Rediscovering the Lectionary’s Unrealized Potential 

By Michael Niebauer

One Thousand Sundays 

Each Sunday for the first eighteen years of my life, I heard a set of four Bible readings read out loud at church: one from the Psalms, one from the rest of the Old Testament, one from the Gospels, and one from the rest of the New Testament.  

These readings were part of a three-year schedule of passages known as the lectionary.  

But after nearly a thousand continuous Sundays, I could not articulate any discernible connection between the passages that were read each week. Furthermore, these readings seemed completely disconnected from the rest of worship.  

My experience is still typical in a majority of churches that use a lectionary today. Yet I believe there is so much unrealized potential in the lectionary.  

When churches read all four prescribed passages each Sunday of the three-year cycle, they are exposed to a majority of the New Testament and the Psalter, and a significant portion of the Old Testament. They get to see how the seasons of the church calendar orient Christian time around the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. They are able to see how God has woven together stories and writings over thousands of years into one beautiful tapestry, and how each and every passage of Scripture holds the possibility of a direct encounter with God the Father through his Son, Jesus Christ, when read in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

What the Lectionary Recovers from the Early Church 

The lectionary recovers ancient approaches to the Bible. These early Christian understandings of Scripture can be characterized by their unique approach to time, Christ, and liturgy. 

• Time: Encountering God in Sacred Time. Scripture is the Word of God and the accounts of God’s wondrous works within the world. Early Christians assumed that God had orchestrated and arranged the entirety of Scripture so that all of it—little bits and large sections, persons, actions, and symbols—could be brought to bear on the present experiences of his church. Approaching Scripture within this heavenly context of sacred time naturally lent itself to reading selections from various books of the Bible together. The reading out loud of these lections together invited the hearer to see how their accounts of past and future could be made present before them as they sat in sacred time.  

• Christ: The Center of Every Reading. In the wake of Pentecost, Jesus’s disciples preached of the resurrection and explained how all of the Old Testament is now fulfilled in Jesus. The churches that they founded continued to unpack the mystery of Christ as revealed in every single jot and tittle of the Old Testament. As it expanded, the early church continued the synagogue process of reading out loud lections from the Old Testament, increasingly incorporating into these readings passages from newly written Gospels and apostolic writings. Christ remained the focal point of these compilations, which eventually became formalized through the development of lectionaries. Because Christ is the center of Scripture, these lectionaries made the Gospels their focal point, replacing the centrality of the Torah. The schedule for these readings in turn followed the Gospels through the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Jesus Christ, which were codified in the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter. 

• Liturgy: How Scripture Shapes Worship. Early Christian interpreters assumed a timeless quality to Scripture: its ability to draw together past, present, and future in an immediate encounter with God. They also asserted Christ as the fulfillment of all of Scripture and the key to understanding its contents. The resurrected Christ unlocks the true meaning of the Old Testament, allowing it to speak of him and be applied directly and immediately to those who read it in him. These first two approaches to Scripture in turn had profound ramifications on how Christians understood their communal life, since the Old Testament contains detailed commands and descriptions concerning the ways in which the people of God are called to assemble for worship. 

Unlocking the Lectionary’s Potential 

I wrote From Word to Worship to help unlock the potential of the lectionary to disciple Christians to approach Scripture along the same vector as the early church.  

Scripture trains us to see the world through its words and its symbols. It is the key to seeing Christ’s presence in the material world. As the lectionary trains us to see the interconnectedness of the stories and symbols of the Bible, it will open us up to the ways in which its stories and symbols are manifested in the physical actions of the church as it worships. 

This article has been adapted from Michael Niebauer’s book From Word to Worship: How the Lectionary Welcomes You into Sacred Time Through Story, Symbol, and Sacrament, published by Baker Books. In the book, Niebauer traces the church year’s major themes—from Advent to Ordinary Time—showing how the lectionary’s readings are carefully harmonized to magnify Christ, and how the church enacts these readings through its worship, liturgy, and sacramental life. 

 Michael Niebauer is director of Heritage Mission, an initiative that trains leaders to start worship services in care facilities. He is the author of Four Mountains: Encountering God in the Bible from Eden to Zion and the award-winning Virtuous Persuasion: A Theology of Christian Mission.