Solstice

Solstice (excerpt at 2:12 min)

This weekend also marks the weekend of solstice, where probably hundreds of thousands of people around the world are marking this day when the Earth is closest to the Sun. There was a time particularly within the Celtic world, and certainly within Aboriginal sacred spaces around the world, that those sacred spaces and those sacred rituals were all connected to the seasons of the Earth or the seasons of the Sun or the seasons of the Moon. I forget who said it, but somebody once said it's only the Christians who took it inside. But here we are outside again, under the sanctuary of Earth and sea and sky, and thinking about this event called solstice, thinking about the longest day of the year, the brightest day of the year, the day of the year with the most sunlight. I'm thinking about those words that Jesus said to his friends, he said, "You are the light of the world."

What's interesting to me, as I remember a colleague of mine a number of years ago who had done all kinds of work with the original Greek text, the New Testament Greek text, and he said, "You know when all of those 'I am' declarations—'I am the bread of life,' 'I'm the light of the world,' 'I am the vine'—that the writers of the Gospels indicate are words from Jesus," he said, "If truth be told, he said, if we are the body of Christ, then those words are also 'I am' words for us."

Yet for how long, for how many seasons did the church not affirm the light within each of us, to the capacity for light within each of us, the capacity within each of us for us to be bread for another, for us to be a cup of blessing for another, for us to be the portal through whom the one whom we call God shines and expresses love and grace and forgiveness, and so I'm inviting you to think about that right now.

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