Sermon for New Year's Eve (2025) : New Year, No Shame

Sermon for New Year's Eve (2025)

New Year’s Eve can carry joy, relief, grief, or simple exhaustion after the

holidays. However we’ve arrived here tonight, the last day of 2025. New Year’s

Eve is often a night full of noise, but the most memorable New Year’s Eve I have

is from five years ago. On New Year’s Eve 2020, Millie and I were browsing

YouTube and came across someone’s video feed from their apartment by the

Castro Theater overlooking Castro Street. The street was dark and empty, except

for a lone man walking his dog. The absurdity that it should be this way—in a

global pandemic, on New Year’s Eve struck us. And yet, we laughed. When 2021

arrived that night, it felt like letting out a collective sigh of relief. That year was

done. We had all come through the darkest days, with continuing death tolls from

Covid, and for a moment brighter days seemed ahead when election results would

be certified on January 6th—or so we thought.

In 153 BCE, the Roman Senate moved the start of the consular year to

January 1. January itself was named for Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings

and transitions—a fitting image for the turning of the year. By 45 BCE, Julius

Caesar’s calendar reform took effect on January 1, cementing it as the beginning

of the civil year in the Roman world. As the Church began shaping the Christmas

cycle in the early medieval period, January 1, eight days after Christmas, came to

be observed as the Octave of the Nativity, and in many places also as the day of

Jesus’ circumcision and naming. Luke tells us: “After eight days had passed, it was

time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus.” This observance did more

than simply mark time. It bore witness to the obedience of Jesus and his parents to

the Law, and in Rome especially it stood as a Christian counter to the revelries of

the Kalends that surrounded the new year. Over time, devotion to the Holy Name

of Jesus deepened in the Western Church. While the Circumcision remained on

January 1 in many calendars, our own Prayer Book tradition keeps this day as the

Feast of the Holy Name. And so we gather tonight on New Year’s Eve, the Eve of

the Holy Name—the last day of 2025

For many of us, even though we’ve all lived through our share of absurd and

troubling moments this year, the close of 2025 feels different. Ecclesiastes reminds

us: “Remember your Creator in your prime, before the days of trouble arrive, and

those years, about which you’ll say, ‘I take no pleasure in these’” (12:1, CEB).

Perhaps that’s why you’ve chosen to come to church on one of the most

celebratory nights of the year — to remember your creator, to remember, as Psalm

95 says, God who is “the strength of our salvation... For the Lord is a great God,”

even in the midst of life’s troubles. Maybe, like the author of Ecclesiastes, you’ve

felt that “Vanity of Vanities! Everything is meaningless!” (12:8, CEB), as this year,

or the arc of your life,has not followed the path you expected, or the path others

expected of you. And when life fails to follow the path we expected, it doesn’t just

unsettle our plans — it begins to unsettle how we see ourselves. When the story of

our lives breaks down, the question quickly becomes not just “Why?” but “Who

am I now — and will I be seen?”

Many this year have had to navigate life carefully or invisibly, making them

all too familiar with the fear of exposure, of not being enough in the eyes of

others, or maybe even not being enough to God. Regardless of how we have

landed at the end of 2025, shame is such a pervasive part of our human condition

and we all know it. Psychologist Brené Brown, whose research focuses on shame,

said in a 2010 TED Talk: “Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It is the

fear that we’re not good enough. It is universal, and it is contagious. If we let it,

shame can keep us from connecting, sharing, or showing up in the world fully.”

Whether current or residual, shame resides in the hidden recesses of our beings —

the space where the capital 'A' Accuser accuses us of who we are before God and

before others. Like Adam and Eve who hid from God in the garden, we hide out of

shame because of the fear of being exposed, of being a sham, a fraud.

Like Adam and Eve, our natural instinct is to conflate shame with guilt. Dr.

Brown explains that guilt is the emotion we feel when we’ve done something bad;

shame is the emotion that makes us feel bad because we are bad. Hear again what

Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians, “...God, who reconciled us to

himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that is, God was

reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them,

and he has given us the message of reconciliation.” In God's incarnation of the

Word made flesh, our human nature has been changed and in Jesus' death and

resurrection, what we have done or left undone has been put far from us and as

Paul reminds us elsewhere there is nothing that will separate us from God's love.

And this is the good news: shame does not tell us the truth about who we are, and

we do not have to carry it alone. This is the good news we are given tonight—not

that our lives are suddenly resolved, but that shame no longer has the authority it

once claimed, and that we are not asked to face it by ourselves. And if that is true

— if reconciliation has already been given — then shame is not something we are

meant to manage or hide, but something that can be named, disentangled, and

brought into the light. Paul draws a clear line for us here. Guilt has to do with what

we have done. Shame tells us who we are. And Paul insists that in Christ, that

verdict has already been overturned.

But this freedom from shame is not meant to remain private or internal. It is

meant to be lived. That is why the author of Hebrews does not call us to greater

self-discipline or inward resolve, but to one another: “Encourage one another

every day, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by

the deceitfulness of sin.” What hardens us is not only wrongdoing, but isolation —

the slow closing off that happens when we believe we must carry everything

alone. Vulnerability, then, is not weakness. It is obedience. It is the way a

reconciled people learn to live as reconciled people. And it is no accident that the

Feast of the Circumcision places vulnerability at the very center of covenant life.

On the eighth day, the Christ-child is named — and that naming comes through

bodily exposure, through risk, through trust. Joseph and Mary carry on faithfully,

not because everything is resolved, but because covenant sometimes looks like

showing up when the path is narrow and the cost is real.

In this way, the answer to shame is not perfection, nor secrecy, nor self-

sufficiency. It is being named by God, and then daring — carefully, faithfully — to

be known by one another.

“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will

be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” That passage from

Revelation, which opens the Daily Office during Christmastide, reminds us that

the God who makes a home with us does not wait for some distant future, but has

already made a home among us in the Word made flesh — a newly named,

vulnerable child.

The God who makes all things new is not creating a world where we must

finally get everything right, but a world where there is nothing left to hide from.

The God who wipes away tears, death, mourning, and pain also wipes away

shame. And when we see one another the way God sees us — when we see

ourselves the way God sees us — there is no hiding in the garden. There is only

being fully known, and fully held.

Revelation tells us, “Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will

be their God and they will be my children.” Living this way — the way of

vulnerability and shared life — is not easy. There are real costs to living truthfully

in this world. But if today is the day of salvation, then today is also the day we

trust that God’s reconciling work is already stronger than the powers that shame

us. In a time when so many of God’s people are being separated and scapegoated,

the gospel calls us not to retreat, but to lean into vulnerability with one another.

Not recklessly, not without care, but with honesty and presence — refusing the old

instinct to hide, and trusting the life Jesus is always drawing us into, out of the

garden and into the City, where nothing is hidden in shame and everything is

perfected in love. Amen.

.

Sources

Roman history — Consular year beginning January 1 (153 BCE); Julian calendar

reform (45 BCE).

See: Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Roman calendar”; “Julian calendar.”