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September 2009, Page 8.
Index of articles:
by subject,
by date.
In this issue:
(September 2009)
Back to church,
Song,
Question,
CAP Money,
Lectionary.
Reading the bible now and then
When you tour around England on your holidays, you may be the sort of person who likes to visit cathedrals? If so, there’s just a chance that you might stay for a service when you call, for they usually have Evensong each evening, and quite often there may be a visiting choir to sing the psalms and the anthem.
So what bible readings will you hear? The answer is that the Church of England has a scheme for daily bible reading, morning and evening, and you’ll get readings from the scheme. The plus is that over a year you cover the whole bible. The two minuses are (i) that you may well catch the middle of an Old Testament story, maybe quite a violent bit, and quite often something that doesn’t make sense if you read it just by itself, and (ii) the Old Testament and New Testament readings aren’t linked in any way, so you’ll get two readings on two quite different subjects.
For a long while the people who take services in cathedrals have been concerned about this, so in July, General Synod considered a new scheme (the “pillar lectionary”) for church services at which the majority of people there are one-off visitors. Its basic idea is to choose readings that cover most of the New Testament, and then for each day choose an Old Testament reading that links with the theme. So you get two readings on the same subject, and you rarely get marooned in the middle of a story.
I think this is a very sensible idea. Of course I think we Christians should read the bible regularly and try to cover the whole of it - but realistically, most visitors to Cathedrals won’t do that unless something strikes them. And it’s more likely to strike them if the two readings are both on the same topic and link with each other.
That’s not to say there aren’t any faults with the suggested scheme, and in fact there’s a big problem with its use of the apocrypha - the books later than about 300BC which were written in Greek, not Hebrew, and which weren’t recognised as fully scriptural by the Jews during the time of the early church. It’s easy to choose well-meaning passages about “wisdom” from these books, and the compilers of the lectionary have chosen 17 apocryphal passages instead of Old Testament ones. I’ve written in to ask them to change these choices; but on the whole I think the new scheme will be a great help to cathedrals in their mid-week services.
John Hartley