What is the Lectionary?

In Jesus Christ God came into human history to show us what creation’s original larger loving purpose had been and continues to be.  Jesus came to show us “the way, the truth and the life” which God had tried to show human kind through his chosen people Israel.  Israel’s story recorded in the Law and the Prophets, the Histories and the Psalms, repeatedly promised God’s coming among us.  Those scriptures repeatedly point toward the birth, life, teachings, death and resurrection of God’s son.

 The God of Israel and of Jesus is the creator of all things and the ruler of all relationships.  Time itself is one of God’s creations.  In Christ we live and move and have our being.  The seasons of the story of God’s coming to us unfold through the Christian year-the year where Christians remember our source in God and our story as God’s loved children.

The lectionary is an ancient, yet thoroughly renewed method of organizing the biblical story through a series of readings during the Christian year.  It was originally created in the 2nd century and has been updated several times since then.  Readings from the Old Testament and Psalms each week provide a background history of God’s saving grace, while readings from a New Testament Epistle and a Gospel focus God’s good news in Jesus Christ.  Over the centuries, those who organized this systematic series of readings discovered that in a “three year” cycle the whole story of God’s love as it is recorded in scripture could be read and proclaimed.  All of the important moments along the path of that story from creation to Christ and the church could be reviewed and relived.

The lectionary provides us with a complete guide through Scripture, so that we can discover how God’s story can save our own-dead end stories form despair.  The lectionary protects preachers and congregations from partisan selections of readings and self-serving biases each Sunday, which reduce the breadth and depth and challenge of God’s gift and call through Scripture.  In a word, the lectionary keeps us living in God’s Word, rather than a house we construct from it.

Thank God for the lectionary!