Sermon 10.4.26 What is a Lectionary and Why does it Matter? The Biblical Vineyard Metaphor
“He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!”
Have you ever thought about how hearing readings from a lectionary shapes your experience of the Bible?
Lection, means “reading,” so the lectionary is the prescribed set of readings that we do each Sunday; Hebrew Bible lesson, Psalm, Epistle (letter), and Gospel readings.
Today, we use the Revised Common Lectionary, which came out in 1994, and was part of a process to get all of the mainline denominations and Roman Catholics on the same page after the Council of Vatican II in the late 1960’s.
It uses a three-year cycle of readings, and if you’ll believe it, this year marks our third year going through this same set of readings together.
Before, Vatican II the last time the lectionary was updated was at the Council of Trent in 1570, which used the one-year cycle that goes all the way back to at least 400 of the Common Era.
According to Gail R. O’Day and Charles Hackett, who literally wrote the book on the Revised Common Lectionary, Christians have used schedules of readings in some form since the beginning of Christianity.
In early Christianity, what that meant was that particular readings of Scripture, by which they meant the Hebrew Scriptures, were read at certain times of the year, especially at Easter and Pentecost.
This began even before the letters of Paul, or even the Gospels were fully formed and accepted as biblical books; a process known as canonization.
And, of course, all of it goes back to religious observances of the cycle of the year that were common in both Jewish and Hellenistic faith traditions.
It is much messier and more complicated than we have time to go into, but suffice it to say that we’ve been at this for a long time.
There are two major reasons that the lectionary exists besides just the fact that we have been doing some version of it for the past 2,000 years.
The first is that it helps us to imbue our ordinary cycle of life and seasons with the extraordinary news of God’s Salvation.
The cycle of Easter happening in the Spring as the days lengthen and winter ends, as the early flowers begin to defy the bitter cold,
The commemoration of All of the Saints and All of the Hallows, which will happen in less than a month as the leaves begin to fall and the earth heads into its dormant season,
The celebration of the birth of Christ around the time of the longest night of the year, the silent and holy night.
Having certain selections of Scripture set aside for certain times both teaches us something about who we think Jesus is, and it also gives us a chance to get out of our day-to-day calendars.
It imbues the universe and nature with meaning.
The second thing that the lectionary does is that it democratizes and opens up Scripture for everyone.
We may not notice that as much now, where people go to Bible studies on a Thursday morning, or have a Bible at their desk or nightstand and can read Scripture whenever they want.
For most of Christian history, the reading and hearing of Scripture at the mass was the one of the only times that ordinary people might have any personal contact with the Bible.
For most of Christian history, people didn’t have direct access to the Bible either because it was so expensive to print that there were very few copies around for public use,
Or, as we often take for granted, the literacy rate was so low that even if you could find a Bible, an ordinary Christian probably couldn’t read it.
As the Bible spread, another issue came up; the Bible, the Jewish Scriptures written in Hebrew, and the New Testament written in Greek, or translated into Latin, were eventually in a different language than most hearers spoke.
That was actually one of the big pieces of Martin Luther’s Reformation in the early 1500s; that the Scriptures should be translated and heard in the native language of the people.
Yet, even after the translation of the Bible into German and English and all of the other languages, the cheaper reproduction of the Bible using printing presses,
Hearing the Bible in Church was the most common place for Christians to hear and reflect on the Scriptures; and I would guess, even with our phenomenal literacy rates in comparison to the ancients, that this probably still true today.
Many of us probably get most of our experience with the Bible through the lectionary.
So, I began by asking a question; have you ever thought about how hearing readings from a lectionary shapes your experience of the Bible?
In the first place, we almost never hear the Hebrew Scriptures or consider them on their own.
We read them with readings from the New Testament, and those lessons usually form the lens through which we view the older Scriptures.
We may mention that the Prophet Isaiah lived around the time of the Babylonian and Assyrian captivities, or try to establish what part of King David’s reign a certain psalm might have come from,
But, our real interest as Christians is often how those ancient readings are summed up, or point toward Jesus.
Often the lectionary does this by presenting us with themes that connect all of our readings;
Like our lessons last week, where I pulled out the theme of making choices in each of the Scriptures, and yet in the end, I tied that theme back to Jesus’ choice to face Jerusalem and the cross.
That theme was rather abstract given the readings. It was there, but none of the Scriptures said, “Hey, I’m a lesson about making choices.”
This week, our main theme is concrete, “God had a vineyard, here’s what happened next.”
In weaving together that theme to teach us something about the world that we inhabit, the lectionary writers’ choices affect how we think about this topic.
Let me illustrate.
I’m not sure which of these Hebrew passages came first; Isaiah or the Psalm.
Both are notoriously difficult to date, other than knowing that the Prophet Isaiah probably lived after the time of King David and after David’s kingdom had split between Judah and Israel.
The kings that he reports about lived in the 8th century BCE.
But, most scholars believe that the Book of Isaiah was written in three sections and only the first 39 chapters belong to the original prophet. Good thing for us is that we’re reading chapter 5.
The Psalms report about themselves that they were either written by King David himself or his court musician Asaph, well before Isaiah lived.
No matter when they were written, whether decades or centuries apart, they originally had little to do with each other except that we can see that the vineyard as a metaphor was a way for ancient people of faith to try to understand God.
But, when you put them in a lectionary together, they actually form very interesting dialogue partners.
As a song of lament for the community, Psalm 80 uses the vineyard metaphor to ask God why calamities are allowed to befall the chosen people.
Now, we don’t know the context of this lament.
Was it just ordinary pillaging by the super-powers of their day? Israel/Palestine has always sat on a major trade route between empires.
Was it some major catastrophe in war against their smaller neighbors? They got into a lot of fights with the Moabites.
We don’t really know, and the psalm is not very specific, it just calls the enemy, “neighbors.”
And yet, when you put this reading next to and in dialogue with Isaiah 5, which shares its vineyard theme, something new happens.
Now, we have an answer to the question.
The people of the psalm ask, why is this happening to us and how long will it go on.
Isaiah, now closer to the time of the Babylonian captivity, gives God’s answer to the question; “I planted you as a vineyard and you grew wild grapes. I expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!”
Now, if you are familiar with the rest of Isaiah, or any of the other prophets, if you’ve read the Books of Samuel, Kings, or Chronicles, they will give you accounts of what the injustice may have entailed.
But what stands out is that these acts were not just singular problems of ignoring God’s Laws, or making mistakes, but that the entire society had taken on ways of injustice as an everyday way of life.
So, I think this shows us a little bit about how the lectionary changes the way we view Scriptures, but now let’s add the New Testament.
This week, in Matthew 21, as Jesus is escalating his rhetoric toward the people who are looking for ways to kill him, he also uses the vineyard metaphor.
He uses it to predict his own death, yes, but when read next to these first two readings, he is also giving a concrete example of the injustice that Isaiah has hinted at.
So now, we are looking at Isaiah through the lens of Jesus’ parable.
What does injustice look like? It looks like that vineyard that Isaiah spoke about, about a people who kill God’s messengers, and who will soon kill God’s very Son.
This is not about breaking commandments or religious laws, as Isaiah may have intended, the injustice and bloodshed are now a people so far gone that they are killing prophets, not just seizing each other’s land or failing to keep the Sabbath.
The lectionary has set up this dichotomy for us, and it teaches us something even as it directs us.
And just in case you aren’t convinced yet, what if instead of this Gospel reading, we heard the other vineyard story from a couple of weeks ago in this context?
You remember the one about the laborers who went into the vineyard and got paid daily wages?
Same vineyard as a starting metaphor, and yet, through the lens of the parable, we might look at the injustice that Isaiah decries as the failure of people to understand God’s Grace and impartiality.
What I think that I have showed you this morning is the influence that the lectionary has on how we view Scripture.
Now, to conclude, I want to tell you why it matters.
Before 1974, most Christians only heard a one-year lectionary cycle, which means they actually heard the same Scriptures every year; so even if they went to church every Sunday religiously, they didn’t hear that much Scripture.
After the three-year cycle came in, we began to hear more Scripture, three times more (more or less).
So, do you know what percentage of the Scriptures we hear, if we come to church every Sunday for a full three-year cycle?
It won’t surprise you to know that I googled it.
According to a couple of very earnest Roman Catholic researchers, we hear about 14% of the Hebrew Bible, 55% or the psalms, 72% of the non-gospel New Testament, and 90% of the Gospels.
That’s what we get by listening to the Scriptures and hearing a sermon every Sunday for about 30-40 minutes per week.
I would guess, and this is just conjecture, that most Christians spend five times that amount of time per day either on Facebook, or Tik-Tok, or watching the news or going to see the Bengals.
In churches that do not have the lectionary, even Bible churches, the percentage of exposure to the Scriptures is even smaller.
In fact, I once met a pastor that bragged to me that he had spent two years of Sunday sermons just going through the letters to the Corinthians.
I said, “what about the rest of the Bible?”
What I want to say to you today is that, as we see the world that surrounds us and probably even our own actions that cause us to seek forgiveness on a weekly basis;
Those things that we wish that we ourselves wouldn’t do on a weekly basis.
When we see a society that continues to be okay with capital punishment,
Or winning at all costs,
When we look at the continuing tragedy of Gaza and the West Bank settlements,
or the growth of anti-semitism and islamophobia,
or violence on our own streets,
when we wonder with the psalmist why our vineyard keeps coming under attack,
maybe we’ll make a connection between the ways that we have uprooted God’s good grapes and replaced them with wild grapes that have become severely unrooted from the soil of our Scriptures;
and recognize that even those who read Scripture the most, those who like the Apostle Paul may have reason to be confident, must still be humble, not claiming their own salvation as a right,
but as something worked out, prayed for, but ultimately in the hands of Jesus.
Something not already obtained, or a goal reached, but something to continually strive for.
If we want real justice and real righteousness, then we have to know the Bible.
The lectionary helps, Bible Study helps, but until we get more people to get into the Word on a regular basis, to care more about seeking more and better questions than seeking answers,
To be more curious about what God might be up to, than certain about who God hates,
Then the wild grapes will continue to grow until all of the hedges and walls are gone, all the water has run dry.
We all need to tend the vineyard, because we all receive the same wage, if the vineyard is trampled.
I pray that it not be said of our generation: “He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!” I guess only time will tell. Amen.
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