Lection and Liturgy

Welcome to Lection and Liturgy. I have backed up to this site a series of posts making a guide to the whole of the Christian Bible, aimed particularly at those who read it in public. My name's Doug Chaplin, I work as a priest and trainer in the Church of England. Everything here is written in a purely personal capacity. I hope the posts here will help people read Scripture in ways which help their listeners understand what is being read. You can read more about this site in this introductory post , and you can follow it in "book order" using this Reading Guide Index . So here it is: the Bible in 90 posts.

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...

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...

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...

Discussions of which books are Scripture usually uses the language of canon explained in yesterday’s rather long post . So people discuss when the canon was “closed” – which means when the list was finally agreed. Books that made it into the canon are called canonical, those that didn’t are referred to as non-canonical. I will use some of that language in this and the next post, exploring just a little more of the history of how Christians reached agreement (or mainly reached agreement) on which books are scripture. Key to that question is recognising which books the church should read in public worship, take as foundational in discerning God’s truth, and listen to prayerfully to hear God’s wisdom and guidance. In this post I look at the New Testament; in the next one at the Old Testament. The first is about how the early Christians collected their own literature; the second about they appropriated literature they shared in common with early Judaism. The Church's...

This follows on from the post Reading the right books: memory . It’s quite clear that the majority of the texts in what is now the Jewish bible and Christian Old Testament were regarded by the earliest Christians as scripture, even while some are used much more extensively than others. It’s less certain where they thought the boundaries were, or how clear a listing they carried in their heads. Jesus, like other Jews of his time, seems most commonly to refer to two broad categories of scripture “the law and the prophets” 1 While we can’t be certain, it seems likely that synagogue liturgy already included a pattern that reflects that: a reading from the law, followed by a reading from the prophets. We saw this pattern a couple of days ago when we looked at Jesus reading at Nazareth . Something like that may be reflected in one of the stories in the Acts of the Apostles: “After the reading of the law and the prophets, the officials of the synagogue sent them a message,...

Over the last few posts, we’ve seen how there is a continuing thread running from Judaism into Christianity of reading the scriptures in the context of giving worship to God. One of the obvious questions that the early church then found itself asking was “Which books should we read in public worship?”.  This was one of the key drivers in developing a sense of “bible”: making lists of the books that Christians should read above all when they met in public to worship God, and which would therefore also form their core collection of texts when they wanted to think about faith and life. Some of these books were clearly inherited from Jewish tradition, from Jesus as a user and interpreter of scripture, and then from his apostles and the earliest Christian communities. These earliest communities, the ones we find reflected in Paul’s letters, didn’t know they were Christian, of course. They simply thought of themselves as people who were finding the Jewish prophecies ...

The third and final vignette in this little series of glimpses at public reading in the past comes from around the year 150AD. (The previous two glimpses were  here , and  here .) In the pages of the New Testament (and some other early Christian literature) we get various instructions about what Christians should do when they meet for worship, and various glimpses of special gatherings. However, we don’t get a full description of an ordinary Christian worship assembly. For such a description we have to wait till the middle of the second century, for a writer called Justin, a Greek-speaking immigrant to Rome from the Palestinian Samaritan city now known as Nablus. Justin was a philosopher who appears to have made his living as a teacher, both before and after he became a Christian. He’s famous as the first Christian apologist – a word which means someone who mounted reasoned public defences and commendations of Christianity to outsiders. We have different writings from him whic...

Yesterday I looked at public reading in Nehemiah 8. Today we’re jumping forward to the gospels, and Jesus being invited to read the lesson. At the beginning of his account of Jesus’ ministry, Luke chooses to emphasise and elaborate the story of Jesus preaching at Nazareth. The first part of the story (before it all turns a bit sour) goes like this. When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then h...

I want to look at the tradition of public reading through three different texts that show different aspects of it. Today’s text is a story comes from one of the lesser read books of the Old Testament, Nehemiah. It’s the only passage from Nehemiah that crops up in the Sunday lectionary for the main service. Parts of this story, from Nehemiah 8, crop up on the third Sunday of Epiphany (or the third Sunday in Ordinary Time) in Year C. (If any of the words I’ve just used (lectionary, Epiphany, Ordinary Time or Year C) phase you, then you can find them all defined in the Glossary.) Gustave Doré’s woodcut of the scene (1843: Public Domain) He imagines Ezra as a second Moses with stone tablets, rather than the scroll described in the story Here’s the text. (The reason for putting the word LORD in capitals is a long-standing convention inherited from Judaism. It signifies that the Hebrew text is not the word Lord, but the four-consonant name of God – YHWH.) "The priest Ezra brought the la...

On sabbatical early in 2019 I was trying to write the first draft of what I hoped might be a simple introduction to the bible for those who have to read from it in public worship. As I worked, I came to realise that it would be too long to be the sort of book which might be attractive to the kind of audience I had in mind. I put it away for a few months, but thought after I’d let the first draft settle a bit, perhaps the second draft might be a (long) series of blogs. Now it feels right to resurrect the idea, and so partly as the vehicle for this series, and partly for other posts on worship, prayer and liturgy, I launched a new site in autumn 2019. Then I realised thatI wouldn't be purchasing that web domain in perpetuity. One solution is to back it up to Blogger, tidying up as I go along. Hence this site! The index page will lead you through it in "book" order i.e. the order it would be in if you were reading it as a conventional book. Most introductions to the...