New Year Homily Stories

When the Israelites finally entered the Promised Land, forty-five years after Moses had first sent scouts to survey it, an 85-year-old man named Caleb walked up to Joshua and made a remarkable claim. "I was forty when Moses sent me," he said. "Now I am eighty-five. But I am as strong today as I was then." He was asking for the hardest portion of the land — the mountains, the fortified cities, the territory of the Anakim. Nobody wanted that section. But Caleb did. At 85. A new year isn't a threat to faith. It's an invitation. The question isn't how old you are; it's whether you're still asking for the mountain.

The oldest New Year blessing in the world may be the one God gave to Moses to pass on to Aaron: "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace." Those words are over three thousand years old. They were spoken in a desert, to a people who had no home yet, who didn't know what the coming year would bring, who had spent forty years learning that the God who fed them yesterday would feed them tomorrow. That is the blessing with which the Church begins every new year. Not a prediction — a promise.

I want to share a story I made up, but please listen. Imagine a woman who writes herself a letter every New Year's Eve — but she doesn't open it until the following December. She writes down what she's afraid of, what she hopes for, what she's asking God for. When she opens the letter a year later, she's always surprised: some fears never came true; some hopes she'd forgotten were quietly answered; some prayers she'd stopped praying had been heard long after she'd gone quiet. — That's not a real woman. But she describes a real practice: at the end of the year, looking back, you can almost always see the hand you didn't notice at the time. The blessing was there. You were just living too fast to see it.