FYI - Oct-23-2019.
Background: Openacs using letsencrypt has been working very successfully with certs renewing every 90 days.
The only changes to my environment have been Ubuntu patches. I am not sure what stopped letsencrypt from automatically updating for the month of October.
Letsencryt auto updates worked for the months of April and and July.
Here is my fix.
as user letsencrypt, cd /home/certs/hostname
This is where the pem files are located.
cp ./fullchain.pem server.pem
cat privkey.pem >> server.pem
chown letsencrypt:letsencrypt server.pem
Stopped/started nsd
Everything works. Posted to help others.