassion. They are a direct undoing of empire’s effects on flesh.
Matthew uses the verb therapeuō — from which we get “therapy.” It implies sustained care. Healing here restores people to community, livelihood, and belonging. Joy begins as breath returning to the body.
Toni Morrison helps us name what is at stake. In her Nobel Lecture, she warns that “oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence.” Empire does not only wound bodies; it wounds meaning. It teaches people to expect less from life, from God, from themselves.
And this is the danger if we are not careful: we begin to adapt. We lower our expectations of what is acceptable. We learn the language of “that’s just how it is.” We stop being shocked. We stop grieving. We stop imagining and making alternatives.
Oppressive language trains us to consent without realizing we have consented. It shrinks our moral imagination – until cruelty feels inevitable and suffering feels deserved — or at least unavoidable. And when that happens, empire doesn’t just occupy land; it occupies the soul.
This is how violence sustains itself — not only through laws or weapons, but through a slow dulling of conscience, through silence, through the quiet decision to look away. Morrison is warning us that the greatest risk is not only what is done to them, but what happens to us when we allow our language, our faith, and our hope to be disciplined by fear.
Isaiah counters that violence with prophetic speech. Matthew counters it with embodied restoration. Both insist that naming truth is the first step toward joy.
And then — only then — Jesus calls disciples.
This sequence matters. Healing comes before calling. Joy clears the ground for commitment. When Jesus calls fishermen, he is calling people whose labor is tightly controlled by Rome — licensed, taxed, monitored. Nets are not neutral tools; they represent economic entanglement.
So when they leave their nets, this is not reckless abandonment. It is release. Isaiah’s promise is unfolding: the yoke is breaking.
Matthew closes this section by telling us that crowds follow Jesus from everywhere. Joy multiplies. This fulfills Isaiah’s vision precisely: “You have increased its joy.” Not individual happiness but communal joy. Shared relief. People gathering instead of scattering.
Morrison reminds us that freedom is measured by what it gives life to. Near the end of her lecture, she describes a fragile bird held in human hands—alive or dead depending on how those hands choose to act. Scripture presses the same question: Will power crush life, or sustain it?
Joy, then, is not sentiment. It is evidence.
Evidence that oppression is being undone.
Evidence that bodies matter.
Evidence that God’s reign is not theoretical, but present.
The light has come, Isaiah says.
The kingdom has drawn near, Jesus says.
And where the yoke loosens,
where language gives life instead of death,
where bodies are restored and people gather, joy appears.
Not as escape.
Not as denial.
But as the deep, communal gladness of a people discovering that empire does not get the final word.
Beloveds, may it be so.
Amen.
