Engaging the Bible via a Lectionary
The Old and New Testaments consist of: 66 books, 1189 chapters; more than 31,000 verses! There is no possibility of engaging this collection as a whole. The question is how to arrange it in digestible portions. Tradition is instructive.
Most Christians in the earliest centuries encountered the Bible in the context of corporate worship. The scribal labor to hand-copy documents was expensive; literacy was limited; and most believers were not among the urban elites. There was no easy access to copies of the sacred books, so private Bible reading was rare. When the author of 1 Tim 4:13 wrote, “Until I arrive devote yourself to the reading [of Scripture],” he meant: See that the Bible is read aloud when your churches gather for worship.
Christian corporate worship sprouted in the soil of Second-temple Jewish worship in synagogues and Temple. The first Palestinian Christians were almost all Jews, and the Book of Acts (2:42) remembers Jerusalem followers of Jesus still attending Temple services in addition to the distinctly Christian daily worship in their houses. In various Roman cities Paul’s synagogue-based evangelism produced many Christian converts whose concept of worship had been formed within Judaism.
Reading the Hebrew Bible was a core ingredient of such Jewish worship. While synagogue practice did not develop uniformly in all regions, it seems generally to have been marked by the following features:
1. The text was read aloud. Most worshippers heard it without seeing the text.
2. The selection of passages to be read was tied to the liturgical calendar. A Torah portion and a smaller selection from a Prophetic book (Haphtora) were read each Sabbath. Other readings came to be appointed for holy days.
3. The length of each portion varied from a large paragraph to several chapters.
4. The pattern of readings varied: Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy) was read virtually in its entirety on a one-year or three-year weekly schedule. Only selected excerpts from certain Prophets were read alongside these Torah passages; some books were never read liturgically; and a few shorter books were read through completely (e.g., Ecclesiastes on the Feast of Booths).
It is no surprise that the early Christians continued the Jewish practice of reading Scripture as an important element of their worship assemblies, even though the development of a formal lectionary system probably did not begin until the second century or later. At first, notes were simply added to regular Bible manuscripts to indicate passages to be read in worship. Eventually, such passages were copied out in a separate volume called a “lectionary,” and it is these lectionaries that were actually used by readers in the services. The oldest surviving text of a Christian lectionary dates to the late 400s.
As Resurrection Day, Sunday seems from the beginning to have been the primary occasion for Christian worship, with holy communion, hymns, prayers, instruction, and Scripture reading as the chief elements. By the late 300s, a fuller sacred calendar emerged, supplementing weekly assemblies with two additional seasons of special observance.
First was the celebration of the resurrection of Christ on what became Easter Sunday, pinned to the springtime of the Jewish festival of Passover and Unleavened Bread. The celebration of the birth of Jesus emerged as the second most holy festival. Each of these holy days became expanded—a twelve-day festival of Christmas, and a fifty-day season of Easter. Later, the Church developed a time of special reflection and penitential devotion to prepare for each of these two great occasions: Lent as the prelude to Easter, and Advent as the pathway to Christmas.
What eventually emerged then as the chief cornerstones of the Christian calendar were two clusters of special observances: Advent—Christmas—Epiphany in early winter, followed by Lent—Easter—Pentecost in spring. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus thus provided the framework for the liturgical half-year given to these celebrations. Much of the other half of the year, from early summer to the end of November, is known as “ordinary time” because there are no mountain-top celebrations like Christmas or Easter. During this second half of the liturgical year, the worshipping church thinks about how it should live in response to the divine grace manifested in Jesus Christ, and what should be the shape of its love for God and for one another. Although there have always been some differences, especially between Eastern and Western churches, most churches follow this basic structure of the Christian liturgical year.
Early on, the church confronted two somewhat conflicting ideals for selecting the Bible passages to be read during corporate worship. On the one hand, it was perhaps most natural to read a biblical book continuously all the way through, section by section over a stretch of Sundays. That would make it most understandable; that is how synagogue worship treated the Torah. On the other hand, it seemed equally appropriate to select biblical passages that related directly to the theme of special holy days. Thus, for example, resurrection accounts in the Gospels should be read on Easter, and the birth narratives of Jesus should be read on Christmas. By the time of the 16th century Protestant Reformation, continuous reading in the Western church had largely broken down due to the very large number of saints’ days and other special observances. The great Reformers wanted the integrity of the individual Bible books to be respected by means of more continuous reading. Other changes were made, but most—certainly Luther—did not want to give up the idea of an orderly program of Bible reading in worship. They created new lectionaries for their own churches, also stressing that the Bible readings should be in the native language of the congregation, not Latin.
If we fast-forward to the twentieth century, two groups representing many church bodies, The North American Consultation on Common Texts and The International Consultation on English Texts, worked for over a decade to create a new common Sunday lectionary, called The Revised Common Lectionary, which depended somewhat on an earlier Roman Catholic lectionary. Released in 1992 it has been adopted by most major North American denominations including, with some variations, Roman Catholic churches. (Some Lutheran groups still follow an older one-year lectionary, commonly termed the “Historic Lectionary.”)
Those who do not use any lectionary are mainly those independent Protestant churches who were strongly influenced by the revival movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These large gatherings occurred outside church structures, often on days other than Sundays, and they sought to convert new believers to Christ or to revitalize nominal Christians, mainly through earnest public prayer, heart-felt singing, and passionate preaching. The sermon had central importance. The preacher often read a particular Bible passage, but it was typically short and chosen for its pertinence to the sermon and the perceived needs of the audience.
For Sundays and special celebrations, the Revised Common Lectionary provides an Old Testament reading, a Psalm, a reading from a New Testament Epistle or Revelation, and a Gospel reading. These readings are carefully spread over a three-year pattern. Each year centers on one of the synoptic Gospels. Year A is the year of Matthew, Year B, of Mark, and Year C, of Luke. Portions of John are read each year, especially around Christmas, Lent, and Easter, and also in the year of Mark. (Year A always begins on the first Sunday of Advent in years that can be evenly divided by 3. We are now in year B.)
From the First Sunday of Advent to Pentecost, the Old Testament reading is closely related to the Gospel reading for the day. From the first Sunday after Pentecost to the end of the church year, two alternative sets of readings from the Old Testament are offered: A complementary series in which the Old Testament reading is closely related to the Gospel reading, and a semi-continuous series in which portions of Old Testament books or related books are read sequentially week to week. For holy days, the Old Testament readings, like the New, are selected primarily for their pertinence to the liturgical theme of that occasion. (Note that Vanderbilt Divinity School Library maintains a website that provides many helpful materials about the Revised Common Lectionary: http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/ )
In addition to the warrant provided by Tradition, there are specific benefits provided by systematic oral reading of the Bible as a key part of corporate worship, ordered by something like the Revised Common Lectionary:
1. To read aloud through large portions of the Old and New Testament every three years provides a basic exposure to the most important content of the Bible. In most modern churches, sadly, probably fewer than 15% of the adults who come to worship encounter the text of the Bible in any other setting.
2. The lectionary exposes much of the theological and literary variety of the Old and New Testaments. If divine providence has created and preserved the huge spiritual buffet of the biblical canon, we can be grateful that the lectionary compels us to eat from all the serving plates, not just the desserts and or the dishes we know best. Someone has observed that more heresy is created by distortion than denial of Christian truth. The lectionary helps to minimize the likelihood that one section or theme of the canon will be given an exclusive centrality it does not deserve.
3. It is also no little thing to realize the Christian solidarity that is signaled when millions of Christians from many different denominational traditions read the same biblical texts Sunday to Sunday. There are many things we cannot yet do together in the fractured fellowship of the universal church, but this we can do.
4. Because of its wide usage, many valuable resource materials have been produced based on the Revised Common Lectionary, to assist preachers, worship leaders, and Christian teachers.
5. In churches that commit to the discipline of the lectionary readings, usually the lectionary also frames the duty of the preacher for the day. He or she is not free to cut loose in the pulpit on just any topic; the sermon is to help break open the truth of at least one of the texts for the practical religious life of the congregation. The lectionary thus prevents the pastor or priest from being trapped by biblical inertia or theological prejudice.
However, along with these benefits it is important to acknowledge that devotion to the lectionary also presents some difficulties:
1. The diversity of texts to be read within a given worship service can feel overwhelming. I confess that I often have trouble concentrating on an Old Testament passage, a Psalm, a passage from an Epistle and then a Gospel read in fairly quick succession. My brain gets overloaded. Occasionally I long for a single passage on which I can focus. But I bow to the wisdom of Tradition and do not advocate eliminating multiple readings. Sometimes they cohere quite powerfully, and I realize that on a given Sunday one of the passages may speak to me especially, while a different passage “grabs” my neighbor. I try to listen to all four readings, but I no longer get alarmed if I cannot keep them all in my head. In fact, I give myself permission to be a Bible “surfer.” As four waves of Scripture wash over me, I am content to catch just one and ride it all the way in, giving it all my attention.
This brings to mind a helpful observation by novelist James Collins in the New York Times Book Review recently (“The Plot Escapes Me,” September 19, 2011, p. 27). “I have just realized something terrible about myself,” he writes; “I don’t remember the books I read. . . . Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?” This question got under his skin, so he consulted experts. Dr. Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University informed him that reading a book creates pathways in the brain: “There is a difference between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall the gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks [of the brain]. . . . It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it. . . . You are the sum of it all.”
If something like this is true, then those texts heard week after week, year after year, are subtly burning themselves deep into my soul even though my mind wanders or experiences Bible over-load some Sundays. Perhaps in this respect the Bible is engaging me, rather than the other way around.
2. Is hearing the Bible read aloud better or worse than reading it? Some of us are more aural than visual, some of us not. Even if you are more visual, hearing the text read aloud gives it a more robust impact if it is read well. The sound of a voice enlivening this text surely has a force that eyes merely running along a line of text cannot achieve
However, we have to be very honest here. Some lyrical or vivid passages lend themselves to being heard, but in other passages the opposite is true. An extended theological argument full of abstractions, long subordinate clauses, prose narratives with multiple characters, complicated poetic stanzas–such passages may be difficult to follow just by listening. If sometimes in church I choose to ignore the printed text and let the sheer sound of the text have its way with my brain, it is equally true that there are other times when I need to see the text for full understanding. Happily, it is easy in our era of computers for the service leaflet to print out the full text of the Bible passages that are read aloud. Some churches can project the text on a screen. To see and hear the Bible text gives the fullest opportunity to engage it.
3. For the preacher, if something is gained by the balanced biblical diet provided by the lectionary, it is also true that rigid enslavement to the lectionary can be a pastoral handicap. Occasional crises arise in congregational life when pastoral wisdom dictates ignoring the texts given for the day and speaking to the immediate need, trusting in the broad foundation of the Gospel as a base. Also to be lamented are the far-fetched homiletical contortions by the preacher who feels obligated somehow to drag all four texts of the day explicitly into the sermon. Sometimes there is coherence among those texts that lets them all function in the foreground of one’s sermon. Other times it is quite valid simply to focus on the one or two which best ground the Good News that will be on your lips that day, and leave the other passages for another time. Another difficulty is that lectionary absolutism leaves little room for the helpful sermon series that flourished in an earlier day. While surely none of us longs for a preacher’s freedom to preach every Sunday for three years on the Song of Songs (Such things are attested in church history), it seems unfortunate that the lectionary makes it difficult for a pastor or priest to put together a series of connected sermons on The Ten Commandments or The Apostle’s Creed or some other important Christian theme. The wisest course is probably to make a serious, firm commitment to preach the lectionary and to experience the personal growth of having to wrestle with its many different Scriptural passages. But one should strive also for the pastoral maturity to know when to make a rare departure homiletically from the lectionary.
Despite these difficulties, the church’s long tradition of oral reading of Scripture in worship, arranged according to a carefully developed lectionary, offers much practical wisdom. The investment of so much work to order the reading of the Bible in every worship service helps to enact and preserve the deep bond that exists between the sacred text and the sacred community. The Bible came about as the writings of Jewish and Christian persons who were living their faith in the midst of their worshipping communities of faith. The ability to understand those sacred writings always has been dependent upon the faith and life of those communities. Private Bible reading and study by individuals is a precious undertaking. There are understandings one may never achieve apart from such rigorous private reading. But the Bible belongs in the church and in the synagogue in the most basic sense. Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten has said it eloquently: “Where there is no church, there is no Bible and no need for it. This is why the Bible can only be studied as Holy Scripture within the context of the church. . . . The Bible forms the church, and the church has the Bible. The church is in the Bible and the Bible is in the church . . .” (Principles of Lutheran Theology [1983] p. 22). The lectionary, embodying the long tradition of reading Scripture aloud in worship, helps us to preserve this truth.
The Revised Common Lectionary has its flaws and it limitations. No lectionary system will ever create perfect mix of passages. But it is a brilliant aid for the church’s worship life, and I commend it to you. If you do not now follow a lectionary in your church’s Sunday services, try it for a year. At first it may seem too difficult or the readings to take too much time. It may indeed seem confining. But after you do it faithfully for a year, you will feel on firmer ground theologically, the Bible will start to be a more potent element in your church life, and the power of the Christian liturgical year will texture and stabilize your faith in a way that will bless and delight you.
