Lectionary: Reading Scripture Together
Lectionaries:
The Bible Reading Plan of the Church
(Part 3 in Liturgical Church)
How does your church choose what is being preached? Can you remember what the sermon was last week? Last month? Last year?
Do you know how your preacher determines what to preach on? Does it ever seem like they preach on the same passages and avoid difficult texts?
The answers to these questions will vary wildly depending on the congregation and the church. Many times, liturgical churches take advantage of something called a “lectionary.” A lectionary, at its simplest, is a Bible reading plan for corporate worship. That is all that it is. “Lectionary” comes from Latin word that we get “reading “ from and is why we have “lectures.”
A Bible Reading plan for the church
The last article in this series covered the “liturgical year” as a way Christian tell time and organize the year. Through the season of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost and “Ordinary Time”, we retell the stories of Jesus and the Church year after year.
As part of this calendar, many churches utilize a “Lectionary” as a Bible reading plan for the whole church. Lectionaries are typically made up of four readings: a gospel, a psalm, and two “lessons.” Most of the time, these two lessons are an Epistle and a story from the Hebrew Bible though sometimes there are both from the Christian Bible. Lectionaries also may have two options for the lessons during Ordinary time, some are selected topically with the Gospel, and other tracks are selected to read “semi-continuously” so that churches may read through the book of Kings or the book of Acts.
lectionaries are an ancient way of reading scripture together
Lectionaries are nothing new and are not uniquely Christian. In Islam, the entire Qur’an is read during the season of Ramadan and in the Jewish tradition there is a weekly Torah reading that may be a one-year cycle or a three-year cycle for Reform Judaism. The earliest “lectionary” in the Abrahamic tradition dates all the way back to the book of Exodus and Deuteronomy when Moses is given the torah and the Israelites are commanded to read the torah at a certain time every seven years.
Deuteronomy 31:9-13
Moses commanded them, “Every seventh year, in the scheduled year of remission, during the Festival of Booths, when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God at the place that he will choose, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing.
Many believe this to be the “first lectionary” as it is a defined set of scripture being read with a defined date or time. This was just the beginning for God’s people and lectionaries began to take off. You can find more examples of lectionaries in Nehemiah 8:18 and 2 Kings 23:1–3 while they began to be more structured and used for various holidays. By the 1c CE, it seems like a designated schedule of reading the Torah was set up with 54 (one year) or 154 (three years) week cycles accompanied by a second “topical” reading from the Prophets called a haftorah which is Aramaic for "dismissal." Read more here.
Jesus used a lectionary
It is possible that Jesus was following such a system when he read from the scroll of Isaiah in Luke 4.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Jesus then sits down to begin preaching. This form of worship: a cycle of main readings (Torah or Gospel) accompanied by other topical readings (haftorah or Epistles) followed by verbal commentary on those readings (a homily or sermon) set the stage for Rabbinic Judaism and consequently early Christian worship. This is how Christians worshipped. They read the same set of scriptures during part of the year and passed scrolls around during the other half to study a book in more depth (like we do in Ordinary Time).
Lectionaries protect churches from the pastor or priest
Lectionaries have more appeal than just their historical significance and liturgical precedent. Lectionaries protect churches from the whims, personalities and preferences of the preacher. How often have you sat in a sermon and realized no matter the passage or time of the year, a preacher essentially gave the same sermon over and over again? Or, perhaps if they are more varied, the same five or six sermons over and over again. They may preach on the same topics or even the same books!
What is more dangerous than noticing what preachers gravitate towards is not noticing what they avoid. Lectionaries force us to listen to and comment on those hard passages people prefer to ignore. They help congregations become more rounded in their scriptural understanding and cover MORE of the Bible than churches that do not utilize one. The Catholic lectionary (three-year cycle) covers over 70% of the Christian Bible and almost 90% of the Gospels.* The original Book of Common Prayer’s lectionary (1549) covered 87% of the Hebrew Bible and nearly all of the Christian Bible. Modern lectionaries cover less of the Bible today but are less repetitive in the stories told and more thematically based.
Compare this to churches that do not utilize a lectionary wherein a preacher picks a passage and typically only that single passage, usually a few verses, is read during the church service. This approach of preaching and scripture reading is prone to verses being taken out of context, a single “biblical” perspective being presented and an avoidance of difficult passages.
Lectionaries are “biblical”
All in all, lectionaries are Biblical. Oftentimes, you’ll find that all the passages read are rarely discussed or mentioned in the homily at a liturgical church. Part of that reason being we prioritize the “public reading of scripture” which should be the expectation of all churches as seen in 1 Timothy 4.
Command and teach these things. Let no one despise your youth, but set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. Until I arrive, give attention to the public reading of scripture, to exhorting, to teaching.
Churches with a lectionary give more attention to just reading scripture than simply listening to a sermon (though we do those too!).
Lectionaries are biblical because that is how the early church was worshipping before the Bible was finished being written.
Lectionaries are biblical because more diverse scripture and just more scripture is read in churches that utilize a lectionary.
Lectionaries are biblical because they it unite Christians from around the world in the same Scripture (nearly 2 billion Christians will read similar lectionaries every week).
Lastly, Lectionaries are more biblical because they keep us rooted in the story of God and of Jesus as we tell it every year in the Christian Calendar.
If you’d like to learn more about liturgical worship, subscribe to learn more. This is part of a series on Liturgical Churches. Find part one here and see the next article here when it is published.
*This is true counting the Daily and Sunday readings together. Find more here.