Happy New Year – kind-a, sort of, maybe…

Yes, a week ago last Sunday was the first Sunday of the Advent Season and the churches that follow the liturgical calendar moved from Year B to Year C of the lectionary.

Now, I will simply recognize that liturgical calendars and seasons, particularly Advent and Christmas, are not unanimously accepted by those of us in the Reformed and Presbyterian stream.  In fact, the Directory for the Publick Worship of God adopted by the Kirk and Parliament of Scotland in 1645 says in the Appendix “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.” (For more you can check out an interesting article on Christmas , a detailed piece on Holy days in American Presbyterianism, a current series of pieces at Building Old School Churches, or the Wikipedia entry for Christmas. There is also a current piece by Mark Horne making the case that there is Reformed support for celebrating Christmas.)

On a personal note, I appreciate the application of the regulative principle and the fact that there are non-Christian influences and origins of the celebrations of Advent, Christmas and Easter that argue against the celebration of specific Holy days.  However, I also find spiritual focus in the seasons and feasts of the old covenant as applied to the Christian liturgical year and the celebration of special days.  Back to this in a moment.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we have begun a new year in the lectionary which provides weekly scripture passages for worship on the Lord’s Day.  I was reflecting on this because there does seem to be an association between the use of the lectionary and the “DNA” of a particular Presbyterian branch.  But as I reflected on it more and how it impacts our worship it seemed to me that the lectionary has certain benefits, but also certain limitations, in its use.  It seems important to understand each of these and how they impact our community life.  And it should go without saying that it impacts the “true preaching of the word of God.”

In most mainline congregations it seems that the Revised Common Lectionary is the default position.  In a couple of respects this is the “bastion” or “safe” approach.  In one respect it is safe because it guides a congregation through the three-year cycle of scripture readings providing broad, though hardly complete, coverage of the Bible appropriate to the liturgical season. (My friend David Gambrell over at Linen Ephod has a nice summary of each lectionary year.)  It also provides a ready defense for a preacher when a congregant did not like text for that day — all you have to say is “that is the lectionary text for today.”   

The lectionary also provides a “paring” of scripture passages from the three sections and these selections are supposed to relate to each other.  (Sometimes it is tough to see the relationship, other times you can probably think of a better pairing.) Some preachers will include two or more readings and then expound on all of them in the sermon, some will only chose one to preach on.  In the lectionary there is also the annual rhythm in the reading that takes us through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ and “tells us the story” repeated every year.  And I am told that by having congregations use a common lectionary it gives pastors something to talk about when they get together.

But one of the biggest practical benefits of the lectionary is that it keeps a preacher from falling into the pattern or habit of preaching on what they want to preach on.  In this way the lectionary acts as a “border,” “fence,” or “hedge” around the preaching.  It works as a tool to keep from always hearing a message based on the pastor’s favorite scripture passage or selecting texts that simply provide another avenue for the pastor to once again advocate their favorite theme or message.  In fact, by using the lectionary a conscientious preacher can work the three weekly readings (Old Testament, New Testament and Gospel) into nine years of distinctly different sermons.  (Twelve years worth if you include the weekly Psalm as a unique sermon, but from what I have seen most pastors use the Psalm as a supporting text to the primary text that they preach on.)

Now, to be clear, I don’t have a fundamental objection to a well planned and executed sermon series that is outside the lectionary.  My own church has done a couple of very effective ones including the series last year of preaching through the Lord’s Prayer one phrase at a time.  When properly done this style does have the elements of the “true preaching of the word of God” in my understanding.

Where the “free-form” approach is dangerous is when it is not implemented with any long-term plan or accountability – especially when a pastor just spends the week deciding what to preach on and choosing relevant passages to base it on as they go.  That is, they let the sermon drive the texts that will be used.  One of the best sermons I have ever heard preached at a General Assembly was delivered by the Rev. James Costen titled “The problem of deferred maintenance” and addressed the Great End of the Church of The Maintenance of Divine Worship.  In that sermon he spoke of a variety of sermon that he called “Saturday Night Specials” that he said could be just as deadly as the street firearm variety.  An interim pastor I once had took this to the extreme when we would regularly find him in his office Sunday morning writing out the sermon.  Again, I know of cases where the Holy Spirit has led preachers to completely rewrite their messages at the last moment and I have no problem with that.  But to regularly write the sermon like that I believe does a disservice to the preaching of the word.

So on the one hand the lectionary provides a framework to help pastors preach through scripture in an organized and systematic manner while letting scripture have its way with us rather than the other way around.  But there are limitations on the other side as well.  If you and you preacher have both been there over nine years you might begin hearing the same things again.  Or if the pastor is not systematic you could hear them again in three.  And even with good planning, there will come a point where the cycle begins repeating itself.  You young’uns may not have been through too many cycles but I’ll admit to being old enough to have been through over 15 lectionary cycles (although the Revised Common Lectionary is not as old as I am having a first version in 1983 and the Revised version in 1992).

So the lectionary will still lead to repetition given enough time.  Some may argue that the repetition is good, that it reinforces important passages of scripture.  But instead
of repeating, what if you were to cover passages of scripture that have not been preached on yet – passages that are not included in the lectionary?

I have not found detailed statistics for the Revised Common Lectionary, but there is a great page that gives the statistics for the Roman Lectionary, which the RCL is based upon, concerning how much of the Bible is covered.  It turns out that of the Roman Lectionary covers only 3.7% of the Old Testament of the Catholic Bible and 40.8% of the New Testament.  If you consider the Scripture to Lectionary cross-index for the RCL is quickly becomes apparent that of the 66 books in the Protestant Bible, several (17 by my count) are used only once or twice and 8 are never used — there will be no lectionary reading from I or II Chronicles, Ezra, Nahum, Obadiah, II or III John or Jude.

Now, I’m sure some of you are saying “of course not everything can be covered on Sunday morning, that is what personal Scripture reading is for.”  I do not dispute the importance of regular Bible reading for personal study and I recommend that every Christian have a plan to read or hear the complete Bible in a one or two year cycle.  But my focus is “the true preaching of the word of God.”  Is it a problem that some of the word is never preached if you use the lectionary?  Has the lectionary become a “barrier” to hearing some sections of scripture preached?

It is here that I am beginning to have a appreciation for congregations that instead of using the lectionary make it their practice to systematically preach through individual books of the Bible.  The congregation hears large sections, at least chapter length, read through in sequence from week to week.  And while every single verse is not necessarily touched on in the preaching, a regular, sequential set of sermons allow for the development of the word in the order recorded.

I don’t know how many preachers would consider the lack of coverage of the RCL a problem and that a solution is necessary.  But if you do, here are a couple of different approaches to this.

One is of course multiple services per week.  If the word is preached three times a week (Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday evening) a preacher, or preaching team, could cover three times as much territory.

Another approach is to make the lectionary cycle longer and include everything.  For the 1189 chapters in the Bible that could be covered in 22.8 years if one chapter is covered every Sunday morning.  Preaching multiple chapters per week – either multiple services, larger pieces (two chapters say), or pairing OT and NT passages in a sermon would shorten the cycle.

But here is my modest proposal for an “extended lectionary.”  This would not necessarily be tied to a liturgical year and therefore precise order would not be important.  However, since the Gospels are the heart of the Bible for Christians, I would suggest that one is Gospel is preached in its entirety each calendar year.  That would set up a four year cycle with between 16 and 28 weeks each year in a contiguous block being taken up for the Gospel reading and direct preaching.  Considering the Psalms the worship book of the Bible, I would suggest they be included each week as a second scripture passage that is read or sung by the congregation.  That leaves 941 chapters of Scripture that when preached at one chapter per week, and working around the regular reading and preaching of the Gospels, would take about 34 years to cover.  That is about one generation to cover the preaching of the whole Bible, and then a congregation would start over again.

Well, its an idea anyway.  Do you have a better one to systematically cover the whole Bible?  (And yes, systematic preaching 3 times per week would pull that down to less than a decade to complete the cycle.)

But getting back to the central idea of this commentary, as we start a new lectionary year I simply wanted to review the benefits and the draw-backs of the use of the lectionary.  There is a tension between the order and fence provided by the use of the lectionary that helps to keep us from having our way with the holy word.  On the other hand, this border is narrow and only covers a small part of the Scriptures possibly presenting a barrier to preaching more of God’s word. It raises the question “if we only cover 12.6% of the volume of Scripture in three years cycles and then start over again, is that the ‘true preaching of the word of God’?”