Lection and Liturgy

The first broad genre a Christian reader encounters in a description of the bible’s contents is “law”. Whenever the scriptures are referred to in the pages of the New Testament by genre, it is nearly always “the Law and the Prophets.” ( I discussed this language a bit here .) And many people are used to hearing references to the books of Moses, or the law of Moses, in relation to the first five books of the bible. However, what the reader finds when starting these books is not laws, but stories. It takes 50 chapters of Genesis and 19 more chapters of Exodus before we get to the giving of the law. This alerts us to a certain problem with the language of “law”. Detail of a Torah scroll So what’s in a name? The first five books of the bible are referred to by various names, especially Pentateuch (meaning “five scrolls”), Books of Moses, Torah (the Jewish term we’ve encountered earlier) and Law. This last is, as we’ve said, the one that crops up most often in the New Testament. Whichever t...

This blog series now moves on to the longest section, as much intended for repeated reference as reading immediately. Nonetheless, I hope each post will be interesting enough to read in its own right as it is blogged. Since I am going (with one or two extras here and there) to blog my way through the books of the Bible in their canonical order, you might expect that to begin at the beginning would mean starting with Genesis. However, I want to take a couple of steps back, and begin with another word starting with the same three letters: genre. At this point, though, I need to enter a caveat. I blog these posts on books of the bible not as an expert, but as a fellow reader. I venture to claim a degree of knowledge, and a reasonable depth of study for much of (but not all) the New Testament books. But when it comes to the Old Testament I have no particular expertise. I’m simply another reader sharing something of what I read. My reading always begins by asking what sort of book I’m rea...

The last post in this section on the practicalities of reading looks at something slightly different. Sometimes you can consider a reading by more than one voice. An obvious example is dramatic reading. This can be overdone, and it’s neither to everyone’s taste, nor for every occasion. But there are times it may enrich the practice of public reading. The most common use of dramatic reading is the tradition of reading the passion narratives, Matthew, Mark and Luke on the Palm or Passion Sunday 1 of their respective years, and John on Good Friday. A number of churches have made wider use of dramatic readings, and particularly on occasions when a wide age range is present. There have even been dramatized Bibles produced filled with as much dramatic reading as possible. As far as I am aware, they are not presently in print. On the whole, it’s more likely as a reader that you will be asked to participate in a dramatic reading, rather than be in a position to decide to...

In my previous post , I mentioned a list of five key things to watch out for which will help you to read well. Today I want to go through that list in more detail, and add a sixth for those of you (the majority) using sound systems. Pitch All of us speak with a varying pitch, and it helps people understand what we say. Normally, for example, we end a question with a rising tone 1 . As a basic rule, in most contexts for public reading, it is good make sure we do end questions on a rising pitch, and statements on a falling one. Most of us do better reading in a slightly lower tone than we speak naturally in. It helps our voice carry more clearly. However, I have heard people lower their voices drastically when reading or praying: it is incredibly distracting. Your voice should be as near to your normal one as possible, but slightly lower in its overall pitch. Avoid anything that sounds “put on” or artificial. Get to know your sound system. (Image is CC.0 – Public D...

When I first started reading in public, I wore glasses all the time (I now tend to wear contacts most of the time) and I don’t have a very pronounced bridge on my nose. This meant my glasses regularly tended to slide down my nose, and I had unconsciously developed the habit of pushing them back up my nose at regular intervals, even if they had barely slipped at all. For some people, this was a distracting form of punctuating the reading, and I needed a kind critical friend to tell me I was doing it. I found a way of adjusting them once in a pause before I began reading, and then making sure I didn’t do it again. The first thing that will help you read well is having a critical friend in the congregation. They can observe you when you are actually reading, and tell you honestly both what you are doing well, and whether there are things you should try to change. It helps if, from time to time, they can sit in a different place, including at the back of the church (th...

If the previous post looked mainly at grasping the overall meaning of a reading, today’s looks at the question of detail. It is not just the devil who is in the details. Paying attention to details helps meaning and truth emerge. Exploring the details can help the reading be heard as the word of the Lord. Perhaps the most obvious of those details is the pronunciation of names, people and places. The first, and most important piece of advice to remember, is that when it comes to the really difficult names, no-one else is likely to know exactly how they are pronounced either. However, in most cases, there is a relatively traditional English pronunciation of most names. Very often the translated English name is quite different from the Hebrew or Greek way of saying the names in the original language. The traditional English is itself simply a time-honoured way of mangling the original, but if you know it, or can find it out, it’s certainly worth doing so. If you ca...

It’s time to move on from looking at how the readings are fitted to the year, to some practicalities about how we approach the task of reading them aloud. There’s a lot I can’t tell you about how to read in your church. I don’t know you or your context, whether you worship in a large or a small building, whether you have a sound system or a loop, which translation of the Scriptures your church normally uses, how many people you read to, and many other such things. The hints and tips in this section of the blog series are therefore necessarily going to be limited, but I hope they will be of some use, helping you become a more understanding and understandable reader. The first and most important condition of reading well is to understand what it is you’re reading. That is what the largest part of this series, the “software” section to follow is all about. But how might you go about that if the reading seems particularly difficult, if you’ve read it through and ar...

 Roman Catholic parishes are fully bound to the lectionary. In most English Protestant churches it is generally optional whether to follow it. These alternatives create a push and pull that affects Anglicans, depending on how strong the evangelical or catholic influence is in any particular parish. This post, unusually for this series, therefore primarily relates to the peculiar situation of Anglicans, though I hope it might still be of interest to other readers. We have already seen that there is a choice in the underlying Revised Common Lectionary between a semi-continuous and a related Old Testament reading. This choice is not yours as an individual reader of Scripture, but rather one where the church corporately decides on its pattern for worship. Common Worship provides several clear pieces of guidance on these choices , as well as permitting an alternative in Ordinary Time which fits the practice of some churches. In fact, the first piece of guidance is a firm r...

We’ve looked at the pattern of the Church’s year , and at the ways the readings interlink in the Sunday liturgy. Now it’s time to look at how it all fits together over time. I hope, especially as we’ve gone through the calendar in this section, all those different Sunday names have become clearer. This is now where we deal with the last plank of all those detailed references to particular Sundays by years as well as by names. The pattern of readings is based on organising the reading of Scripture over three years. This is done slightly differently depending on whether we are in one of the two main seasonal cycles, or are in Ordinary Time. This difference is potentially greater for the Revised Common Lectionary than it is for the Roman one. The underlying principle of the three years remains the same throughout. Each year is based on one of the first three gospels. This is especially notable in Ordinary Time. John’s gospel is used primarily in the seasons in ad...

As a priest who regularly provides cover in a range of churches round our diocese, I often find myself asking people: “How do you do it here?” The almost inevitable answer is a variation on “Just the normal way.” The problem is there are almost as many normal ways as there are churches. One of those points where there is considerable variation is the question of who reads which reading. As always, perceptive humour from the excellent Dave Walker at CartoonChurch . The image is © Dave Walker and Cartoon Church and is used by kind permission of the artist. These differences are mainly focussed on the reading of the Gospel, where Roman Catholic, Anglican and other Protestant traditions differ. Before I get to the differences, I start with what they should all have in common, but all too often don’t. The chief commonality should be that those who read do so clearly, audibly, and in a way which allows the listener to grasp the meaning of the reading. People complain fairly quickl...

Throughout this series, I am working on the assumption that the vast majority of occasions when people are reading in public worship, it is the principal service on a Sunday. This is the set of readings provided for mass in the Roman Catholic Church, and for the principal gathering for worship (whether eucharistic or not) of the day in other denominations. In most Anglican parish churches, the same set of readings tends to be used for any eucharist celebrated on that day (as in the Roman Catholic Church). There is a separate set of readings for morning and evening prayer (matins and evensong), whose selection is less clearly organised. However, in this series, I am only going to focus on the three-year lectionary which provides the most frequently used readings. There are three readings provided for each Sunday of the year. In addition, there is a text from the psalms which offers words of response to the first reading. That means that when there are alternative first re...

The year, according to the calendar explored in the previous few posts, is colour-coded. Colour coding for different types of celebration grew-up over time, and mainly in the Western Church. The Western, particularly Roman, mindset is generally much more inclined to make things tidy, and organise them according to clear patterns than is the Eastern Church. This colour scheme is not just a tool for organisation. It helps provide not only a quick visual guide to the changing seasons, but also, subliminally, can help create the mood Art installation, summer 2019, Durham city centre   The colour of Ordinary Time, the colour that doesn’t point to any particular mood or season, is green. This is the default, both for the church and for nature. It is the colour we are used to seeing most of the year, inside our church buildings and in the world around us. The traditional colour for the seasons of major celebration, Christmas and Easter, is gold, or as is the case in mos...

In addition to the cycles of seasonal and ordinary time there is another calendar which overlays it. This, the calendar of saints and other holy days only intrudes on the Sunday cycle occasionally, and has much more influence on weekdays. In the diagram I’ve been using, I represent this as a looping arrow going around the year. Someone – presumably an academic used to writing copious footnotes on their sources – once described saints as “footnotes” to the gospel. That is to say, their lives show us something of the details of what a Jesus-shaped life might look like in different times, places and circumstances. Different saints bring different Christian virtues into prominence, and show what a really committed Christian life might look like at a particular time in history, or a specific cultural context. On a Sunday it may be more likely that the lives of these saints will influence the prayers, rather than the readings. That is because every Sunday is seen as a cel...

I should probably offer a health warning on this post: there’s no way of explaining the diversity of ways churches name and number the different Sundays of the year without getting a little bit geeky. I have tried to be as clear as possible, but there is a lot of rather messy detail that demands a certain amount of anorak wearing. When I looked at the Christmas and Easter cycles, I described them as swimming in a sea of Ordinary Time. Having told these stories, one of the events around Christ’s birth, the other of events around his death, there’s still well over half a year left over. So having told these stories, the church then reflects for the rest of the year on what it means to live out a life that is faithful to the stories of this Jesus, reading through the main teaching sections of the gospels. These reflections – on what faithfulness to the stories of Jesus looks like – begin with our idea of God. The first Sunday in Ordinary Time is always kept as the Feast of the Most Holy T...

The Easter cycle is quite similar to the Christmas cycle I explored in the previous post . There is an extended period of preparation, Lent, which leads up to the events of Easter, and an extended period of celebration after Easter which finishes on the feast of Pentecost. The origins of Lent appear to be as a time of preparation for baptism in those places that celebrated baptisms at Easter. However, it has long since become primarily a time for attending to a more disciplined life of faith. The recovery of a long Eastertide is relatively recent, but, unlike Epiphany, Easter is not fighting any strong cultural currents, and it has deeper roots. Moreover the tone of joy naturally suits the uplifting mood of time outside the church, at least in the northern hemisphere, as we move into spring and (sometimes) early summer, and leave the winter months behind. As an old Easter hymn says: "Lo, the fair beauty of earth, from the death of the winter arising, every good g...

In a previous post I offered a general outline of the church calendar, as two cycles of seasons standing out from the ordinary passage of the year. Today I focus on the first of those, the Christmas cycle. At present the ways the Christmas cycle is organised differs slightly between the Roman Catholic lectionary and the Revised Common Lectionary, on the one hand, and the Church of England’s lectionary on the other, by extending the post-Christmas celebration. This means there are two ways of constructing the Christmas cycle. The illustration is of the Church of England’s. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany   In both lectionaries, the season of preparation begins four Sundays before Christmas Day, with the First Sunday of Advent. Depending on how early in the week Christmas comes, Advent lasts between three and four weeks. When Christmas falls on a Monday it is three weeks and a day; when Christmas falls on a Sunday it is a full four weeks. Over the course of time, Adv...

This series now moves on into the second main section: what I am calling the firmware. This is the way in which we organise and develop our actual practice of reading. I begin with the church year. We have a range of different years we organise our life by, and they all start at different times. The school year in September, the tax year in April, the calendar year in January. Historically it’s moved around a bit. So it’s not really at all out of the ordinary that the church year begins four Sundays before Christmas, a date that usually falls at the end of November, and sometimes at the start of December. The pattern of readings followed in Christian liturgy is tied to this year, so that a new cycle of readings begins on the first of the four Sundays before Christmas, called Advent Sunday, from a Latin word meaning “arrival”. The year begins with preparations for the arrival of Jesus. There are different ways of conceptualising the year. Both the diagrams bel...

It’s time to wrap up this opening section of the series, looking at how the practice of public reading has shaped the content and collection of these sacred writings into the bible. This short, potted history of how we got the bible is, over and over again, a story of which books Christians read in public worship. Reading – public reading as part of meeting together for worship – is fundamental to being Christian. It is not, obviously, the only way we encounter the bible, even in worship. A huge amount of the words worshippers say to or about God are also taken, in one way or another, from the pages of the same scriptures. The Christian practice of public reading is relational more than it is informational. Reading is not the only thing that happens. It is one element, one very important element, of public worship, but it happens surrounded by a framework of prayer and praise, confession and thanksgiving. It is primarily intended to help us listen, so that people m...

 If you were surprised it took a few centuries (as the previous post described) to reach agreement about the contents list of the New Testament, you may be even more surprised by the length of time it has taken for the Old Testament. Christians have never produced a fully-agreed contents list for the Old Testament. Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Anglicans and Protestants disagree about which Old Testament books they should read in public. The seeds of this disagreement lie in the distant past. The early Christians essentially used the books which were in circulation among the synagogues of the diaspora: 1 the Greek-speaking world of the ancient Mediterranean. Greek in the ancient world functioned much like English in today’s world: it was the “global” language of the Graeco-Roman world. The earliest books of the bible to be translated into Greek were the books of Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The other books followed, wi...