Understanding the Church Calendar: Instruction, Inclusion, and Innovation. 4.28.2022

    “The Preacher” puts it this way in the book of Ecclesiastes; “Nothing new under the sun.” Nope, nope, nope. You may think it is new. You may labor over it and pour your heart into it; you may publish it and even own the copyright. The chances are that at some point, someone somewhere has gone through the same process, arrived at basically the same conclusion, chosen pretty much the same words, and preached or wrote the same thing you have. 

    The Bible comprises what is called a “closed corpus”. It isn’t getting any bigger. No more is being added to the scripture. Our words of explanation, exhortation, and exaltation do not add to scripture though they may, by God’s grace, contribute to the understanding of scripture. The thing about a “closed corpus” is that there is kind of an absolute ceiling about what can be said about it. Just like describing a duck, there are only so many things that can be said. After everything ducky has been described you are pretty much indulging in fantasy. 

    We buy a lot of books. We read commentaries and other secondary literature to help us understand the Scripture and preach it. If we are scrupulous, we try and separate the thoughts of others from our own. There is a point however when the weight of the corpus bears down on us and we hear The Preacher snicker behind us— “I told you, so many books, so little time nothing new!”

    The great tradition is a reminder that we are not the first to preach the gospel. We are not the first to embrace the discipline of study. We may be the point of the spear in our time and place but the lance is long and it reaches back throughout Church history ever since Pentecost. 

    Preachers are hunter-gatherers. We read widely on a variety of subjects to enrich our preaching. History is not a closed corpus. It would seem that there is an endless capacity for change and variety. Yet Solomon’s glare cuts through the pretensions of history as it does through everything else. Humans tend to walk the well-worn behavioral paths of the past. The names and technologies change but the actions seem so repetitive as to appear predetermined. The seemingly endless information at our fingertips reveals not the upward trajectory of humanity but our downward glance. The open contingency of history is undone by halting advances of a fallen race. 

    In preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ we are constantly adapting the focused message of Scripture to an unfocused world. This is not new. This is the job. In Jerusalem greed was an issue. In Jerusalem, hungry widows became a distraction. Paul was mobbed. For John, it was EmpireWe cannot and do not change the Word, but in a fast-moving world we need to be light on our feet in preparing and preaching and we need to have a broad grasp of what has been said before. This leads us back in a rather twisting and wandering way to this month’s broad topic.  

    As scavengers, we should not be copying wholesale or merely repeating any resource for our preaching. The scholarly word for that practice is “plagiarism.” The more vulgar term is “stealing.” It is hard to properly cite everything you use in your preparation. There are circumstances where it is warranted. I do find it odd that anyone who uses commentaries or who reworks and adapts entire books from other preachers would find using a lectionary or integrating insight from the Church year into their work either a restriction or some kind of a compromise. 

    If you are going to read, review, and learn from the work of others why not use that which has been around for 500, 1,000, or 2,000 years? By the way, between this sentence and the prior sentence, I stopped to read scripture over Facebook Live as I do every “normal” working day. I opened LOGOS and clicked on the Today page. One of my cards on that page is the Book of Common Prayer (1928) Daily Office Lectionary. That is the reading I am currently using. Now, I could have looked at my ESV already opened in the program and taken several minutes to choose some scripture. Or I could have chosen from a number of other prepared “reading plans.” This just happens to be the one I’m using. It is of ancient heritage, being derived from the original Book of Common Prayer composed during the English Reformation. I could have reinvented the wheel or fixed a perfectly functional wheel to the work of this day and accomplished quickly what could have become a slog. 

    My goal this entire month has been to encourage you to broaden your palate, expand the reach of your reading, and incorporate some venerable, ancient practices into your daily and weekly work. New things are produced every year to help you do a better job of preaching. Many of those tools are not helps, they are crutches. 

    We do not have to fully adopt the Church year to allow it to teach us a more disciplined approach to worship and to include portions of it in our individual congregational planning. In fact, were we to examine what even the most liturgically driven Churches do we would likely find that each congregation and each preacher in his planning is constantly including, excluding, editing, resetting, altering, and adding to the “set” readings and making them truly local and situational. 

    That is the beauty of our task. Every week we can examine the broad output of nearly 2100 years of preaching, teaching, discussion, exegesis, hermeneutics, and commentary on scripture. In addition to that, we have enormous stores of data and information, facts, and figures to help us illustrate divine truth in a timely fashion. We have a larger toolbox than at any time in the history of Christian preaching. Just remember that some of the older tools are still very functional and that wielding them well will make you a better preacher and a more capable pastor.