Early Church, Why a calendar, lectionary, and collects?

Why Did the Early Church adopt a Church Calendar with a Lectionary of Proper Scripture Readings?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            A blogger, whom I follow on Twitter, asked his readers for possible advice on his desire to do a blog using the Episcopalian lectionary.  I gave him a recommendation, pointing out that traditionally one of the ways Episcopalians were trained to handle the lectionary readings was to connect the weekly collect to the Scripture readings.  Having spent most of my life in non-liturgical churches I imagine some readers are wondering what a lectionary and a collect is.  I will begin by defining those terms and then I will show how the early church came to making use of such strange things as lectionaries and collects.

            There are three concepts (calendar, collect, lectionary) important to understand in simplicity for this blog to make sense.  First, this blog relates specifically to churches that make use of a calendar, marking various seasons of a church year.  A church calendar takes a yearly journey through the central redemptive events of Christ’s life and the basic teachings of his ministry.  I will describe more on the concept of a church calendar shortly.  Within the church calendar there are differing focuses of attention presented on each Sunday.  Thus during Christmas, the focus is on the incarnation, on the Biblical accounts surrounding the birth of Christ, etc.  During Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, there are a number of services observing the partaking of the last Supper, Christ’s betrayal, his arrest, trial, Good Friday and the Resurrection.  Appropriate prayers and reading are assigned to focus the church’s attention in these particular times of worship.

The prescribed prayers are called collects.  For example the collect for the past week, beginning the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity reads “Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.”  The early church, within a relatively short time had assigned Scripture readings from what is known as a lectionary to guide the gathering church’s meditation especially at times when the gathered church met to partake of the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, Eucharist or the Divine Liturgy, depending on what your tradition names the observance.  The scheduled readings from the Lectionary came to be described by the church as Proper’s.  They were the proper, or at the least the preferred texts for those sermons based on the teaching being done in accordance with the church calendar.

I am sure this all sounds very terrible to someone accustomed to a minister getting to choose his own sermon text as the Spirit leads him.  But if we pause to consider how this practice began to take shape and what it meant for the early church I think we can begin to see how the practice benefitted the early church; which was in many ways more united in word, doctrine, and practice than at almost any other time in Christian history.

First the early church probably needed something like the church calendar.  There were no modern printing presses, no modern inexpensive ways to put literature in people’s hands, and no mass production of Bibles.  Bibles were not nearly as available for everyone to have and own as they are now.  A Bible would cost as much as a free laborer might earn in an entire year.  The typical Roman in the first or the second century was likely not even as fortunate as a free laborer.  Probably half of the Roman Empire’s inhabitants in the earliest Christian era were slaves, and not many masters were going to buy high priced Bibles for their slaves.  The early Christian church was often filled with slaves and they had no Authorized Version sitting on their desktop, nor even a Gideon’s Pocket New Testament to bring to worship services.  They generally relied on someone teaching them from a copy of a portion of the Scriptures at a church service.

A second reason the early Church had for using a Church calendar with assigned Scriptures and prayers, is that this was how worship had been done within Judaism.  The Christian Church was at first a Jewish sect that became independent of Judaism after large numbers within the Jewish population did not embrace the Gospel of Christ.  But for the Apostles, including the Apostle Paul, proclaiming the Gospel meant preaching first to those who were Jewish and then also to those who were Gentiles.  Within Judaism there had been a yearly calendar with holy days; including days of feasting and fasting.  There were holy seasons like Passover, the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement), and the Festival of Lights (Chanukah).  Early Christian leaders quickly recognized that as Christ came to fulfill the Law that the Hebrew calendar of religious observances could be easily converted to a Christian calendar in which such seasons as Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day and Pentecost could be observed and explained to the Church through the Bible readings describing the life of Christ around such seasons in the first half of the Christian year.

This was how an early church with little opportunity to own the Scriptures came to learn of the life of Christ.  The gathered church worshipped Christ with a focus based on a church calendar.  It had prayers it learned to pray for the week in conjunction with the message they heard based on the Scripture passages for the week.  They joined the singing of Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to what they had heard and what they learned to pray during the week.  For example of a hymn associated with the church calendar listen to the music and look at the words found on the link of this favored hymn “O come, O come, Emmanuel” which continues to be sung during the season of advent when the Church was taught to consider how in the times of the Old Testament God’s people were called upon to wait for Israel’s great redemption in Christ.  So Israel learned to wait, watch and hope, and so the church was called upon to remember how that had been the case as we experienced the Advent season prior to the celebration of Christ’s birth on Christmas Day.

The church learned the life of Christ by observing Advent, Christmas, then about how Christ was manifested through certain events from the coming of the Wise men to his baptism by John the Baptist, in the season known as Epiphany (which means a revelation).  We learn of how Christ suffered for us and sought to hunger for our righteousness in his Wilderness experience during our observation of Lent.  We then see Christ in holy week as he comes to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, has his supper with the disciples, is betrayed, arrested, deserted, crucified, buried, and then risen from the dead according to the Scriptures.  We then rejoice in his resurrection and then we learn of how he ascended into heaven after forty days of being seen alive by witnesses after his resurrection, and then we learn that he is united to the people of God by the gift of the Holy Spirit to the believer within the Church on Pentecost.  Pentecost is the final Sunday of the first half of the church year.  In that first half of the church year we journey week by week to see and hear in the Gospel proclaimed the great events of Christ’s redemptive life.

In the second half of the church year we learn the basic teachings of Christ.  We are taught about the the purgation of sin (or in Protestant terminology, reckoning your selves as dead to sin); and of illumination or discovering the way of a holy life in Christ, and ultimately we are taught of how all this is accomplished and is brought to completeness though our union with Christ.  We are led by Christ's teaching to repent from dead works, to being enlightened to see and learn the way of the true life in following after him, and to be able to see our identity and the fullness of our sanctification in our eternal union with Christ.

This was how the early Church taught slaves, illiterate, and the poor to be wise, rich, and full in Christ.  It was how a Roman Empire that enslaved half of the people living under its domain was turned upside down by a Lord who was put to death; but whose followers gathered together on the morning of the first day of the week to celebrate how their Lord had died and now lived.  Many of our Lord’s redeemed were in Roman eyes mere women, children, and slaves; the nobodies of the earth.  But a few were wealthy and wise, and some had even believed within Caesar’s own household.  In a short time, it was being said that they were turning the world upside down.

In our next blog we will consider if this method is outdated when we have Bibles in every home to be read at our leisure, or if there is something in this model of ancient worship that may well be able to be commended to our modern age.