New Year Sermon

The Mercy That Meets Every Morning

A Homily For The New Year

We come to the threshold of a new year carrying two things at once: the weight of what lies behind us and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. Both are real. Both deserve honest attention. And it is precisely here, at this hinge between one year and the next, that the Scriptures we have heard this morning speak with uncommon clarity and grace.

The lectionary does not ask us to pretend. It does not hand us a tidy resolution or a cheerful slogan. Instead it sets before us two very different voices from two very different moments in sacred history, and asks us to listen to both. One is the voice of Jeremiah, sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem, writing the book we call Lamentations. The other is the voice of Paul, writing from a prison cell to a congregation he loves. What is remarkable is that both of these voices, shaped by suffering and honest about it, arrive at the same place: a trust in God that refuses to be paralyzed by the past and refuses to be terrified of the future.

That is the word this homily offers at the turn of the year. Not a promise of smooth sailing. Not a guarantee of personal prosperity. But something older and more durable than either: the mercy of God that is new every morning, and the call to press forward in Christ.

Lamentations 3:21-24

Let us begin with Lamentations, because it is the harder text, and because the New Year is often harder than we admit.

Lamentations is not a comfortable book. It is a collection of poems written in the aftermath of catastrophe, the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, the exile of God's people. The author, traditionally associated with the prophet Jeremiah, does not soften the grief. He describes it with searing honesty. He says in the verses just before our passage that he has been driven into darkness, that his strength is gone, that he has forgotten what prosperity is.

And then, in the middle of that darkness, something shifts. Not the circumstances. The city is still in ruins. The exile has not ended. But something shifts in the writer's attention, and he names it with one of the most important words in the passage: "Yet I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope."

"Yet I call this to mind." This is a deliberate act of memory. The writer chooses to remember something specific, not a feeling, not a vague optimism, but a theological conviction rooted in the character of God. He remembers the steadfast love of the Lord, what the Hebrew calls hesed, a word that carries the weight of covenant faithfulness, loyal love, mercy that does not abandon.

"Because of the Lord's faithful love we do not perish, for his mercies never end. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness!" (Lamentations 3:22-23, CSB)

This is not wishful thinking. This is not a refusal to face reality. This is a man in ruins choosing to anchor his hope in the character of the God who made a covenant with his people and has not broken it. The mercies are new every morning. Not the circumstances. Not the feelings. The mercies.

And then comes the confession that holds everything together: "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him." (Lamentations 3:24, CSB)

The Lord is my portion. In the ancient world, a portion was your inheritance, your share, the ground you stood on. The writer is saying that when everything else has been stripped away, when the city is gone and the temple is ash and the future is uncertain, the ground he stands on is God himself. Not God's gifts. Not God's blessings. God. And because God is faithful, because his mercies are genuinely new every morning, hope is not naive. Hope is the most honest response available.

This is the word for those of us who come to the new year carrying grief, or loss, or a year that was harder than we expected. The text does not ask you to pretend it was easy. It asks you to call something to mind: the faithfulness of the God who has not let you perish, who has sustained you through what you thought might undo you, whose mercies have been new every morning even on the mornings you did not notice them.

Philippians 3:12-14

Now we turn to Paul, and the tone shifts from lament to urgency, though the underlying conviction is the same.

Paul is writing to the church at Philippi from prison. He has already told them in this letter that he has learned contentment in all circumstances, that he counts everything he once valued as loss compared to knowing Christ. And now, in our passage, he turns to the question of how a person actually moves forward in the life of faith when the past is complicated and the future is uncertain.

He begins with a striking admission: "Not that I have already reached the goal or am already fully mature, but I make every effort to take hold of it because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus." (Philippians 3:12, CSB)

Paul does not claim to have arrived. He does not present himself as a finished product. He is, by his own account, still in the middle of the journey, still pressing toward something he has not yet fully grasped. And the reason he presses forward is not his own ambition or discipline alone. It is because Christ has already taken hold of him. The initiative belongs to God. Paul's striving is a response to grace, not a substitute for it.

Then comes the passage that has shaped Christian thinking about the past for two thousand years: "Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God's heavenly call in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 3:13-14, CSB)

One thing I do. Not many things. One thing. Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead.

Now we must be careful here, because Paul is not counseling spiritual amnesia. He is not saying that the past does not matter, or that we should pretend our failures and wounds never happened. He himself, in this very letter, has rehearsed his own past in some detail. What he means by forgetting is something more precise: he refuses to let the past determine his posture toward the future. He refuses to be so defined by what he has done or what has been done to him that he cannot move forward in Christ.

There is a particular kind of bondage that comes from living in the past. Some of us are held captive by our failures, convinced that what we have done disqualifies us from what God might still do in and through us. Some of us are held captive by our wounds, unable to imagine a future that is not simply a continuation of our pain. Some of us are held captive by our successes, always measuring the present against a former glory that we are trying to recapture.

Paul says: release it. Not because it did not happen. Not because it did not matter. But because Christ has taken hold of you, and Christ is pressing forward, and you are called to press forward with him.

The goal Paul names is the prize of God's heavenly call in Christ Jesus. This is the language of a race, and the prize is not earthly reward but the fullness of life in Christ, the resurrection, the completion of what God has begun. Paul is oriented toward that completion, and it frees him from being paralyzed by what lies behind.

The Central Claim

Here is what these two passages, taken together, offer us at the turn of the year.

We are not asked to pretend the past was painless. We are not promised that the future will be easy. We are invited to do two things that belong together: to remember the mercy of God that has sustained us, and to release our grip on whatever in the past is holding us back, trusting that the same God who has been faithful is the God who goes before us.

The mercy is not new every year. It is new every morning. That means it was new yesterday, and it will be new tomorrow, and it is new today. The faithfulness of God is not a seasonal offering. It is the daily ground on which the life of faith is lived.

And the pressing forward that Paul describes is not a self-improvement project. It is a response to grace. Christ has taken hold of us. We press forward because we have been grasped by someone who knows the way.

Practical Invitation

As you enter this new year, I want to offer you three invitations drawn directly from these texts.

First, take time to remember. Before you make plans or resolutions, sit quietly and call to mind the ways God's mercy has sustained you in the year that has ended. Not to sentimentalize it, but to anchor your hope in something true.

Second, name what you are carrying from the past that needs to be released. This is not always easy, and it is rarely instantaneous. But Paul's word is a genuine invitation: you do not have to drag every old weight into the new year. Bring it to prayer. Bring it to the Table. Let the grace that meets you here begin the work of loosening what has held you.

Third, orient yourself toward Christ rather than toward outcomes. Paul does not say he is pressing toward a better year or a more successful ministry. He is pressing toward Christ. When Christ is the goal, the journey is possible even when the circumstances are difficult.

A Closing Word

In a few moments we will come to the Table, and we will do what the church has always done: we will remember. We will take bread and cup and call to mind the body broken and the blood poured out, the mercy of God made flesh and given for us. And in that remembering, we will be nourished for the journey ahead.

The year before us is unknown to us. It is not unknown to God. His mercies will be new every morning of it. His call in Christ Jesus will be the prize worth pressing toward. And the faithfulness that has brought you to this day is the faithfulness that will meet you in every day to come.

Go forward, then, not in certainty about circumstances, but in confidence in the One who holds you. That is enough. That has always been enough.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017. Philippians 3:12-14 and Lamentations 3:21-24.

The Book of Common Prayer. Church Publishing, 1979. Collects for the New Year and the Daily Office.

F. B. Huey Jr. Jeremiah, Lamentations. The New American Commentary, vol. 16. Broadman and Holman, 1993.

Gordon D. Fee. Paul's Letter to the Philippians. The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 1995.

Richard Hooker. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Everyman's Library edition. Dent, 1907. Book V, on the nature of grace and the sacramental life.