For three Sundays recently I was the guest preacher and worship leader at a local Lutheran church. It was the first time I had been back in that role since retiring and leaving my last congregation eleven months ago. While overall it was a good experience, once again I found myself asking, “What are we doing here?”

As I’ve said before, while worship is the foundational activity of any church, it’s also is its biggest problem. Until churches get the “worship thing” fixed they will continue their long downhill slide. This time around, it was the lectionary that stood out to me as the biggest obstacle.

Of the three, this last Sunday was the worst. The lectionary readings were a hopeless jumble of long, nearly incomprehensible texts. (I told the congregation it should be called Hodgepodge Sunday.) We had a bizarre story from Israel’s post-exodus wandering about meat and manna (even the lectionary editors left out portions they thought were too weird), another dose of paternalistic moralizing from James, and Jesus advocating bodily mutilation.

While this is one of the worst examples, the lectionary as a whole is a mess. It needs to be either drastically overhauled or dropped altogether. It sets the worship theme for each Sunday and provides the structure for the year. As a result, it is a straitjacket locking churches into out-of-date theology and spirituality.

The lectionary’s goal, through its selection of Bible texts to be read in worship, is to tell the “Jesus-story” each Sunday and over the course of the year. Yet it is that ancient story that has become meaningless and irrelevant for most people. Jesus as the history-fulfilling savior of the world is a worn-out mythology. It’s bad theology and bad Bible reading.

Scholars today dismiss most attempts to project an overarching theme to the Bible as a whole, or in its parts. The notion that the Bible contains a “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte as 19^th century German scholars dubbed it) is now seen as a spurious Christian projection.

It’s debatable where the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament, is “about” anything. It has countless authors and editors and multiple types of writing within it. If anything, it can be seen as “the story of Israel”, but the Old Testament writers had many views on what that story was, what it meant, and where it was heading in the future.

The notion that the New Testament somehow “completes” the Old (as these titles imply) is now recognized as preposterous. While its writers all knew the Hebrew scriptures, none of them thought they were writing for some Christian “appendix.” And while some of them were aware of each other’s writings, when they did, they often wrote to correct them!

New Testament scholars today agree that each of the gospels have unique messages that are not easily combined or reconciled, and that Paul’s letters are different yet again. Thus, we’re given at least five different understandings of Jesus. Further, it’s now recognized that other views of Jesus are found in ancient non-canonical writings which were intentionally excluded.

The question Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”, hangs over the New Testament and all of church history, down to the present day. The lectionary, however, following the creeds of the imperial church, tries to smooth over all these bumps and cracks. Jesus was born (Christmas), suffered (Lent), died (Holy Week), was raised to heaven (Easter), and then created the church (Pentecost).

While the creeds give no attention to it, the lectionary does devote space to Jesus’ adult life and ministry. In the “green seasons”, or “ordinary time”, we hear of Jesus’ teachings and miraculous deeds. Yet the overall meaning and importance of these “ordinary” readings (often combined confusingly with Old Testament texts) is never clear. Mostly they seem to be a long prelude to the grand finale of the Passion/Easter saga when Jesus “saves” the world.

The mishmash of texts last Sunday, which I had to manhandle to find a thread for a sermon topic, was an extreme but not unusual example. Each Sunday thousands of preachers are confronted with a smorgasbord of texts (including Psalms and “alternate” readings) that are supposed to be the basis for a message to their congregations. Not surprisingly, those messages today are all over the map, often having little to do with the readings, and often mediocre or even awful.

It is probably true that ministry no longer attracts “the best and the brightest” and preaching skills aren’t what they used to be. But I can’t help thinking that the decline in preaching is mostly due to the near incomprehensibility of Bible texts. Because of their training and being part of the culture like everyone else, clergy know too much today to take these ancient texts at face value, and neither they nor their congregations take the salvation story seriously anymore.

That’s not to say the Bible is of no value. Far from it. But it doesn’t have the same value it had even a hundred years ago. Nor does it need to be viewed anymore as the only text that can contribute to the life of Christians and the church community. It’s impossible now not to recognize that writings like the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the Taoist Tao Te Ching, the Buddhist Sutras, the Koran, and many other texts of the world religions can all be as meaningful and profound as the Bible. Then there are the non-canonical writings of early Christians, like the gospel of Thomas, the writings of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, and the works of countless mystics, theologians, philosophers, and sages, down to the present day, who continued to explore and develop their respective ancient religious heritage.

Of course, this bounty of religious and spiritual written tradition would burst the bounds of a traditional lectionary, which is why its purpose and format would have to change. Why, for example, does there need to be one set of texts for all congregations to follow? A new cottage industry could be created of talented people creating curated selections of religious and spiritual writings to be pondered in public gatherings and for personal devotions. In doing so, these texts would no longer be seen as in competition with each other, but rather, as engaging in a global spiritual conversation from ancient times to the present.

Such a reform would also lead to reexamining why we read such texts at all: what’s the purpose? The simple answer would have to be that we believe they will somehow lead us to an encounter with God, the Center of our lives, and the Ground of Being itself. And we would read widely because we no longer are following the spiritual quests of particular tribes, ethnicities, or nations but of the entire planet. Humanity today is ever more unsure of life’s meaning and value, while at the same time careening ever closer to catastrophe. By themselves, the ancient religions are too small for the global task at hand.

Nor is the spiritual quest guided only by writing. There is an ancient and broad tradition that all of nature communicates the divine to us. This has been largely forgotten by modernism but is slowly being rediscovered. In today’s meditation from Richard Rohr, there is a quotation from Franciscan friar Dan Riley. He writes about how the ancient monastic devotional practice of lectio divina, or holy reading, should be expanded beyond the pages of the Bible.

Lectio is not restricted to monasteries or monks or “the religious” or even solely to sacred texts but is instead an activity “in the sphere of love”—God’s presence—that is holy and whole everywhere. It is time for what was once held in monasteries, friaries, and churches to now spill out into the homes and public spaces of our world. It’s time for what was once reserved for Bible reading to now also spill out into Creation, the incarnate Word….

Each creature is a vestige of God’s creative action and an expression of God’s loving Word. This is the blessing of Franciscan Lectio…. Lectio is about reading or focusing or listening long enough and deeply enough so that beauty, depth, and connectivity emerge; peace and freedom inspire action and service….  

Eventually a new light comes on as we are brought into unity. We open our hearts to the conversion that is part of the habit and practice of Lectio—a conversion through reading the sacred cosmos: the Christ that is in everyone and everything. We read the Word slowly—in one verse, one creature, one face, one journey, one song—as one cosmic story unfolding with grace as our guide.  

Worship and the readings that shape it must evolve and expand for this time in which we live. As Riley says, our focus must now be on “the one cosmic story” that can guide everyone to true peace and freedom. Why would we want to read and listen to anything less?

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