Jesus Creed
A friend (Mark Stevens) writes me this note, and I use it with permission:
Every year around this time I enter a kind of pastoral confusion on what to preach. I trust you as both a teacher and evangelical. Every year I am tempted by the lectionary and every year I have my reservations as it seems the domain of liberals and folks who want to do away with the historicity of certain elements of scripture. Let’s call them the skinny jeans crowd. I have always reached through books of the bible but i find it too hard to come up with a preaching plan and then stick to it (maybe I just need to be more disciplined I’m not sure.)
Anyway, I wondered if you had any advice being a good Anglican and also coming from a conservative baptist background? Have you written on this subject at all? The lectionary is a foreign land to me, one who’s language I struggle to understand or learn.
My response pertains to one dimension, what I want to call posture, and let me embolden the differences in order to draw out a point.
The lectionary is not hard to figure out … Google Revised Common Lectionary … we are in Epiphany right now … http://lectionary.library.
You can see the major texts in the Gospels, and you can do a series on those texts — big events in the life of Jesus. And then you can set up themes to come — Lent and repentance and then the death and resurrection of Jesus, and then beyond that Pentecost.
The issue can be discussed with respect to the posture of the preacher (pastor, priest). I simplify for the sake of a conversation:
1. Classic low church posture: pastor chooses texts, preaches those texts to the congregation, expects congregation to listen and change etc. The pastor/preacher becomes the voice of God, in other words, the pastor tends to take on the mantle of the prophet or at least the didactic preacher. Giving the pastor the choice of which texts to preach results in the omission of many texts and themes from the preaching schedule.
2. Class lectionary posture: church selects texts, pastor is asked to obey those selections, the pastor then listens to those selections and preaches them to the congregation that is also listening to the same texts. The pastor/priest is asked to take on a stance of listening, but (of course) preachers in the lectionary tradition can posture themselves as prophets just as preachers in the low church tradition can become good listeners to the text. Preaching from a lectionary exposes a church to the core of the whole Bible over a three year period.
Notice the posture: in the first the pastor is the prophet; in the second the pastor is a listener as part of the congregation and is asked to bring light to the texts read that Sunday. In my opinion, the lectionary tradition removes some authority from the pastor and locates it in the church. (I’m not idealistic here.) This can have a huge impact over time.
Mark Allan Powell wrote a book called What Do They Hear, and in it he says lay folks identify with characters in the stories of Jesus and in the parables of Jesus while pastors identify with Jesus … which is a powerful revelation that posture matters. The lectionary texts, since they are set by others, means the pastor first listens as a disciple. I like that.
This is a bit of stereotype version but I think you see the wisdom in the lectionary.
It is easy to preach a series in a lectionary since the texts are all set out in advance and you can scan them to see the big themes that can be preached. It is no more difficult to preach a series from the lectionary than from choosing a book.
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