"The Lectionary is Designed to Protect the Church from Idiot Preachers"

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2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19

A dead horse I routinely beat is the deficiencies of the lectionary, the three-year cycle of scripture readings assigned for the liturgical calendar.

The version most widely used by mainline Protestants is the Revised Common Lectionary. For each Sunday, the RCL assigns an Old Testament reading (except when it doesn’t), a Psalm, an Epistle or, on dashingly rare occasions, a reading from Revelation, and finally a Gospel reading. As it’s a three-year cycle, Matthew, Mark, and Luke receive emphasis accordingly. The Gospel of John meanwhile gets treated piecemeal, which is unfortunate given that John, more so than the Synoptic Gospels, stands apart as demanding sustained attention to its high Christology and nuanced narrative.

As a professor at Princeton once griped to our class, “The lectionary is designed to protect the church from idiot preachers.”

I have as many problems with the lectionary as the lectionary has Sundays devoted to John 6. Seriously, Year B has five Sundays devoted to John’s account of Jesus’s sandwich powers.

Among the reasons I think the lectionary sucks:

The lectionary consistently treats Old Testament passages as proof-texts for the paired New Testament readings. Thus, the lectionary unsubtly conveys that the Old Testament is but historical background material for understanding the New Testament. The Old Testament is fulfilled by the New rather than authoritative in its own right. This is not how the Old Testament functioned for the early church. What we now call the Old Testament was the only scripture known to and authoritative for the apostles. Accordingly, the New Testament has a different, more provisional authority than the Old Testament. Whereas the scriptures of Israel were the unquestioned Bible of Mary’s boy and so authoritative, the New Testament canon came together under emergency duress. Now however, to the extent preachers even deal with the Old Testament texts, the lectionary’s pairings tempt preachers to commit one of two heresies, Marcionism (positing that the God of the Old Testament is not the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ) or Supercessionism (presenting the church as having supplanted synagogue in God’s purposes).

If you think the above point is hyperbolic, then consider the next reason I believe the lectionary sucks. During the season of Eastertide, the New Testament Book of Acts replaces readings from the Old Testament. Not only does this again encourage supercessionist readings of scripture, it obscures the fact that resurrection is a Jewish belief. Is it any wonder, then, that church people routinely still make cringey comments about Jews?

The Gospel passages assigned across all three years consistently privilege moments from the ministry of Jesus rather than to the Passion of Christ. You may have noticed that this is exactly the reverse of how the Gospels themselves weight their narratives. We should not surprised, then, that so much of the preaching in the churches is Glawspel, moralism in Jesus drag.

The lectionary leaves out approximately three-quarters of the Bible. I am not exaggerating. Over three years the church hears only a fourth of the scriptures, all of which— the dogma claims— are inspired by God, passages he has promised to pass through if we but sit and wait.

Much of what the lectionary leaves out are the Bible’s women. The Protestant Church does not simply have a Mary problem. We neglect all her sisters. Among the ladies left out by the lectionary: Dinah, both Tamars, Rahab, Achsah, the daughters of Zelophehad, Jael, Jephthah’s daughter, the Levite’s concubine, Rizpah, Abigail, Michal, Merab, the Shunammite woman, Huldah, Priscilla, Philip’s four prophetess daughters, Phoebe, Junia, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, Julia, and the elect lady of II John. As my friend Sarah Hinlicky Wilson notes, in Matthew’s year, lectionary leaves out the story about the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet, of which Jesus (ironically) said, “Wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”

Something else with which the lectionary fails to trust the church and her preachers, the troublesome texts of scripture and its themes of judgment and wrath, the latter’s absence can account for the prominence in the church’s preaching of Moral Exemplar interpretations of the atonement. That is, Jesus’s death on the cross does not satisfy, propitiate, rectify, or deliver. On the cross, Jesus merely models for us selfless, self-sacrificing love that in turn moves our hearts to turn from our sin.

Exhibit A:

This coming Sunday’s Old Testament passage is— catch the verse notation— 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19.

Whenever the lectionary skips over seven verses and chops another in half (12b), you can be certain the story is one that Roald Dahl would love.

What does the lectionary attempt to protect the church from this Sunday?The unfortunate story of Uzzah that interrupts King David dancing before the ark of God:

When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen shook it. The anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God. David was angry because the Lord had burst forth with an outburst upon Uzzah; so that place is called Perez-uzzah, to this day. David was afraid of the Lord that day; he said, “How can the ark of the Lord come into my care?” So David was unwilling to take the ark of the Lord into his care in the city of David; instead David took it to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite. The ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite three months; and the Lord blessed Obed-edom and all his household.

When approaching a disquieting passage like 2 Samuel 6, the reader should remember the assertion in Hebrews 4.2 (and this is also a text the lectionary leaves out):

"The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

In other words, according to the author of Hebrews, the word does not record; the word works surgery upon us.

The word does not record.

The word works surgery upon us.

Scripture is not a tale of what God did. Scripture is the tool with which God does.

In his book On the Inspiration of Scripture, the theologian Robert Jenson points to the many medieval paintings which show the Holy Spirit hovering beyond a biblical writer as he puts his witness to the page to compose the canon.

It is our tendency to think of the Spirit’s relation to the scriptures as extrinsic— outside of us— and historic— back before us— that is the chief error that has distorted the church’s understanding of the inspiration of scripture.

“The pictures that show the moment of inspiration as the Spirit bending over a busily writing prophet or apostle,” Jenson writes, “depict the wrong scene altogether.”

Because, of course, as we acknowledge at every baptism and in every prayer meeting, “the mighty acts of God” go on today.

The apostolic church enjoys no advantage over us in terms of the Spirit’s activity.

To make it plain:

The scriptures were not inspired by the Spirit.

The Spirit inspires the scriptures.

The Spirit inspires with the scriptures.

The doctrine of inspiration does not mean that the Bible is a record of reliable information about God. Of course that’s not what it means— rabbits don’t chew the cud, as the Book of Leviticus seems to think.

The doctrine of inspiration does not mean that the Bible is a record of reliable information about God.The doctrine of inspiration means that the Bible is the reliable way God acts savingly in our lives.

The correct picture of scripture’s inspired nature is not the picture that shows the Spirit bending over the narrator of 1 Kings or Paul as he writes to the church in Corinth. The correct picture is, well, you and me, waiting like Moses in the cleft of the rock, for the Lord to pass through a passage of scripture: “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be your living word…”

Just so—

When it comes to scripture, the question is not How.How can we know the scriptures are true?When it comes to the Bible, the questions are Who and Why.Who has given us the scriptures?And why has the Lord given them to us?That is, who is he making us to be?

In other words, before you have a definition of scripture’s authority, you must be able to answer the question, “Saved for what? To what End has the Lord acted for us in Jesus Christ?”

Once again, the passage from the Book of Hebrews provides the answer.  Your sin belongs to Christ and his righteousness is your permanent perfect record; so that, we would become both a temple and a kingdom of priests for the sake of the world.

Fundamentally, the word is no different than water, wine, or bread. The Lord gives us the scriptures in order to make us holy.

The Lord gives us the scriptures in order to make us holy by our encountering him there.

He uses scripture to do surgery on us. He uses scripture to cut away the parts of us that do not comport with him. As scripture itself attests, "the word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, cutting joint from marrow, and exhuming the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

If the Bible is not a record of reliable information about God but is instead the reliable way God acts savingly in our lives, then it surely follows that God can use even the troubling texts of scripture to sanctify us.

In fact, this is what the ancient church fathers called “spiritual exegesis.”

According to the church father Origen, scripture is inspired in that it is divinely designed exactly to elicit our troubled response that in turn sanctifies us.

That is to say, the Lord intends for us to trip over certain scriptures so that we fall in to the mercy of the true God. 

Scripture sanctifies us not by merely reporting information about God.

For example, “God is love.”

Scripture sanctifies us by catching us up in our assumptions about God.

According to Origen, the Lord providentially sticks stumbling blocks into the Bible precisely so that we will trip up and tumble over and fall into his gracious and loving arms.

In other words, the ugly parts and nasty bits are there for a purpose. Or, as the Protestant Reformers put it, we are mortified and vivified in our encounter with the troublesome texts of scripture. They open us up and expose us. And, so doing, they heal us.

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