Of lections and lectionaries

In the early, early days of my ministry (we won’t talk about how long ago that was right now) one of my greatest struggles had to do with preaching.  That is not unusual for a young preacher – or any preacher.  The particular struggle did not have to do so much with composition or exegesis or delivery.  My struggle was, “Where to start?”  I didn’t have a lot of luck with pulling a text out of the air or cracking the Bible open randomly and selecting a pericope.

My first time or two I turned to the one-year lectionary in The Book of Worship for Church and Home.  This was the (at that time) Methodist Church’s official worship book.  That lectionary was a bit haphazard and had no internal continuity at all.  It was a place to start, but it was a meager place to begin.

A lectionary is a table of either suggested or prescribed scripture readings for each Sunday of the year, plus whatever holy days a particular group might observe.  Typically, there is a reading from the Old Testament, a separate reading from the book of Psalms, an epistle reading and a gospel reading.  At times in history, or in the practice of some communions, the church or a denomination required the reading of one or more of the texts that it assigned to a particular day.  For other groups a lectionary offered suggestions for reading in public worship. (There are other lectionaries, such as the two-year daily lectionary in The Book of Common Prayer, that are meant for private devotional use instead of public worship.)

I attended an event that offered training in a variety of areas for newly-minted preachers.  It presented material on pastoral care and administration and worship among other topics.  When we started to talk about preaching, the presenter gave each participant a small blue booklet that the Consultation on Church Union (the now-defunct COCU) published.  Its title was simply A Lectionary.  The sub-group responsible was the Consultation on Common Texts.  Initially this group sought to establish common versions of liturgical materials (such as Gloria, Creed, Lord’s Prayer, etc.) that COCU members used in common.  Work on these items determined that the fullest use of these elements in an ecumenical setting would require agreement on scripture that surrounded these other worship pieces.  So, COCU developed this first pass at a jointly-employed lectionary.

In 1983 the group finished its work on harmonizing the variants that various churches within the COCU family employed.  The result was The Common Lectionary.  There were a number of revisions of the initial document.  Many had to do with replacing readings from The Apocrypha that many churches were using in the Old Testament Slot.  The Consultation on Common Texts issued a refined version of the lectionary in 1992.  This Revised Common Lectionary reflected several cycles of use.  Subsequently some tweaks have been made, to the point where some publications refer to The New Common Lectionary. But this is an unofficial title.

I’ll look at this some more tomorrow.