On Tuesday evening, the sun crosses the equator, and for one day, everywhere on earth, light and dark stand in equal measure. In Miami it will still be ninety degrees. Nobody will need a sweater. And the light will change anyway. The sun will set a little farther south down the street. The farmers in Homestead will start putting tomatoes in the ground. Whether or not you feel it, the year is turning on its hinge.
Human beings have marked this moment for as long as we have been writing things down. The oldest calendars we can read are built around it. But this week I want to tell you about a hill in southeastern Turkey, because it turns out we were marking the turning of the year long before we could write, and long before we could farm.
The hill is called Göbekli Tepe, near the city of Urfa, which local tradition remembers as the birthplace of Abraham. About eleven and a half thousand years ago, people who hunted gazelle and gathered wild grain, people with no farms, no pottery, no metal, no wheel, and no writing, cut limestone pillars eighteen feet tall and weighing up to ten tons, carved them with foxes and scorpions and vultures and cranes, and raised them in great circles on the top of that hill. They did this six thousand years before Stonehenge. Seven thousand years before the pyramids. For most of my life, the textbooks said monuments came after cities, and cities came after farming. Göbekli Tepe says the opposite. First people gathered. Then everything else.
What was it for? The archaeologists who have spent thirty years digging there have found the bones of thousands of animals and enormous stone troughs that may have held the earliest beer anyone ever brewed. This was a place of feasting. People walked for days to reach it, met others they would never otherwise have met, ate together, and built something together that no one family could have built alone. The newest excavations have turned up houses and rainwater cisterns beside the pillars, which means the first monument humans ever raised was also a home. And in 2024, a team from the University of Edinburgh argued that the V-shaped marks carved on one famous pillar are a calendar, three hundred sixty-five of them, twelve lunar months plus eleven days, with the summer solstice marked by a V worn like a necklace around the neck of a bird. Other archaeologists are not convinced, and honest science lives in that argument. But nobody disputes the rest. Before we planted a single seed, we watched the sky, we marked the turning of the year, and we built a place to celebrate it together. The celebration came first. The harvest came later.
That is the whole theology of this month, and I did not have to invent it. Seeds of Transformation has been asking what we are planting. This Sunday, at the equinox, we ask the older question, the Göbekli Tepe question: what has this year grown in you? What ripened, what withered, what came up where you never planted it? Equal light and equal dark is the honest condition for taking stock. And here, where the growing season is only beginning, we get to do both at once: gather what the year has given, and put the next seed in the ground.
So come stand in the equal light. Here is where to find us this week.
Tomorrow, the New Eden Jubilee Market opens its doors again. Come volunteer, or come get fresh food for your family, and bring a neighbor who needs it. No questions asked, and no one turned away.
Tomorrow night at seven, our sanctuary becomes the Lavender Lounge, and this month it is a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration with live performances back on the stage, hosted by our friends at Pridelines and Lost Girls Theatre. Dinner and drinks are free. Nowhere else in Miami will you get a show and a meal on a Saturday night for nothing. RSVP at Pridelines.events/lavender, and bring someone who has never walked through our doors.
Sunday morning, we gather for Seeds of Transformation: Harvest, our equinox service. Bring your whole account. All of it belongs.
The Sunday after, September 27, we close the series with Stone Soup. Bring one ingredient from your kitchen that belongs in a pot. There will be two pots on the fire this year, one vegan and one made with chicken stock, so everyone eats. The soup will be our lunch and our celebration.
And save the date for October 4, the feast day of Francis, who preached to the birds. That morning we hold our first annual Pet Blessing, so bring your dog, your cat, your lizard, or a photo of the animal who cannot make the trip. It is also the first Sunday of Popcorn Theology, and Andie Arthur will open the series with the theology of The Muppet Movie, “Radicalized by the Rainbow Connection.” Kermit once described his dream as singing and dancing and making people happy, “a dream that gets better the more people you share it with,” and said that finding friends who shared it made them something like a family. If that is not a description of this congregation, I do not know what is.
Eleven and a half thousand years ago, people walked for days to stand on a hill together and mark the turning of the year. You only have to drive to 76th Avenue. Come on Sunday. The light is changing.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero