As October ramps up and we move toward Advent, we wanted to take a moment in this busy season to talk more about, well, the importance of seasons. Laura Turner sat down with Fred Harrell to talk about our lectionary, the church calendar, and how we can plug into both.
Why do we use a lectionary?
Well, there are a number of reasons. First of all, in the early days of the church the use of a lectionary had a lot to do with doing things together. There was a sense that we were all formed by the same story--the same narrative--so going through it together was what Christians defaulted to doing in those early days. We don't want to be alone in reading the Bible; we're doing this with lots and lots of other Christians who are experiencing the same thing and on the same page.
Beyond that, though, the lectionary now has to do a lot with intentionality. Christians know we have to be intentional, or there will be any number of narratives that will compete for prominence in my life, and they will be flimsy or misleading.
With this intentionality, we live into what it means to be a Christian--simply to be a disciple of Jesus. There is a bowing of the knee involved, a surrendering of my narratives and my story to the narrative. That's what the lectionary does for us.
We also follow the lectionary--which really just means a schedule of texts and readings--because we recognize we have a propensity to like only certain parts of stories. If we only picked out our favorite parts of Scripture--if we go only to places that comfort--we miss God meeting us in places where we need to cry, to repent, to be sad. When we encounter what Walter Brueggeman calls the "unlaundered history" of God interacting with people in history throughout scripture, we see that our lives are unlaundered as well. We can try to clean them up, but the lectionary pushes us to be real.
How does the lectionary tie into the larger church calendar?
The lectionary has typically followed along with the church calendar, which is just another way of saying the story of the life of Jesus--the seasons of the Church Year reflect the life of Christ.
Right now, we are in Ordinary Time--the long haul, the living-out of faith, a long obedience in the same direction. This is by far the longest season of the Church Year, marked by growth and nurture, which is why we use the color green in this season. We have started the year in the lectionary with creation, going through recently into Moses, the Exodus, the wilderness, and now, the Prophets. The Prophets are all pointing us to the One who is to come, to the promise that will be fulfilled in the birth of Jesus.
During Advent and Epiphany, then--the Seasons of Expectation and Incarnation--we will be looking at the Gospel of John to tell us about Jesus' early ministry. The lectionary and the Church Year complement each other in this way, as we read about Jesus' ministry in the time we celebrate his incarnation. In all the gospels, there is always a turn, and in the season of Lent, that turn is toward the cross. Jesus has gone to the cross, and he's called me--all of us--to follow him.
The last season, Pentecost, is the Season of Resurrection. We move towards living out the resurrection in the book of Acts, when we see the sociological impossibility of the church begin to take place. We celebrate Jesus being in all places at all times through the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. We hold the tension of remembering parts of the story and the whole story at the same time.
What can I do to interact with the lectionary/church calendar outside of a weekend service?
We want to buttress our experience by having a little more scholarly input this fall. We have an Old Testament scholar (Peter Enns), a New Testament scholar (Daniel Kirk), and a master practitioner (Wesley Granberg-Michaelson) coming in at different times to talk to us about Scripture. These will be a series of luncheons at our Sutter campus--Pete Enns on November 10th, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson on November 17th, and Daniel Kirk on December 8th.
Pete Enns will talk about the Hebrew Bible--some of the questions it raises, how to access this piece of ancient near eastern literature, and how to recognize the expectations we bring to the Bible. Daniel Kirk will do the same, but with the New Testament.
If we expect it to be a manual, it's going to really be frustrating. We need manuals for somethings. A car, for example: I don't want anyone telling me about the mystery of my brakes. But when it comes to faith, we should know that there is mystery involved. It's informed mystery, informed by the story, but it's going to involve mystery and a God who is not always predictable. There are some hard spots that just don't make sense to modern ears. What expectations of the Old and New Testaments do we have when we read them that may be coloring our disappointment with them?
Sandwiched in between these two scholars, we wanted to bring in someone who has spent a lifetime marinating in Scripture. We don't want this to be information, we want it to be transformation, renewal. So Wesley Granberg-Michaelson is going to talk about the spirituality in Scripture, and how we can be renewed by it.
We'll also be sharing our regular worship folder quotes online, both on our website and via social media, updated every other day. Our hope is that this can provide a daily contemplation for our congregation, a way of inviting the words we read on Sunday to shape us throughout the week.