It’s 5:47 AM on a Tuesday. Sleep eludes me. Might as well
get up and start the day. I lace my running shoes and
step outside. You know the time of day—the sky caught
between night and daybreak. It’s still too dark to call it
morning, but too much light to call it night. For a moment,
I couldn’t tell if I was watching the sun rise or set. Which
direction is the light moving?
As someone who runs often in the early morning
darkness, I know that disorienting experience quite well. It
captures, I think, something profound about our spiritual
moment. Are we watching faith’s light fade, or are we
witnessing its rebirth?
Twilight. It’s Old English for “two lights,” the collision
between dissipating and emerging illumination. Two lights.
Evening twilight slides steadily toward darkness. Morning
twilight builds gradually toward dawn. A time of ambiguity.
Same sky. Opposite directions.
The prophet Isaiah is writing to a people living in twilight
time. After seventy years in Babylonian exile, they have
returned to find their homeland shattered beyond
recognition. Their temple lies in rubble, their traditions have
been obliterated, and their identity as God’s people is now
far from certain.
And so, they do what religious people do when the world
collapses. They revive their rituals. They fast. They pray.
They worship. And yet, God feels more distant than ever.
God’s voice more absent. In that twilight, Isaiah the Prophet
delivers a word that cuts like a blade:
Day after day they seek me.
They delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness,
as if they did not forsake the ordinances of their God…
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
Stop there. As if they were a nation that practiced
righteousness. The prophet does not call his people
wicked. He’s calling them actors. They are performing
piety while the script of their lives tells another story. They
fast while neighbors go hungry. They pray but ignore the
poor. They worship while the vulnerable suffer in silence.
Religious theater that abandons the commands that make
their faith real.
Here is the uncomfortable truth. We live in our own spiritual
twilight. It’s the dissonance between ritual and reality that
plagues the Christian movement. Sharing Bible verses
while ignoring scripture’s persistent call to justice and
compassion. Speaking eloquently of our personal faith
journey while remaining silent about the way our faith is
being misused and abused. Carefully curating a pristine
spiritual image while unmoved by the suffering we see
each day. Like our ancestors, we have perfected the art of
religious performance while those created in God’s image
are in pain.
And Isaiah will not let us off easy. That’s not in the prophet’s
job description. No, he traces twilight to its dimmest
destination: the depth of night when faith is drained of
meaning and God ceases to listen.
You cannot fast as you do now and expect your voice to
be heard.
This is spiritual midnight. When prayers bounce off the
ceiling because they were never intended to change our
lives. When worship echoes in emptiness because it does
not reach heaven because it costs us nothing. When
religious expression is just another disguise for political tribe.
Faith asks nothing of us.
The prophet charts a different course. There is another way.
It is the way of costly discipleship.
There are some moments that shape a pastor’s heart, and
some of you have heard this one before. Twenty years ago,
I slipped into the last pew of Duke Chapel to hear Bishop
Peter Storey speak to the graduating class of Duke Divinity
School. Bishop Storey was a leader in the faith-based
struggle against Apartheid in South Africa and chaplain
to Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. Peter Storey knows
about costly discipleship. I, on the other hand, was a
twenty-two-year-old contemplating my life’s path. That day,
I grabbed a pencil from the pew rack and wrote his words,
now inscribed on my heart. Bishop Storey said:
Until you lead your congregation to engage with the real
world, your pastoring will be mere pampering—your
proclamation will be a religious form of talking to yourself. You
must resist with all your might the temptation to play “church”
while the world bleeds.
The phrase still haunts me. A temptation for every
generation of believers. Religious ritual absent worldly
impact. My friends, listen. Attending church weekly, quoting
scripture online, parading your faith in public, means
nothing if at the same time you applaud the harassment
of the homeless, or celebrate policies that leave children
without meals and neighbors without shelter, or justify
cruelty toward those who need compassion the most.
Worship that neglects the hungry, the poor, the stranger,
the outcast the exile, the captive—any who are bent under
heavy yokes—is not worship at all. It is spiritual midnight.
And yet. As soon as we name that darkness, we also
acknowledge what every soul who has walked through long
nights discovers: that midnight is not the end. In fact, the
deepest darkness often signals dawn stirring just beyond
the horizon. And when it comes, when it finally comes, it
does not announce itself in gentle whisper. Dawn breaks.
Is not this the fast that I choose? To loose the bonds of
injustice, to let the oppressed go free, to share bread
with the hungry, to bring the poor into your house?
Listen to Isaiah’s verbs. Feel their force against the
status quo. Loose. Let go. Share. Bring. These aren’t
suggestions for charitable contributions. These are acts
of prophetic power—the kinds of verbs that break chains,
and shatter yokes, and tear down barriers between
comfortable and crushed.
You might know that Isaiah’s language here echoes the
stories of binding and captivity in Hebrew scripture, the
stories of Isaiah’s ancestors. The yokes that bent their
backs, the cords that tied down their lives, the chains that
restricted their freedom in slavery and exile. And now
God calls the exiled to become the liberators—the chain-
breakers, the yoke-shatterers.
Next comes the promise that should terrify as much as
it delights:
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn.
Your light. Not the flicker of a dying candle. Not the glow
of a nightlight tucked safely in the corner. Your light will
break forth like dawn itself—that unstoppable, inevitable
blinding in its exposure of everything we’ve tried to keep
hidden in the darkness.
But here’s what we need to understand about the dawn:
it doesn’t just illuminate. It also reveals. Dawn exposes
everything—the corruption of faith weaponized for power,
the wounds we ignore in our neighbors, and the truth
we’ve hidden from ourselves. Dawn people see clearly and
respond faithfully.
And so, Isaiah’s promise expands:
Your ancient ruins will be rebuilt; you will raise up
foundations for coming generations; you will be
repairers of the breach, restorers of streets to live in.
Do you hear what God is calling us to become? Not those
who maintain religious routine while suffering spirals,
but dawn-people who repair what is broken. The work
is everywhere: economic structures that trap families in
poverty, political rhetoric that demonizes the vulnerable,
religious leaders who posture purely for power.
What if churches stopped playing it safe in the twilight and
became what the world desperately needs—communities
of people who fix what’s broken and rebuild what has been
torn down? You see, the dawn Isaiah describes is not a
miracle that we beg God to perform. It’s the power made
possible when we stop performing religion, when our
prayers shape practice, our worship becomes work, and our
fasting frees us to fight for those on the margin.
I’ll tell you what dawn-breaking faith looks like right here
in our community. A couple of weeks ago, I witnessed
the ribbon-cutting for the Mosaic Center. This is a career
training and coaching hub for people building careers in
healthcare, often those who have very few skills, training,
or education at the beginning of their journey with Mosaic.
Mosaic provides hope for those who need support and
serves as a powerful partner in Second’s work in our city.
Shadreck Kamwendo, Mosaic’s Director for Workforce
Development and an elder in this congregation, embodies
what happens when worship fuels work, when faith moves
from praise to practice. Shadreck’s commitment to the
common good flows directly from the strength he finds
here in this sanctuary.
Isaiah’s closing promise is breathtaking in its beauty and
its gravity.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am.
Here I am. The words are familiar. The reply of Moses to
the burning bush. Here I am. The answer that led Isaiah
himself to a prophetic career. Here I am. Send me. The
response of young Samuel to the voice of God calling
his name in the middle of the night. Here I am. Mary’s
reception of God’s greatest gift. Here I am. Let it be with me
according to your word.
Here I am is the language of call and response. But here,
God responds to our cry for help. It is the light of dawn.
It is the light of resurrection. The light that exposes and
transforms everything it touches. When God declares:
Here I am.
So. Here we are. 5:47 AM, caught between competing lights.
Two lights. A decision to make. A direction to choose. Are
we witnessing faith’s final slide into irrelevant obsolescence,
or are we standing in those unsettling moments just before
the light breaks?
I’ll tell you what I believe. I believe dawn is breaking.
You can feel it when injustice makes your heart race. You
can sense it when inequality provokes holy anger. You
can witness it in congregations mobilized for action. You
can recognize it when someone else’s suffering becomes
unbearable to your soul. That’s what it means to be human.
When someone else’s suffering becomes unbearable to you.
Dawn is breaking. What will it reveal? Will we play church?
Will we settle for religious performance? Or will we let God’s
light shine? Will we walk in the way of Jesus? Will we let
our Christian conviction (and nothing less) be the light that
guides us, so that Sunday worship becomes Monday action,
faith moves from the sanctuary to the street, and our prayers
become our practice?
Friends, the dawn is breaking. God is waiting. The world is
watching. Stop playing church. Let’s live in the light. Amen.