Editor’s Introduction

On the first day of a new civil year, John of Kronstadt puts to his congregation the one question a calendar cannot answer: is anything about us actually new? This short New Year’s sermon, preached in 1899, will not let the turning of the year stand in for the turning of the heart. The renewal he asks after is the daily, unglamorous work of repentance, prayer, and the Eucharist, not a fresh date on the wall.

The homily works like a mirror held up twice. First John weighs the modest gains a year of grace can leave behind (a sharper wariness of sin, a deepened taste for prayer, a truer sense of virtue’s worth) against the same old sins that persist in spite of them. Then, near the close, he turns the mirror on his hearers directly, pressing them with questions borrowed from Paul and the Gospel: do we bear one another’s burdens, are we merciful as the Father is merciful? Characteristically, he insists this renewal has no source outside the Church: heretics, schismatics, and sectarians, he warns, can never reach it. It is a note struck briefly here that recurs at length in his more developed apologetic sermons.