A New Beginning
A New Year’s Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Andrew M. T. Dibb
Lessons: Luke 2:21-33; Genesis 12:1-9; True Christian Religion 89
Now the Lord had said to Abram:
“Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house,
to a land that I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1)
H
uman beings have a remarkable ability: they can look back over time and
forward into the future. The New Year is a time when we particularly
like to do that. We look back over the past year or years and evaluate them.
Then we look forward and try to work out how to avoid the pitfalls of the past
and accomplish new states of satisfaction. In this sermon I want to connect
an event in the past with the promise of the future, partly so that we can
understand our present, and partly so that we can, in the present moment,
prepare for the future.
For many people the most important event of the immediate past was the
celebration of Christmas. For the better part of a month people reorganized
their lives, their homes and their finances to focus on celebrating the Lord’s
advent into this world. But when it is all over, when the visitors go home,
the decorations come down, the church services return to normal, we have
a tendency to put Christmas aside for another 11 months until the next one.
We may forget all about it, except for one other festivity at roughly the
same time: the New Year, when people look ahead to the coming year, often
planning on how to do things differently from the past to achieve goals that
may have been unfulfilled in previous years, to change their habits, and so on.
Like Christmas, these intentions are often filed away in our memories and
forgotten about until the next New Year brings them back to our attention.
The Christmas story often seems very self-contained: the shepherds, after
visiting the infant Lord in Bethlehem, returned “glorifying and praising God
for all the things they had heard and seen, as was told unto them.” (Luke 2:20)
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