The last few years have had no scarce supply of headline-grabbing events in The Episcopal Church. A less widely publicized happening, but one with great potential effect upon the weekly experience of those in the pews, was the formal adoption at last year’s General Convention of the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL). This thumbnail introduction is for those who may have missed this action, and the years of discussion that preceded it.

The RCL owes its existence to the “new” lectionary of the Roman Catholic Church (1969), which expanded a historic single-year plan of scriptural readings to a three-year schema. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer lectionary adopted this Roman lectionary more or less intact. Meanwhile, the North American Consultation on Common Texts (CCT), a committee of Roman Catholic and protestant liturgists and scholars, sought to improve on the Roman document, particularly its choices of readings from the Hebrew scriptures. The CCT produced a trial document (the Common Lectionary) in 1983. The RCL followed in 1992.

The RCL is already widely in use in North American protestant Christendom — at least, in protestant churches where any lectionary is used—and elsewhere, particularly in the Anglican Communion (though sometimes with significant adaptations, as in the current lectionary of the Church of England). Interestingly, despite having essentially started the wave of lectionary-revision in motion, and while continuing in dialogue with CCT, the Roman Catholic Church does not use the RCL, but sticks with the version of the three-year lectionary that started it all.

Authorized for trial use in certain designated Episcopal congregations since the mid-1980s, the RCL has been available as an option throughout the church, by diocesan permission, since 1994. Many printed and online lectionary-related resources already encompass the RCL. But the 75th General Convention’s decision in 2006 goes further, making the RCL the official Sunday lectionary of The Episcopal Church, superseding that printed on pages 889-921 of The Book of Common Prayer (although the text assignments for certain holy days not covered in the RCL remain intact). This change takes effect in just a few weeks, on the First Sunday of Advent, Year A — though the resolution also provides for local deferrals by one three-year cycle, thereby potentially putting off the change until Advent, 2010.

Like the familiar BCP lectionary, the RCL is a schedule of readings for corporate worship, providing four readings for each Sunday, including a selection from the Psalter (though see below, for a new wrinkle). The epistle and gospel readings assigned in the RCL are broadly identical to those familiar to us from the BCP. So what’s going to be different?

The traits distinct to the RCL come in the passages chosen from the Hebrew Bible. The 1969 Roman lectionary marked the first systematic re-appearance of readings from the Hebrew scriptures in Catholic eucharistic worship in more than 1,000 years. They were equally “new” to Episcopalians when enshrined in the 1979 BCP. The proponents of the RCL contend that, while seeking to engage the Hebrew Bible, the

new three-year lectionary privileged certain stories for the sake of their thematic connection with episodes in the gospels, a practice that led to fragmentation and discontinuity in congregations’ experience of those ancient narratives. Inevitably, vast tracts of the Hebrew Bible were neglected in the process. The RCL was formulated largely to address this concern.

Still, through the first half of the liturgical year, from Advent through Eastertide, the first lesson in each week’s readings appears largely as in the 1969 Roman lectionary. But in the long season after Pentecost, the RCL does something quite new (the “wrinkle” cited above). Here, it provides two parallel tracks of readings for each of the three years of the cycle. One track, the “thematic” one, essentially preserves the pattern of 1969: The readings from the Old Testament (including the psalm assignments) connect thematically with the day’s gospel. In the other track (the “narrative” one, preferred by the RCL’s framers), the first reading follows a particular story line across several weeks (though stories still must be rather abridged to fit into the available time span). This latter track pursues narratives drawn out of Genesis and the story of Moses (Year A), the story of the Davidic kingship (Year B), and the stories of Elijah, Elisha, and the minor prophets (Year C). The Hebrew Bible

reading in each track also has a psalm assignment that fits it appropriately.

What results in this “narrative” track may feel familiar to those accustomed to the BCP’s Daily Office Lectionary, a plan in which biblical books are (at least broadly) read right through across a few days or weeks. The office readings nearly always leave preachers groping in vain for thematic interconnections. Their point does not lie in such connections, but in the day-to-day continuity of the separate narrative lines. Now a similar week-by-week continuity is available as an option in the Sunday Eucharist as well — but it comes at the price of the thematic coherence within a given Sunday to which we have grown accustomed under the Roman/BCP lectionary.

It is important to note that the two Ordinary Time tracks of the RCL are not like a weekly menu: One is not meant simply to pick and choose the Hebrew Bible readings on a week-by-week basis. Once a congregation starts down a given track in May or June, the intent is that they will pursue it right through until Advent. (We have, in fact, the potential for what is essentially a six-year, rather than a three-year cycle, with the only difference between one Year A and the next being the selections of readings and graduals from the Old Testament. This sort of cycle-by-cycle alternation of tracks is nowhere mandated or even recommended, but congregations wanting to get maximum exposure to the breadth of the Hebrew Bible might want to consider such an approach.)

One widespread source of concern is that parishes already have substantial investment in a variety of materials, from gospel books to text-inserts to Sunday school curricula, all for the BCP lectionary. Even if budgets permit the acquisition of new materials, Church Publishing, while surely doing its best to make materials available in a timely way, still does not have most of the relevant offerings available for delivery as of this writing. And it will be a long time before the whole apparatus of the church’s liturgical and musical resources geared to the lectionary has managed the conversion mandated by General Convention.

Surely in time, these issues will work themselves out, and materials will be available to support the ministry of the word. While that work goes forward, if you take the RCL transition into your own hands, the Liturgy and Music Office of The Episcopal Church has prepared a BCP-formatted version of the RCL: just follow the links from here.

In fact, alarming as it may sound, the conversion to the RCL may prove to be not a bang, but a whimper. Parishes opting for the thematic track for the weeks after Pentecost will notice relatively few differences from the lectionary they already use. And even those opting for the other track will hear much that is familiar. It is in the season after Pentecost that the challenges and opportunities will come, as preachers, musicians, and listeners alike seek to make the most sense out of the heretofore marginalized texts we will now be able to hear from the Hebrew Bible.

I suspect that the transition will bring out its best results in the ways that it invites (and compels) us all, clergy, musicians, and lay people alike, to re-engage with scripture, to hear many neglected stories again — or perhaps for the first time. My hope is that it will, in the long run, help us all to transform telling “the old, old story” into singing a new song. ❏

Alan Lewis is the director of music at Calvary Church, Pittsburgh, Pa. This article is based on an article which appeared in The Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians in December, 2006.

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