HomeEach year at the winter solstice the earth shifts towards the sun and the days are filled with growing light. Human beings have always seen this as a sign of hope.
READING
“Chorus for the Turning of the Year,” David C. Meyer
A tincture of dark spreads through the winter light.
Light, weak as water slipping down
a riffle into the swallowing sea; light,
thin as an onion skin, and the dark seeping
through it like December, long of night,
long of tooth, gnawing us one by one
out of sight.
In the desert the night arrives
with cold, and wind, and the swift clittering scurry
of thin, leathery feet across the sand.
In the North, in the woods, dark even in moonlight,
they flit across the grainy snow, and owls,
silent as air, fluffed against the cold,
cruise and stoop as if stealth were not
a habit of their genes, but life itself.
Think, a thousand years ago, or two,
or ten, our eyes made of metaphor,
and the light dwindling away into a hush
too much like death, the cold creeping into
caves and cabins and tents, the gods,
whatever gods were ours, turning their torches
away from our faces, changing our eyes to ice,
our eyes eager to see the light and know,
eager to find a warming in the weary
world as the heat leaches from its body,
our mother, the earth. How are we to live?
So we take up boughs and hang their green from rafters
and roof-trees and lintels; we drag pines and junipers,
berries clustered in their hands, into our homes
of cold timber and stone; we roll logs
thick as cattle into our hearths, mumbling
all the time of Mithras or Odin; hunched
in tents of skin in desert or on steppe
we line candles in a row and kindle fire
night by night to bring us back to light,
little by little, reminding us of warmth,
of the time when earth was green and beasts
were fat, and sunlight lasted through the day,
the whole day. We stoke the Yule log, light
our candles in a row, we huddle close
beneath the pungent boughs, and tell each other
tales to keep us wakeful through the night,
tending the fire, striking another light.
SERMON
{NOTE: this sermon was delivered in two versions. Due to time constraints at the 9:30 service, the Closing Reading was eliminated. At the 11:15 service, the Closing Reading was used, but the section on black holes was deleted.}
Good Morning!
Yesterday was the Winter Solstice in our hemisphere. It was the day of longest darkness and shortest light. There were slightly more than nine hours of daylight out of a day of twenty four hours.
Today was just a little bit longer.
In those parts of the where the fact of the waning and then waxing of the sun was evident, it always had a major impact upon religious thinking and rituals of human beings.
Autumn represented the entry into a time of darkness. When the number of the hours of darkness becomes longer each day, we begin to notice the impact of them on ourselves and the world. What we cannot see tends to frighten us. What we cannot see is unknown, and what is unknown is frightening. We begin to fill the darkness with glowing eyes, scary beings and other kinds of dangers. Our imagination populates the darkness with evil. And as darkness lengthens upon the earth, the cold increases. And plants die; the earth yields fewer crops and food, and sometimes yields none of these at all. People’s very existence is threatened.
And then, in the midst of dark and cold, the sun would miraculously pause on the horizon, dipping no lower. It would begin, each day, to rise a little higher in the sky and to shine on the earth a little longer each day, and light and warmth would begin to return to the land.
In earliest times there would have been genuine fear that the sun would go away and never return. By the time of ancient Babylon and Egypt, three thousand years ago or more, people knew the sun would return. Their priests and astrologers had long before tracked the path and timing of the apparent rotation of the sun and stars. There was no more fear of the sun disappearing at the end of the year than there was of the moon disappearing at the end of each month. Still, the sun’s return was a time of celebration and festival as it marked the beginning of the return of life to the earth. Not that the plants had yet started to leaf out but--like castaways seeing a sail on the horizon—ancient people knew that the longer number of hours of daylight promised, even guaranteed, the help was near and that new life that was to come. There are, of course, some plants that do not fade and die during the winter, and these were—and are--often seen as sacred or holy plants. So fir and balsam, holly and mistletoe, by retaining their green throughout the winter were viewed as not only promises of the eternal return of the sun, but also, in time, as promises of the eternal life of the spirit of each individual.
People create and relate stories to explain strange events, and the fact of the sun’s return inspired many such stories.
One of these is the story of the goddess Inanna, or Ishtar, and her husband Dumuzi or Tammuz. Inanna is the goddess of love and sexuality. She goes into the underworld where her sister Ereshkigal rules, apparently to take over the rule of the Netherworld for herself, and possibly to free the dead from death. Ereshkigal causes Inanna to die. Because she has died, all procreation on earth ceases; that is, winter descends. After three days in the netherworld, her attendants seek to free her from death. Another god sends two beings, called The Food of Life and The Water of Life, into the underworld and they free Inanna. They sprinkle themselves on those in the Netherworld, including her. So, is Inanna a failed conqueror of the realm of the dead and a failed savior of the dead, or does the sprinkling of the food of life and the water of life indicate that she actually succeeded and that the dead in some way were brought life? The worship of Inanna under the name Ishtar or Astarte was common throughout the Roman Empire at the time the stories of Jesus were being written down. We can hear echoes of the story of Inanna in the later story of Jesus: he dies, enters the tomb for three days during which time he descends into hell to free the souls trapped there; he then returns to life and in doing so overthrows the rule of Satan, king of the underworld and of this. Did later Christian theology and imagery, as stated in the creeds, intentionally propose that Jesus had succeeded where Inanna had failed? Inanna returns to the world but with a special requirement: she must find a replacement in death for herself. After thinking about a variety of substitutes, she discovers that her husband Dumuzi, the god of vegetation, rather then mourning for the loss of her following her death, has been celebrating with wine, women and song. She decides that he is a good candidate to take her place in death. Now Dumuzi does not wish for this fate and after a lengthy adventure, he cuts a deal with Inanna’s sister Ereshkigal, whereby he need only spend half the year in the netherworld. Thus, we have winter and spring.
The birth day of Dumuzi is said to be the winter solstice, and he is said to have come into being by leaping up from the stump of a cut down fir tree—the sacred evergreen, you see; the Tree of Life.
The returning light of the sun at this time of year represents the coming return of the power of vegetation, of procreation, of sexuality, of new birth; it promises the return of spring. Because of that, because crops will grow and lambs will be born, the return of the sun promises survival. And so in many cultures there have been celebrations of the sun’s return often characterized as a form of salvation. We are saved by the god of the sun or by the god that is the sun. And the Winter Solstice was celebrated as the birthday of the sun. James Frazer describes a solar birthday celebration in this way:
“In the Julian calendar the twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt was remarkable. The celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at midnight they issued with a loud cry, ‘The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!’ The Egyptians even represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers.” That from Frazer.
One can sense here just how much the Biblical stories of the birth of Jesus owe to previous solstice celebrations. In some ways it is merely a recasting of the old mythology in a form that people of its day found had more resonance for them.
The God born on the winter solstice was often the god either of vegetation or of the sun. In either case, light was one of the qualities or characteristics connected to him.
Light in the darkness is a major symbol salvation of all kinds in many of the world’s religions. It represents physical survival; it represents hope in the midst of despair, it represents rebirth in our spiritual lives. And that symbolism is transferred to other kinds of lights, lamps and candles for example. These are, after all, miniature suns, and in the midst of darkness of any kind, one tiny light, even the smallest spark, has the potential to relight the world. So every small light is a promise of new hope, and the lighting of even the weakest candle is a sign of hope in the midst of hopelessness and helplessness.
This idea was applied by people in many cultures to the world in general at the winter solstice, and it is applied to human beings and their everyday lives.
The birth of the sun is, of course, an annual rebirth following death conceived of as either real or feared. In the death and resurrection stories of the sun and of gods and goddesses, the descent into death and the subsequent return from death to life is seen as an archetype of the human future. All human beings must face death; the point of the resurrection stories being that even in death there is the possibility of hope. Whether through rebirth, transmigration of souls or resurrection in the kingdom of heaven, the returning sun becomes a symbol of the returning of life for every person. This promise is evident not only in the return of the sun, but then in the return of the vegetation of the world of the food crops, etc. In fact, with crops death was the necessary precursor of new life. The seed planted in the ground dies and in doing so gives birth to a plant that gives hundreds of seeds for food. A miracle.
This mixing of life and death and return from death is still evident around us.
Scientists have recently reported on a binary galaxy in the constellation Serpens. One of the galaxies has a “supermassive” black hole at its center that is spewing forth a stream of energy that is hitting the other galaxy and destroying stars that are part of it. Now there are two things to know about black holes. The first is that a black hole is an object or a something that has an extremely powerful gravitational force, so that it swallows anything that comes close to it, and the gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape. The second thing to know is that it is now believed by some astronomers that there is a black hole in the center of every galaxy; it appears to be a black hole that brings galaxies into being. That would make the black hole in every galaxy, including ours, something like the Titan Cronus from Greek mythology. Cronus knew that one of his children would overthrow him, so he ate each one at its birth. You see, he sired them and then slew them. When Zeus was born Cronus was fooled by his wife who gave him a large stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to eat. Zeus was therefore able to hide and grow into maturity and overthrow Cronus. But the point for today is that the black hole in the center of our galaxy brought the galaxy into being and now sits in the center of it slowly eating it. Life given as a gift by the very thing that then brings death as the payment in return for life.
And one thing to know about this particular black hole is that the ray of energy hitting the other galaxy may cause the formation of a large number of new stars and planets. Death giving rise to new life; and that is the essence of the winter solstice festivals. The sun dies and the earth dies with it, but the sun is reborn bringing new life to the earth.
For most of the earth, of course, the sun does not “die” during the time leading up to the winter solstice. But in northern latitudes it does weaken; it sits lower on the horizon and is present less during this time of year. Still, the birth and resurrection mythology did build up around it.
The message of the returning sun is that no matter how sorrowful our lives, hope exists; no matter how much pain we feel, hope exists; no matter how ill we are, hope exists.
The return of the sun is the metaphorical symbol of rebirth or renewal in this life, of the rebirth of joy and hope. It is a symbol that states no matter how dark the world may seem, no matter how hopeless our lives may seem, there is a shift taking place in the world, indeed, in the universe, that will bring new hope and new life.
Closing Reading
A Winter Solstice Story
by Carol Sampson Rudisill
In the deepest, darkest, depths of winter, when the ground is so icy it crunches under your feet, and the air is so cold every breath hangs as a cloud in a windless sky, when the days get shorter... and shorter... and the darkness is upon you each evening before you're ready, remember....
Remember the stories that have been told and retold, written and rewritten, passed down through the ages by wise women and wise men, from mother to son, from father to daughter....
Remember the stories told in the darkest days of winter....
Remember....
Deep in a cave, on the night of the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, every year since time began, a woman... a goddess... a virgin... labors to bring forth an infant. Attended by the creatures of her realm, she pants, she moans, she may cry out, for childbirth is often difficult. The child she brings forth is special, as all children are. But this child represents the returning sun, this child represents our hopes for renewal, this child represents the promise of Spring. This child answers to many names:
Osiris... Tammuz,,, Adonis... Dionysus... Mithra... Jesus....
This child brings light, and warmth, and hope.
In the deepest, darkest, depths of winter, as we huddle around hearth fires and candle light, we rekindle in each other our abiding faith that the seasons will turn, that the great mother goddess of ten thousand names will once again give birth to the sun, that the days will lengthen, spring will come, and each of us has the power and the magic to nurture the seeds of the future.
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