Lectionary and Mosaic Bible – Pentecost + 3
I’m ending a hiatus in blogging of just over a month. I see my last post was dated May 8, 2010, but I was pretty sparse for a month before that. I’ll get a post up about what I was doing during that time. No, nothing adventurous; just trying to do necessary work to grow my publishing business.
This morning I looked again at the lectionary passages for the week, and compared them to the Mosaic Bible. Three of the lectionary passages do have material connected with them in The Mosaic Bible
This simply reaffirms the way in which I think the Mosaic Bible is most useful for those who already use a reading plan oriented to the church year–it provides a rich range of readings that relate to the various church seasons that will be helpful in lesson and sermon preparation. For those who do not use a reading program tied to the church calendar, I think the Mosaic Bible provides a more friendly starting point than simply diving into the lectionary. Often the lectionary texts prove a challenging combination–individually helpful, but seeming quite scattered as a group.
The focus for this lectionary reading seems to be evil men. One interesting twist is just how you read the story in Luke. Naboth’s vineyard gives you a pretty clear set of bad guys and good guys, with Ahab in the role of very bad guy. One interesting approach might be to contrast the response of Jesus to the woman who is a sinner as opposed to the judgment meted out to Ahab. That could lead to really interesting discussions of varying types of sin as well. No matter how often we claim that sin is sin, I think we really do have “clean” sins and “dirty” sins. Most commonly “dirty” sins are the ones you commit, and “clean” sins are the ones I commit. (See the host in the story in Luke.)
I find the possible range of topics presented by each collection of lectionary texts quite fascinating, and this week was no exception.
