These days. one of the questions that comes along when there is a pastoral change is, “Do you follow the lectionary?” The curiosity behind this comes from several concerns. Worship planners and musicians are curious because they want to do planning and embracing of lectionary texts makes it possible to look well ahead in designing the worship experience for a congregation. Sunday School teachers and other small group leaders want to know if they will be able to tie in their lesson or programming material to those things that the church addresses in Sunday worship. Sometimes office people want to know about lectionary usage because they are looking for graphics and other material that they can use in bulletins, newsletters, and church publicity pieces. If a pastor commits to using the lectionary, people with a variety of tasks can look well ahead in gathering resources for their particular concerns.
What is a lectionary?
When the church speaks of “the lectionary,” it is generally referring to The Revised Common Lectionary (RCL). That is the resource that comes to mind, and it is the default meaning when we employ the simple term “lectionary.) But, since so many of our church endeavors refer to the lectionary in one way or another, let’s try to come to a little clarity.
A “lection” (pronounced /ˈlekSHən/) is a scripture reading chosen or assigned for a particular day. So, a lectionary is a table or listing of designated readings from the Bible for a specified period of time. The lectionary usually includes readings for an entire year, but compilers may create certain lists for a particular season such as Advent or Lent. The use of lectionaries is as old as the church itself. In fact, Judaism (as well as other faiths) have used lectionaries for their worship or devotional readings prior to the emergence of Christianity.
A Christian lectionary typically offers a reading from the Old Testament, a Psalm for the day, a reading from the Epistles and a gospel reading for each Sunday of the year. In addition, the lectionary may include lessons for observations that fall on days other than Sunday. Most lectionaries have readings for Ash Wednesday, the days of Holy Week and Ascension Day, for instance. There are denominations in which their own lectionary readings are requirements, while in others – such as the United Methodist Church – the use of these readings is voluntary.
In 1944 The Methodist Church issued The Book of Worship (The Methodist Publishing House, 1944) which included a on-year "Calendar and Lectionary for the Christian Year." This listed two lessons for each Sunday and special day. The first came from either the Old Testament or the Epistles, with the second reading being from the gospels. The 1965 Methodist Book of Worship for Church and Home (Nashville: the Methodist Publishing House, 1965) included a one-year lectionary that contained Old Testament and Gospel readings for each Sunday and special day of the year.
In 1969, in accordance with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church published the document named Ordo Lectionum Missae, a three-year lectionary. This greatly influenced the release in 1974 of a document entitled “A Common Lectionary” by the ecumenical group the Consultation on Church Union. In 1993 the Consultation on Common texts formally issued a new version of the Common Lectionary. Prior to the official distribution of that publication The United Methodist Church included its own adaptation of the RCL in its new Book of Worship (Nashville: the United Methodist publishing House, 1992). The United Methodist version omits readings from The Apocrypha that some denominational include in their sequences. The United Methodist version also modified some texts for the sake of continuity or clarity.
How is a lectionary structured?
The RCL is set up in a three-year cycle of readings. It designates the individual years in the rotation as Years A, B, and C. The years begin in Advent. We are currently in Year B, so the readings for most of 2021 began their progression in Advent of 2020. Year C gets underway on November 28 of 2021 and moves through most of 2022. The next Years B start in Advent of 2024, 2027 and 2030.
For each Sunday and “special day” there is an Old Testament Reading, a Psalter Reading, an Epistle Reading, and a Gospel Reading. In Year A the Old Testament Readings come primarily from the primordial stories concerning the Creation and moving through the Abraham and Isaac readings. The RCL offer a reading from the Psalms as a comment on the first lesson. The Epistle readings run semi-continuously through a portion of the New Testament, but the books that it considers are not sequential. That is to say that a series of readings from Romans will not be followed by selections from First Corinthians. The Gospel readings for Year A come mostly from the Book of Matthew. The Old Testament lessons from Year B concentrate on the David and Solomon narratives. The Gospel for Year B is Mark. In Year C the Old Testament moves through the Elijah/Elisha record, and the Gospel for that year is Luke. The lectionary makes use of the Gospel of John in all three years of the cycle, particularly in the Christmas Season and in Lent.
Even over a three-year period, the RCL omits significant portions of the Bible. To include all of scripture would necessitate either significantly longer lections for each day, or the lectionary would have to run considerably longer than three years. That is why The United Methodist Church designates the readings as “suggested” rather than “mandatory.”
Why use a lectionary?
The advantages to using the RCL are several. First, it offers preachers and worship planners a tool for doing long-range planning, perhaps even over the course of the entire three years. The lectionary provides a methodical way of moving through the Bible instead of a random selection of readings for a given Sunday. The RCL provides a way for multiple planners and leaders to interact while considering the same material. Preachers, liturgists, musicians, and those who work with visuals can be about their work without constant meetings and repetitive communication.
The use of the RCL also compels preachers and others to deal with material that they might not ordinarily consider. I know that I have observed to some people that, left to my own devices and desires, I might well preach 45 Sundays of the year on the Sermon on the Mount. The complex parables or hard sayings of Jesus would be easy to overlook without the encouragement of something like the Revised Common Lectionary.
There is also a spiritual strength in knowing that sister congregations are considering the same texts on Sunday morning as we ourselves study. Then when we meet members of other lectionary-employing churches later in the week, the conversation might well turn to last Sunday’s worship, and our friends might say something like, “You know, we read the exact same thing in our congregation, and here’s what our preacher said…” The RCL allows Sunday School teachers and other group leaders to look ahead, knowing that their lessons can be connected to what will go on in the sanctuary on a given day.
So, those are some of the reasons why I embrace “the lectionary.” Let me be quick to say that it is not a perfect tool, and I diverge from time to time (though I try to let our music people know about those instances in advance). The lectionary is a marvelous tool. But I would day that it is always a servant of our worship, never our master. There are times in the life of a church or community when events and lectionary readings just don’t intersect. Part of the pastoral task is to determine when the use of the lectionary is appropriate and when overriding concerns dictate an alternative.
I would be happy to talk about these things if I have left any stone unturned.
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