The Gospel of the Turning Season

A Sermon on Letting the Summer Go

Beloved congregation of the curious, the kind, and the reluctant-to-let-summer-end, welcome. The light is different now, isn’t it? It comes a little earlier in the evening, a little more golden, a little more like a goodbye. Before we speak of it, take a breath with me. A slow one. Feel the turn of the season in it.

Something is ending. You can feel it in the air. The long afternoons are getting shorter. The back-to-school ads have started their nagging. And underneath the ordinary busyness, there’s a quiet ache that the season is slipping through our fingers, and there’s nothing we can do to hold it.

Good. Because holding on was never the assignment.

The plant understands this better than we do. It spends all summer growing green and generous, and then, without protest, without grief, it begins to let go. It knows that release is not failure. It knows that the leaf that falls is not a tragedy; it’s the tree keeping a promise it made in spring. Everything that grows must also learn to release, and the plant does it with a grace we spend whole lifetimes trying to learn.

We are not so wise. We clutch. We cling to summers, to versions of ourselves, to relationships and seasons that have quietly finished. We mistake the ending for the enemy. But the turning season has something to teach us, if we’ll slow down long enough to hear it: you cannot receive the next thing with hands that are still gripping the last one.

So let me ask you, as the season turns, what are you ready to let fall?

Maybe it’s a grudge you’ve carried since spring. Maybe it’s a story about yourself that stopped being true a while ago. Maybe it’s just the exhausting belief that you have to hold everything together all the time. Whatever it is, the season is giving you permission. Let it go the way the tree lets go, not with despair, but with trust. Trust that the letting-go is making room. Trust that after every falling comes a fallow rest, and after the rest, always, the green returns.

And be gentle with yourself in the turning. Transitions are tender. The end of summer stirs up old feelings: the wistfulness, the restlessness, the strange grief of good things ending. If you feel it, you’re not broken; you’re paying attention. Light the sacrament, sit with the shifting light, and let yourself feel the bittersweetness all the way through. That, too, is a kind of prayer.

This is what the plant has been trying to tell us all along: nothing is meant to be held forever, and nothing that leaves is truly lost. The summer folds itself into the soil and becomes the ground the next one grows from. So will everything you release. So, someday, will we.

So as the season turns, I offer you this blessing:

May you let go the way the tree does, without grief, without grip.
May you trust the fallow season to do its quiet work.
And may you remember, when the green seems far away, that it has always, always come back.
Pass the peace. Pass the plant. Let it fall.

Amen, and see you in the changing light.