If you’d like to join in-person worship at the Nativity, please call the office to pre-register. We continue to maintain 2 meters of distance between different household groups. Masks must be worn properly at all times inside the building. Our 10 o’clock Eucharist will continue to be live-streamed each week.
You can join in worshipping on Sunday, live or later, via YouTube! We’ll continue to offer a welcome at about 9:45, followed by some prelude music. The service will begin at 10 am. The service will be posted to YouTube, and you can use the same link to join in later.
If you’re joining in from afar, keep this order of service handy so you can participate in the service! It has all the responses, the hymn texts, and special prayers you might choose to use while those attending in person receive the eucharist.
Have you ever noticed that the church refers to these first days of the week as “Sundays IN Lent”? Throughout these forty days, it’s always “in”, rather than “of.” Sundays aren’t actually counted as part of the 40 days of Lent! Every Sunday is a sort of mini-Easter: we always celebrate the good news of God’s decisive act in the resurrection of Jesus–bringing us into new life.
On this second Sunday in Lent, we hear in the Hebrew Scriptures of the covenant God makes with Abraham. God promises that Abraham will have innumerable descendants and a homeland for their flourishing (Genesis 15.1–12, 17–18). The gospel story has a warning to Jesus–and a challenging response to both the danger he’s warned about, and God’s desire for a better future (Luke 13.31-35). Sundays and Seasons offers a powerful reminder about God’s hopes for us in their reflection for this Sunday:
Though we sometimes doubt and often resist God’s desire to protect and save us, our God persists. In holy baptism, God’s people have been called and gathered into a God-initiated relationship that will endure. Lent provides the church with a time and a tradition in which to seek God’s face again. Lent provides another occasion to behold the God of our salvation in the face of the Blessed One who “comes in the name of the Lord.”