Every noticed that on a given Sunday, lots of different churches use the same readings from the Bible? It’s no coincidence. But is it a good thing?
Many of the people I graduated from seminary with preach every week on a Bible text specified by the Revised Common Lectionary, which is a three-year pattern for preaching that includes readings from the Old Testament, the Gospels, and the New Testament epistles. There are a few passages that show up every year (e.g., the Christmas story from Luke) and a whole lot of passages that will never be read in church or preached on because they’re not part of the three-year cycle.
It has its advantages. Many Christians in different kinds of churches will hear the same passage on a given Sunday, fostering Christian unity. It makes it less likely that preachers will preach their favorite themes endlessly (thought it’s still possible:-)). But it seems to inspire fanaticism. Many lectionary preachers seem to look down on those who do not use the lectionary or seeing them as “arrogant.”
Given the support that it has, I just assumed that the Revised Common Lectionary used by many Protestants must have been based on something that had been around for hundreds of years. Nope. The Protestant version was completed in 1983 and published in 1994. The Roman Lectionary for Mass that it’s based on was just created in 1969, though before that there was a one-year cycle in the Roman Missal that included a schedule of New Testament readings (with very little Old Testament).
So why do so many people consider it so very important to preach from the lectionary? To hear some people talk, you’d think Moses brought it down from Mt. Sinai. It almost seems like idolatry… Some parts of scripture are completely excluded, including some difficult texts, while others are very heavily emphasized. And it jumps around to try to squeeze parts of a whole story into the right times of year, which can make it difficult to see the big picture of what really happened.
Personally, I do use the lectionary when I’m not preaching a sermon series and when no pastoral concerns necessitate choosing an appropriate text to address an issue. It helps me to cover things I might not have, but I don’t find that it works particularly well for me to use it for long periods of time.
I hope you will comment on this. I’d like to know how people feel about this.
As a solo pastor, I can sometimes get bogged down by details… There are so many little things that need to be done to make a Christmas Eve worship service come together. For the 5:00 service, we have a bunch of kids who all have to be in the right places, video backgrounds, lights, microphones, etc. all have to work. At 7:00, the candles have to be handed out. We have to make three bulletins (one for Christmas morning, which is a Sunday). Information cards and church information to hand out. The list goes on an on.
Preaching the Good News of Christmas starts to feel like an afterthought. But it should be my first thought, if not my only thought at this time of year.
My aunt, Arlene Durrett, took this nice picture of me preaching at my re-installation service in August (changing from a two-year “designated pastor” to an “installed pastor” who can stay indefinitely). I’m even wearing the seldom-seem robe. You can see the joy of preaching the Good News on my face.
That’s what it’s all about. This is my job as a Minister of the Word and Sacrament. It’s what I trained for. I can remember feeling that “this is what I was born to do” after sharing an experience of God’s amazing love in a seminary chapel worship service…
I pray that the Lord will help me to recapture that joy and to share it with a hurting world this Saturday night as we celebrate the night when God stepped out of the heavens and into the arms of a young girl, bringing light to all people.
I also pray that you may have a fresh experience of the “wonders of His love” this Christmas.
When I went to work for Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 1991, it was a fairly obscure company. I was proud to work there because it was full of smart people making good products and having fun doing it.
But in 1993, Jurassic Park was released, and the role of SGI’s computers in animating the dinosaurs made the company famous. In the meantime, we were building some excellent computer and finding new markets for them faster than we could grow the company. Then two very bad things happened.
1) One of the things that had made the company successful was that it hired only the best and brightest. When it looked like company financial growth might be limited by staffing, the company made a huge announcement that it would 1000 (maybe 20% of the current size of the company) new people in a matter of months. (I may have the numbers wrong here, but point is, they committed to massive hiring in a short time.) This led to a reduction in quality of the employees of SGI.
2) They bought supercomputer company Cray Research in 1996. Even though SGI was on track to take more and more business from Cray each year, they bought Cray. Cray had been around since 1972 and was headquartered in Eagan Minnesota (just outside Minneapolis). SGI was a cutting edge Silicon Valley company and Cray was a fairly slow-moving, process-burdened beast. Even though SGI bought Cray, Cray’s culture took over and killed the spirit of high-end server development at SGI.
So why am I telling you this? Because Google is reportedly about to buy a 5% stake in America Online AOL. As part of the deal, AOL will get preferential placement in Google listings and AOL’s logo will be displayed on the listings. This is counter to the way Google’s search engine has run in the past. Also, AOL is a big, 20-year-old company that has been part of Time-Warner since 2001. That’s a huge culture difference.
I remember the beginning of the end of the good times at Silicon Graphics, and it looks like Google might be heading that way. The management at SGI thought that they could do no wrong so they ruined a good thing. This Google move has that same feeling for me. Only time will tell whether that’s where Google is headed.
My church is looking at a big budget deficit this year – mostly laying a foundation for the next 3-5 years with a new worship service, etc. Anyway, because I’ve been thinking about church finances, this creative financing approach caught my attention. It’s from Central Presbyterian Church’s history webpage:
“Most of the young church’s income at this point came from seat rentals: each pew was assigned a value based on its nearness to the pulpit, with each member being assessed twenty percent of the value of the selected pew. Thus, for $10 to $75 per year, a member could claim a reserved seat in church, at least until the service began. This method of financing church expenses prevailed until, in 1895, the congregation voted to move to a free pew system.”
These days, we might be able to rent back pews, but I don’t think we could get much for the front ones.
I’ve been working on living an authentic and radically honest life (maybe a 2006 New Year’s resolution – watch this space). This picture of my son devouring a muffin top-first is a nice reminder of what that’s like. Johnny doesn’t do phony. I don’t want to either. (If I don’t get to it in January, maybe I’ll give it up for Lent! 
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