Preaching & Reading the Lectionary

Preaching & Reading the Lectionary Preaching & Reading the Lectionary A Three-Dimensional Approach to the Liturgical Year O. Wesley Allen Jr. © Copyright 2007 by O. Wesley Allen Jr. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse content, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, www.copyright.com. Biblical quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Permission is granted for the use and/or adaptation of material in the Preach- ing and Reading the Lectionary PDF in worship and in free congregational publications, with the credit line “from Preaching and Reading the Lectionary, copyright © 2007 by O. Wesley Allen Jr.” For any other use, contact the Copyright Clearance Center as noted above. Cover image: GettyImages Cover and interior design: Elizabeth Wright ChalicePress.com Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data Allen, O. Wesley, 1965- Preaching and reading the lectionary : 3-dimensional approach to the liturgical year / O. Wesley Allen Jr. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-8272-3006-4 1. Lectionary preaching. 2. Preaching. 3. Church year. I. Title. BV4235.L43A45 2008 251’.6—dc22 2007037171 Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi Preface ix Introduction: The Three-Dimensional Lectionary 1 Cumulative Preaching Strategies for Year A Advent 26 Christmas 34 Sundays after Epiphany 39 Lent and Holy Week 50 Easter 61 Ordinary Time 71 Cumulative Preaching Strategies for Year B Advent 94 Christmas 101 Sundays after Epiphany 105 Lent and Holy Week 114 Easter 123 Ordinary Time 132 Cumulative Preaching Strategies for Year C Advent 154 Christmas 161 Sundays after Epiphany 165 Lent and Holy Week 171 Easter 180 Ordinary Time 186 Notes 209 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is written by a seminary professor who is a perpetual guest preacher, but it is written for pastors who stand in the same pulpit Sunday after Sunday trying to offer a glimpse of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the same people sitting in the pews week in and week out. While for many the distance between the academy and the church is as far as Athens is from Jerusalem, for me the journey is no longer than shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I try to live and work with one foot in both worlds of ministry. Indeed, my experience of ministry in congregational settings informs much of what I do in the classroom and in my writing. This book is an example of that. I have spent most of my pastoral life as someone who follows the lectionary in homiletical and liturgical planning. For me the lectionary is a great gift. It saves me time from scanning the canon looking for texts for Sunday’s sermon and helps me focus the various elements of the worship service around common scriptural texts and themes. It invites me into ecumenical dialogue with other preachers and congregations who are exploring the same texts on the same Sunday I am. It reminds me that my task is to preach on more than just those theological themes and biblical texts with which I am familiar and comfortable by pushing me into parts of the canon through which I might not naturally journey. It nourishes me by giving concreteness to the liturgical themes and practices that shape so much of what I offer to God in worship. However, I also struggle with the discipline of following the lead of the lectionary. I struggle to be true to the predefined texts while also being relevant to current, constantly changing, historical and current life situations of the congregation. I struggle to stay fresh, to offer goodnew s in the pulpit when returning to the same sets of texts every three years and to many of those texts every year. I struggle to offer a cohesive Christian worldview while jumping from Gospel to First Testament to Epistle to psalm. Therefore, I developed the material in this book and in the accompanying PDF (available for free download on this book’s product page at ChalicePress.com) out of my loving struggle with vi Acknowledgments vii the lectionary and for those who similarly experience the rhythm of lectionary existence as both a blessing and a bane. My hope is to crack open new homiletical and liturgical possibilities by taking a step back from our usual practice of focusing on the weekly lections in order to bring into view a bigger, yet still manageable, sweep of the lections. In this process of studying how the lectionary texts function season-by-season, I have been reminded of many things I had forgotten, have found new potential in elements that I had taken for granted and glossed over, and have learned things that I should have known long ago. I wish I had had this sort of resource when I was preaching to the same congregation week-after-week, year-after- year, and pray that those who do so now may find it as meaningful to employ in worship planning and sermon preparation as I have found it to be in writing. One of the reasons writing this material has been meaningful is I have not worked on it in isolation. I am thankful to a number of people who have been willing to be sounding boards for my ideas. While I take responsibility for whatever shortcomings are to be found in the work, I cannot deny that there would have been many more deficiencies were it not for the support, critique, and advice offered by friends, family, and colleagues. Bonnie Cook, Robert Cueni, Bill Kincaid, and Steve Monhollen read early drafts of portions of the work, offered serious feedback, and helped me focus the project better. The library staff at Lexington Theological Seminary, especially Barbara Pfeifle and Charlie Heaberlin, found for me some well-hidden yet much-needed information and resources. Lisa Davison and Jerry Sumney, my colleagues who teach Bible at the seminary, have been open to many a doorway conversation about this or that lectionary text. Students at the seminary and various clergy groups have allowed me to work through different portions of the book in oral form and have provided invaluable suggestions. Daisy Machado, who arrived as dean at LTS after I was well underway in writing this material, has been quite supportive of the project and the requirements of meeting publishing deadlines. Kerry Moore has been an invaluable student assistant. She read through the bulk of the text found in both the book and the free download—not only noting typographical and grammatical errors, but also extensively commenting on the content. Finally, I am especially grateful to Pablo Jiménez, Trent Butler, and their colleagues at Chalice Press for their support of this work. The publishing market is filled with commentaries on the Revised viii Preaching and Reading the Lectionary Common Lectionary, journals offering homiletical aids for each week’s texts, and liturgical and musical resources related to the weekly lectionary choices. These works have established a standard expectation of how lectionary resources are to function. In taking on this project, Chalice Press has been willing to stray from, indeed has been enthusiastic about, moving beyond this Monday to Sunday approach of using the lectionary in shaping worship practice. They have sought ways to shape the work so that it might combine a serious look at the complex layers of the Revised Common Lectionary with an ease of use for worship planners. PREFACE Cumulative Preaching Most books about and resources for preaching deal with the individual sermon. It is little wonder that texts written by homileticians, who are perpetual guest preachers and who spend most of their time in the classroom trying to introduce beginning preachers to the task of developing and delivering sermons, focus so much energy on what “the sermon” is (theologically speaking) and what it is supposed to do (in terms of rhetoric). From the perspective of pastors who read these texts, however, this focus on the individual sermon has led to many blue Monday mornings as we fret over questions like, “Why did this sermon change no one’s life or even their theology? Why was no one moved to make a decision for faith? Why at the rear door of the sanctuary did no one speak of the sermon as if they had truly engaged its content at the level I offered it to them?” While we have much to learn about preaching from works discussing the sermonic event, all pastors know (or at least hope), deep in their hearts, that the great power of preaching lies less in the individual sermon and more in the cumulative effect of preaching week in and week out to the same congregation, to the same community of believers, doubters, and seekers—and, by the way, these labels can usually all be applied to any person instead of separate groups. In other words, we need to find a way to celebrate that, while the individual sermon that profoundly changes lives is a wonderful exception to the rule, sermons offered Sunday after Sunday, month after month, and year after year weave together to have an immeasurable, cumulative influence on individuals’ and the congregation’s understanding of God, self, and the world.1 Although there is no excuse for ill-prepared, boring sermons, it should rarely be the primary goal of preachers to create and deliver sermons in which parishioners remember “the word” offered on that particular day. Instead, pastors need to find homiletical techniques that intertwine their sermons over the course of their preaching ministry within a congregation in order to reinforce the laity’s faith formation.

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