“For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” ( 2 Ti 1:6–7) The Lectionary The single most important thing we can do in this life is feed our faith and the faith of our families. If faith is not fed, it will die and if we physically die without faith in Christ, we will go to Hell. So nothing is more important than feeding our faith. The Church has always known his, though it seems as though some denominations think that they can pick and choose what parts of the Bible they want to follow and what parts they can dismiss. We take comfort in the knowledge that even if they only read part of the Bible, the Word of God still does its work of feeding and strengthening faith. The Church knows that faith is never stagnant. It is always growing or dying and in order to be growing, it has to be fed with God’s Word and Sacraments. The question was always, how to feed the people with the Word. In the early days of the Church, pastors began to understand that the purpose of the sermon was not to give a lecture on a Biblical text but to help people make sense of the reality in which they lived by using the Word of God to guide them. That was the beginning of the Church Year and then the lectionary. The Church year followed the life of Christ from Advent 1 through Pentecost and the life of the Church from Holy Trinity through the Last Sunday of the Church Year. But how should we determine what readings from Scripture to hear each week. Some congregations simply read whatever they could get their hands on as Bibles were enormously expensive before the printing press. Usually, the local cathedral had a copy of the Bible but many congregations relied on bits and pieces that were floating around or they borrowed a section of the Bible from the cathedral to read at the Sunday Service. As Scriptures became more available, the Church adopted a system that was similar to services in the synagogue where parts of the torah, the readings and the prophets were read every Saturday. Then they inserted the Epistle and Gospel and combined all the Old Testament readings. All of that is to say that in the LCMS, we have two lectionaries available to us. One is the Three-year Lectionary, which we have used since before I arrived (October 10, 2004). I don’t know if you ever used another lectionary or not. The other is the One-year Lectionary. The difference is that the One-year Lectionary repeats every year where the Three-year Lectionary repeats every three years. The theoretical advantage of the One-year Lectionary is that we become more familiar with the Bible texts since we hear them more frequently. The theoretical disadvantage is that, overall, we hear less of the Bible. So is it a quantity vs. quality question. Another difference is that the One-year Lectionary does a better job of including the Epistle into the Sunday theme. As you can hear, in the Three-year Lectionary, often the Epistle is just part of a continuous reading from the same book week after week. Often it does not tie into the Gospel or the Old Testament. To try something new, beginning in December with the first Sunday of Advent (the beginning of the Church Year), we will start using the One-year Lectionary at Trinity. You will notice some differences. The days of Epiphany are counted differently and the long summer season is called Sundays after Trinity instead of Sundays after Pentecost. However, the main thing I want you to watch for is the connection of the lessons to the theme of the Sunday. We will do it for at least this Church year and see if we like it or not. Obviously, we will still be greatly blessed by the Word of God no matter the order in which we read it. But I will be interested to see if this format helps us hear God’s Word even better. In His Service, Pastor Rogers |
