How to Belong to the Holy Remnant – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church and Missions, Burns, Oregon; February 1, 2026

I will leave as a remnant in your midst a people humble and lowly.  The idea of a “holy remnant” plays an important role in Old Testament prophecy, beginning with Isaiah’s son, Shear-Jashub, whose prophetic name means “a remnant shall return.” (cf. Is 7:3) Shear-Jashub accompanied his father when Isaiah went to meet King Ahaz and delivered the famous prophecy, A virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. (Is 7:14)

The holy remnant that returns to the Lord, after the people of Israel have been purified through suffering and exile, is made ready to receive the Messiah. At Jesus’ birth, they are represented by the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Simeon and Anna, and the shepherds of Bethlehem. The remnant of Israel is also found among those who, after passing through the purification of Christ’s death and resurrection, were found gathered in the upper room, with the Apostles and the Blessed Virgin Mary, waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.

The prophet Zephaniah, from whom we have heard today, exhorts the people to seek justice and humility in order to be sheltered from the Lord’s anger.  The remnant, then, refers to those who have been sheltered from the Lord’s anger and so remain after the anger has passed.

The thought of God being angry tends to disturb us today, so it is important that we correctly understand the meaning of Scripture. St. Augustine writes:

“The wrath and rage of the Lord God … should not be understood as a disturbance of the mind, but as a force by which he takes vengeance most righteously, with all creation subjected to him to serve him. Indeed, we must examine and hold fast to what Solomon has written: But you, O Lord of power, judge with calmness, and you set us in order with great awe.” (Exposition on Psalm 2) In a word, the anger of God is the effect of his justice, punishing sin.

The Old Testament thus speaks of war, violence, famine, plague, and all manner of social upheaval as effects of God’s anger, that is to say, as just punishments for human sin. The punishments of sin, in this life, are meant to free us from sin; indeed, we should much prefer these mild effects of God’s “anger” to the wrath of the Lamb, when the one who humbly submitted himself to the unjust judgment of wicked men will appear in glory and exercise just judgment. Of that day, it is written that they shall call to the mountains and the rocks, saying, Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand before it? (Rev 6:16-17)

“Who can stand?” Well, the answer is that the humble and lowly remnant that passes through the merciful purifications of divine justice in this life will be able to stand justified before the judgment seat of Christ when he comes in glory.

Today, we live in times of great uncertainty, rapid change, and social upheaval, all of which provoke much anxiety. That anxiety afflicts Christians and Catholics as well. One response is to seek to belong to the “holy remnant”, to find that group that will somehow pass through the purifications of God’s wrath, the great “chastisement” that some more contemporary seers claim will soon come upon the earth.

Well, to my knowledge, there is only one “group” that has received a promise from Christ himself that the gates of hell will not prevail against it, namely, the Catholic Church under the Pope. As in the time of Noah, there was no salvation outside the ark, so the ancient traditional teaching is that there is no salvation outside the Church. (cf. St. Cyprian, Epistle 75.2) Stay in the boat; do not abandon ship.

Yet the idea of belonging to some group, some identifiable “remnant,” can be rather seductive. There is even a Catholic newspaper with the rather presumptuous title, “The Remnant”. For some, the key to the remnant is the charismatic renewal, for others, the traditional Latin Mass, for others, some private revelation or practice associated with said private revelation (or self-appointed interpreters of private revelations), for others, yet it means identifying with the “poor and lowly”, the preferred group of “victims or oppressed”.

These last might actually seem to be on the right track; these last might seem to be embracing the spirit of the beatitudes, except that they canonize mere material poverty, destitution, and oppression apart from moral character, except that they seem to have forgotten blessed are the meek, as they urge, if not outright violence, at least provocation and subversion.

The words of Zephaniah teach us the moral character of the “remnant”, those who are truly poor in spirit: A people lowly and humble, who shall take refuge in the name of the Lord … they shall do no wrong and shall speak no lies.

They seek the Lord, observe his law, seeking justice and humility.

In the matter of justice, we can think again of the words of the Psalm, exemplified in the Heart of Christ, that characterize the new and eternal covenant in the Blood of Christ: To do your will, O God, is my delight and your law is in my heart. I announced your justice in the vast assembly. (Ps 40[39]:8-9)

True hunger and thirst for righteousness delights not in others getting their just desserts, but in fulfilling God’s law, his will, his justice; hunger and thirst for righteousness delights in these things because God himself is loved above all things.

And humility, which is rooted in truth?

Humility seeks the Lord, not one’s private advantage or personal exaltation. Humility knows one’s absolute dependence upon and need for God. Just as there is love of God and love of neighbor, the latter being dependent on the former, so also there is humility before God and the humility of recognizing and accepting one’s limited place in the human order, established by God, especially one’s limited place in the Body of Christ, which is the Church. Humility is the virtue of being a part of a larger whole.

Yet, perhaps the real heart of the matter is found in the words of St. Paul that we heard today: God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.

Boasting before God is pretty silly if you think about it, but alas, we are capable of such silliness, and worse.

God created all things that exist from no existing thing, from nothing. Therefore, the most fundamental truth of our existence is that from ourselves we are nothing, and all the good that we have comes not from ourselves but from God.

The real “purification” or “chastisement” that produces the lowly and humble remnant is not so much the exterior trials, but the interior purification of the heart brought about by divine grace and the working of the Holy Spirit. This is what leads us to the humility that reduces us to nothing so that God can make us something.

One of the great 20^th century writers of fiction, an American, a Southerner, a Catholic, Flannery O’Connor, wrote a short story “Revelation” in which the main character, a respectable Christian woman suffers an unendurable insult when some punk, liberal girl in a doctor’s waiting room calls her a “an old warthog from hell.” After she returns home, she agonizes over the insult, as she looks at the pigs in her sty, wondering if there might be some truth in the insult, seeking to justify herself in her mind. Her musings end with a sort of vision of a great procession of all sorts of people, whom she would have regarded as riffraff, ascending to heaven, with her own sort, the respectable people, bringing up the rear. “They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they always had been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.” (Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works, pg. 654)

“Even their virtues were being burned away.” Their virtues needed to be burned away because they were “their” virtues, not God’s work.

Christ Jesus became for us wisdom from God, as well as righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.

St. Therese of Lisieux understood this in her oblation to merciful love: “After earth’s exile, I hope to go and enjoy You in the Fatherland, but I do not want to lay up merits for heaven. I want to work for Your Love alone…. In the evening of this life, I shall appear before You with empty hands, for I do not ask You, Lord, to count my works. All our justice is blemished in Your eyes. I wish, then, to be clothed in Your own Justice and to receive from your Love the eternal possession of Yourself.” (Story of a Soul, Appendix, cf. CCC 2011)

We must consent to receive everything from Christ and even the good we think we have needs to be purified – “burned away” – so that we can receive it anew, not as “ours” but as belonging to him.

This requires that we collaborate with the grace of God. Collaborating with divine grace does not mean that we sit still and wait for a voice to tell us, “Do this.” Rather, it means praying, asking God for guidance and help, while promptly doing the good that lies at hand, as the Blessed Virgin Mary promptly went to the aid of her cousin Elizabeth, when she learned of her pregnancy. The word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you can do it. (Dt 30:14)

At the same time, we must continually seek to purify our motivation from all manner of egoism and, since our egoism creeps into our best efforts, we must allow God to purify us by embracing the suffering, contradiction, and humiliation that he sends us.

All this requires great trust in God; trust that his way is the best; trust that whatever we might seem to “lose” in following him will be more than recompensed by his gift, especially the gift of his very self.

When we live in the grace and charity of God, there is merit in what we do, but not because we do it, but because God does it in us. For he works in us both to will and to work according to his good pleasure. (Ph 2:13) The will and the work that has value in the eyes of God is both God’s work in us and our work; we really will and we really work, but the value, the merit, comes from God who has given it to us to will and to work; it is indeed the merit of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in whom we are “clothed” so to speak. That is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.

The Roman Missal contains a phrase that cites St. Augustine, “You are glorified in the assembly of your Holy Ones, for in crowning their merits you are crowning your own gifts.” (Preface I for Saints, citing St. Augustine on Psalm 102)

We can think of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s song of praise: My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has regarded the lowliness of his servant. (Lk 2:46-48)