2020 Worship Guide

2020 Worship Guide LINCOLN DAILY NEWS December 2, 2020 Page 9 Christmas and the “U” word I ’m almost afraid to write anything. Before Easter I compared the covid crisis to a storm that would that would come and go and encouraged everyone to “shelter-in-faith” until it blew by. To my credit, I don’t think any of us thought we would be caught in a maelstrom the size and duration of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Does anyone else feel like this season will never end? A better analogy, it seems, would have been to compare Covid-19 not to a storm or even a season, but an age (as in Ice Age). So, you might understand if, with much fear and trembling, I call upon the same words that I wrote about eight or nine months ago – “this, too, shall pass.” We obviously don’t know how or when, but even the glaciers of the Ice Age receded into history. Meanwhile, we press on through the fog of these ‘unprecedented’ days toward equally unprecedented holidays. Don’t you wish you had a dollar for every time you’ve heard the word ‘unprecedented’ in 2020? I suppose that unless you are a centenarian who lived through the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 these are exceptional days in our lifetimes. But the word ‘unprecedented’ indicates something that has never happened before. Sadly, pandemics – along with war, famine, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and other grand-scale calamities – have been around since the day creation fell under the curse of death. Even the oft-ignored Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes affirms, “Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new?” So why don’t we use the ‘u’ word in its proper sense? Let’s apply it to a truly one-of-a-kind happening in history. Like God being born as a human being - not just appearing in some semblance of humanity, but embracing the full measure of human life with all its wonder and frailty. Occupying a womb - risking the painful process of birth. The Power responsible for the construction and maintenance of the universe becoming utterly dependent on the protection and provision of a human mother? That’s never happened before. CONTINUE Pastor Greg Wooten / Hope Chapel Church of the Nazarene