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Page 18
2016 Worship Guide
December 7, 2016
A Lincoln Daily News Publication
hopes up. Whatever you think it is or whatever
it appears to be, it will burn you, just give it
time.
This is why I love the build up to Christmas.
You see, Advent confronts this modern
ideology. It challenges the corrosion of the
heart with the insistence that God has not
abandoned the world.
Advent reminds us that hope is real and
something—someone—is coming.
Advent charges into the temple of cynicism
with a whip of hope, overturning the tables
of despair, driving out the clergy of that jaded
cult, and announcing there’s a new day and it’s
not like the one that came before it.
Instead of screaming at us, Advent whispers in
the dark, “The not yet will be worth it.”
And so, each December, though Advent began
on the last Sunday of November this year, we
enter into a season of waiting, expecting, and
longing.
While we wait, the Spirit meets us in the ache.
We ask God to enter into the deepest places
of cynicism, bitterness, and hardness—those
places where we have stopped believing that
tomorrow will be better than today.
We open up. We soften up. We turn our hearts
in the direction of that day. That day when the
baby cries it’s first cry, and we — surrounded
by shepherds, and angels, and everybody in
between — celebrate that sound in time that
brings our spirits what we’ve been longing
for… belonging and worth.
Advent is the season we prepare for the arrival
of the Christ Child; it’s this assurance and a
promise of God’s goodness coming, not only
once, but also again; in each moment and
everywhere, here and now.
We prepare for the incarnation of God—which
declared, is proclaiming, and will always point
to God’s dream for the world: Love for all,
hatred of none, and a manifestation of love for
God; peace and satisfaction.
I love what a Christian mystic, Meister
Eckhart, once asked, “What good is it that
Christ was born 2,000 years ago if he is not
born now in your heart?”
And so I ask you: How will you participate in
the coming of God’s dream—the coming of
Christ—this year?