Text for the Month
'You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden.'
Matthew 5:14
June is here - and with it, the longest days of the year. Even in London, the sun occasionally gets the memo. The city feels different in summer: people spill out onto pavements, parks fill up, strangers smile at each other on the tube (which, let's be honest, is practically a miracle in itself). There is something in the light that lifts us. And Jesus, it turns out, was very interested in light.
Not just as a poetic image, but as a practical description of what his followers are called to be in the world. You are the light of the world - not "you could be" or "you should try to be," but you are. It is a statement of identity before it is a call to action. Jesus is not setting an impossibly high bar; he is telling his disciples something true about who they already are when they are shaped by his love.
This matters enormously right now. It is easy, in a world of polarisation and bad news, to shrink. To keep faith quiet and private. To assume that one small community in London cannot possibly make a dent in the scale of what is wrong. But Jesus does not seem to share that anxiety. He talks about cities on hills and lamps on stands - things that are visible by nature, that illuminate simply by being what they are. Light does not strain. It does not argue. It does not exhaust itself trying to defeat the darkness. It simply shines - and the darkness, as John's Gospel reminds us, cannot overcome it.
So what does it look like for our community to shine? It looks like genuine welcome for people who are used to being overlooked. It looks like conversations across difference, in a city and a world that is increasingly sorting itself into like-minded bubbles. It looks like joy - real, grounded, undefeated joy - that refuses to be extinguished by the weight of the news cycle. And yes, sometimes it looks like a community quiz, a shared meal, a burst of laughter in a room full of people who have found, against all odds, that they belong together.
June invites us to be exactly what Jesus said we already are.
The days are long.
The light is generous.
Go and shine.
Sabrina Gröschel, Chaplain of the German YMCA in London