Second Sunday of Christmas: Jeremiah 31:7-14
There is something sacred about this first Sunday of a new year.
We come with a mixture of wonder and weariness.
We bring hopes we can name and hopes too fragile to speak aloud.
We carry what the last year left behind—joy and gratitude, yes, but also bruises, disappointments, and memories we’re not yet ready to sort.
And today, just steps away from Epiphany, the church’s season of revealing light, we hear this promise from Jeremiah:
“Sing aloud with gladness…
For God will gather and bring them home.”
It is a word meant for people who felt scattered.
A word spoken to a community uncertain of the future.
A word for people standing at the edge of a new season and wondering,
“What will become of us now?”
It is, in other words, a word for us.
Jeremiah 31 begins with an unexpected command:
“Sing… Proclaim… Give praise…”
But the people weren’t in a singing mood.
They were in exile—displaced, disoriented, grieving.
Yet God says:
“Start the year with praise—not because everything is fixed, but because I am already moving toward you.”
Before any resolutions.
Before any improvements.
Before any fresh start we try to manufacture— God gathers us first.
And notice who God gathers:
“The blind and the lame,
the pregnant and the laboring,
a great company, all together.”
God gathers the ones most likely to be left behind.
The slowest, the tired, the uncertain.
God says, “You come too. Especially you.”
This is Epiphany’s first hint:
God’s light does not shine only on the ready.
It shines on the weary, the limping, the overwhelmed—
and calls them home.
And truthfully?
Many of us don’t enter this year ready.
Some of us feel like we are limping into January, not leaping.
I know this in a very personal way.
Because this past year—2025—did not unfold the way I imagined it would.
It was a year of changes I didn’t choose and challenges I didn’t expect.
A year where my body became a battleground I never wanted to fight on.
A year of appointments and scans and treatments.
A year where “strength” looked less like courage and more like showing up anyway.
A year where I learned that faith sometimes means letting other people carry you for a while.
And somehow, in the middle of all that, God was also doing a new thing—
opening a door to a new call, a new job, a new community,
a new season of ministry here at Grace.
It has been strange and beautiful and disorienting to feel myself
both gathered and scattered in the same year.
Some days I felt like one of those exiles Jeremiah described—
uncertain, tired, wondering how to walk forward.
And yet God kept gathering me.
Through doctors and family, through kind prayers,
through unexpected moments of peace,
and through the welcome I received in this congregation.
And as I look back on 2025, I realize something else:
I didn’t just walk through a hard year — I changed through it.
There were days when the diagnosis felt like a shadow that followed me everywhere.
Days when grief came out of nowhere and knocked the breath out of me.
Days when I didn’t want to be brave anymore.
When I didn’t want to learn anything from suffering.
When I didn’t want “perspective” or “growth.”
I wanted normal. I wanted simple. I wanted my life back the way it used to be.
But God didn’t leave me there.
God sat with me.
God gathered me.
God used the hands and hearts of people — including many of you —
to carry me when I could not carry myself.
And in the midst of that long, hard year, God was writing a new story:
calling me to serve at Grace. Calling me to a congregation that knows something about resilience and hope. Calling me to a community that listens deeply, welcomes generously, and holds one another in prayer with tenderness and strength.
It is not lost on me that God brought me here in a year when I felt both broken and rebuilt at the same time.
Maybe God knew I needed a place where I didn’t have to pretend to be strong.
Maybe God knew this church would be a place where healing and calling could grow side by side.
Maybe God knew we needed each other.
And that, too, is part of Jeremiah’s promise:
Even the broken parts of our story can become pathways home.
Jeremiah continues:
“With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back.”
This is a tender detail for the first Sunday of a new year.
Because this is the week many of us are trying to “start fresh.”
We hand ourselves lists — good ones, honest ones:
- This year I’ll lose some weight.
- This year I’ll eat better.
- This year I’ll put my phone down more.
- This year I’ll be more present with family.
- This year I’ll finally get organized.
- This year I’ll stress less and slow down more.
And these are all beautiful hopes.
But sometimes, underneath those resolutions, there’s a quieter ache:
“I want to be better than I was.”
“I’m tired of disappointing myself.”
“I want to feel whole.”
Jeremiah speaks right into that place.
He reminds us: God does not lead us by our perfection. God leads us by our tears.
God is not waiting for the moment when you finally get your act together—
God is already moving toward you in the parts of your life that feel undone.
I learned this last year, too.
There were days I couldn’t be strong.
Days I couldn’t be productive.
Days I couldn’t “fix” anything through effort.
Days when the only prayer I had was, “Lord, help.”
And that was enough.
More than enough.
Because God does not measure our worth by our strength.
God meets us in our vulnerability.
The end of the passage bursts with promise:
- radiance
- watered gardens
- mourning turned to joy
- gladness for sorrow
- a feast of abundance
It is almost extravagant.
And this is important:
Jeremiah paints this vision before the people have returned home.
Before anything has changed externally.
Before they can even imagine joy again.
Which means the promise is not dependent on circumstances.
The promise is rooted in the character of God.
This is not about trying harder.
This is not about making yourself new through sheer willpower.
This is about transformation that begins in God’s heart long before it reaches ours.
So yes, make good goals — healthier rhythms, more presence, better balance.
But Jeremiah invites us to trust that the deepest work God will do in us this year
is bigger and gentler than any resolution can accomplish.
God is shaping a year of abundance — not always ease, but abundance.
A year of growth — not always speed, but depth.
A year of joy — not loud, flashy joy, but joy that roots itself quietly, like a watered garden.
Epiphany reminds us that God’s light does not always show us the whole road — only the next faithful step.
The wise ones followed a star into unfamiliar terrain.
They traveled in the dark, trusting a pinpoint of light.
They walked with questions, with uncertainties, with no guarantee
except that God was drawing them forward.
I think that’s how many of us feel right now.
We stand at the beginning of a year that carries both hope and heaviness.
We do not know what the next twelve months will hold —
what joys will surprise us, what losses will shape us,
what changes will ask something of us.
But this we do know: God never asks us to walk into the unknown alone.
The star that guided the wise ones still shines.
It shines in our questions.
It shines in our fears.
It shines in our longing to reset, renew, begin again.
And maybe that is our calling this year —
not to see everything clearly,
not to perfect ourselves,
not to hit every resolution on the list —
but simply to keep our eyes on the light,
to trust the God who leads gently,
and to follow the small glimmers of hope that appear one step at a time.
For the God who gathered exiles is gathering us.
The God who turned mourning into dancing is turning our sorrow toward joy.
And the God who once sent a star to guide weary travelers
is still guiding us —
into healing, into wholeness,
and into a homecoming we haven’t yet imagined.
Thanks be to God.
