A Beginner’s Guide to the Lectionary
I’m a music junkie with an iTunes library regularly pushing the boundaries of my hard drive. To keep me from forgetting albums or songs that might get buried in the clutter, I put together a “smart” playlist that serves as my own personal radio. To keep us from forgetting the stories and passages from the Bible we might forget in the clutter of an information culture, the Church has a similar device. It’s called the lectionary. The lectionary is a discipleship tool for regularly exposing us to the vast depth and width of God’s story in the Bible over time.
The Grand Canyon became the Grand Canyon one drip at a time. In spiritual formation, we become what God is making us to be one drip at a time. We just have to give ourselves to the drip. The lectionary is one of many ways we can submit to the drip.
I first came to appreciate the beauty of the lectionary when, for a season, my wife and I participated in the life of an Anglican Church in Kentucky. Each Sunday, at the opening of the worship, the psalm would be read responsively, a lay leader would read from the Old Testament. Another lay leader would read from the New Testament. And then a deacon would process with the Gospel to the middle of the congregation, and we would all stand as we heard words from Jesus. The whole liturgy utilizing the lectionary was a powerful experience in community.
N.T. Wright offers a great illustration of a house with many rooms. You can be in any of the rooms and look out the window and see the same landscape. But each window gives you a slightly different perspective of the view. Likewise, each portion of the lectionary—the Psalms, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Gospels—offers a view of God, always the same God, but each from a slightly different angle.
What is the lectionary?
The lectionary is a complementary tool with the Christian calendar in our spiritual formation and discipleship. The lectionary is a pattern for reading Scripture. It offers a three-year cycle, with the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke providing the basis of each cycle. Selections from John are read during Eastertide in each year.
The lectionary helps remind us the both the Old and New Testaments are telling one single, coherent story: God is rescuing humanity from sin and death. There are times that the connection between the Old and New Testament readings is evident. And other times it’s not. The most important theme that ties the readings together is that they’re about God.
The lectionary doesn’t read straight through the Bible. It assumes our knowledge of the big picture. The lectionary isn’t about us knowing the Bible better. It’s about us knowing God better. The readings point us to God.
What is the lectionary for?
The lectionary keeps us from forgetting the stories of how God has acted in the world. I had a seminary professor who suggested that when it comes to the Old Testament, the Church has something like Alzheimer’s. We neglect to regularly talk about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and so we forget their stories and we forget that God still encounters us in the same ways. The lectionary is one tool to exercise our “remembering” skills.
The lectionary helps us to value the Old Testament and to see its continuity in the story of Jesus and the story of the Church. There’s a story in the gospels where Jesus climbs a mountain with three of his closest friends. Suddenly, there are Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus. And the disciples hear a voice from heaven saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.”
It’s an incredible story. And one way of reading it teaches us how to read the Bible. The disciples there represent the New Testament. Moses is the Law, and Elijah the Prophets—the two primary sections of the Old Testament. The imperative to listen to Jesus is directed to all three. So the Old Testament Law is invited to listen to Jesus. The Prophets are invited to listen to Jesus. The New Testament listens to Jesus. When we enter Scripture, we’re invited to give ourselves to Jesus.
Using the lectionary in corporate worship life
My background and context is American Protestant evangelicalism where preachers most often plan sermons around thematic topics and series. There are pros and cons both to planning worship around series and around the lectionary. My purpose here isn’t to expound those.
Submitting to the lectionary in corporate worship can help wean us from the individualism in which we’re surrounded in our culture. We’re not picking what we want to hear from the Bible, but submitting to what the Church has decided to hear from God this week.
Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The lectionary has a way of giving us what we need from Scripture that we haven’t yet imagined instead of what we think we want week-to-week. The lectionary gives God the primary voice in our worship services through the pages of Scripture.
There are many ways the lectionary can be adapted into a service. I once used the psalm reading as the opening to our contemporary worship service. The church in which I currently worship reads the Gospel reading each week. With some planning and forethought, various series can be put together tying together the lectionary readings over a season. The Revised Common Lectionary is utilized by many Protestant churches.
Using the lectionary in personal devotional life
One of the biggest obstacles I find that people encounter in making Scripture reading a daily practice is knowing what to read. The lectionary can provide a daily plan. No more randomly skimming about through the pages of your Bible hoping something practical or inspirational catches your eye.
Most simply, the lectionary is a pattern for immersing ourselves in Scripture. In that sense, any “read the Bible in a year” can be a lectionary. The advantage of a common lectionary is its invitation to read Scripture in community. In the lectionary, you’re reading the same Scripture with other Christians all over the world, being formed in the likeness of Jesus alongside each of them. You’re giving yourself to participating in the family life of the Church universal.
In Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson writes, “When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.” The lectionary provides one way in which we begin to see our story in God’s.