2018 Worship Guide

Page 6 2018 Worship Guide LINCOLN DAILY NEWS Wednesday, December 5, 2018 Isn’t the birth of Christ more about God’s faithfulness and promise never to give up on the world and less about whether or not we make Christmas great again? After all, the Incarnation interrupted the narrative that greatness is found and defined by worldly powers. This interruption by God at the nativity of Christ reminds me of a Christmas pageant I was in as a kid. It was a director’s worst nightmare. Joseph forgot his lines. Mary tired of walking around with a football under her dress and threw it out half way through the play. Just as things seemed they couldn’t get any worse, one of the shepherds bumped into the Christmas tree, causing it (along with the manger) to tumble down. As the crowd gasped and the shepherds started to cry, John the Baptist proclaimed, “At least baby Jesus is okay!” Upon the young actor’s proclamation, the crowd erupted into laughter, and the dejected director smiled. Christmas is a time for Christians to use their lives, ministries, and voices to interrupt our culture’s narrative—the one that tells us that presents are better than presence; love is available only to those who enter the world “like everyone else”; and your story is only believable if you look like Santa Claus from the western world. To limit Christmas to anything other than God’s affirmation upon creation’s goodness, the belovedness of human community, and the gift of every living creature, is to deny the true reason for the season—that God is with us, never against us, and always restoring us. Resist getting lost in the details. Disrupt the idea that your way is the only way. Instead, celebrate that God made God’s own self known to us in the messiness of a birth. In the unlikeliest of places to an unlikely family but in a particular time, God gifted the world with Love. This Love would grow up to teach us with Christ’s own life that God is with us. Every time we alleviate the pain of those who are hurting, every time we tend to the needs of those who are despairing, every time we tear down fences and walls to welcome the outcast or stranger, and every time we listen to our own life, we usher in the Reign of God, not unlike Mary and Joseph did some 2,000 years ago. Pastor Adam Quine First Presbyterian Church in Lincoln