My First Year Preaching the Lectionary

Sermon Reflection || Year B: Christ the King

How did someone raised in and who preaches for the Church of Christ get the idea to preach through the lectionary?

Believe me, I’ve asked myself the same question, but it’s actually quite simple. Several years ago, I read a fascinating book called The Mystery of Christ: The Lectionary as Spiritual Experience. In it, Keating seeks to show how following the church calendar can improve someone’s walk with God by taking them through the life of Jesus over and over.

The Spring, which is usually a time of joy, is balanced by Lent, which focuses on repentance and the death of Jesus. The Winter, in which many experience seasonal depression, is balanced by Advent, which focuses on “Joy to the World”!

The church calendar takes one through every season of Jesus’s life, and it helps them to follow Jesus wherever he might lead.

This idea intrigued me, and after speaking with several friends about how to use lectionary as well as its benefits, I thought I’d give it a try.

If you are just here for a link to my sermon from yesterday, skip to the end of the post.

Some Benefits to Using the Lectionary

Recently, I read William Barclay’s Spiritual Autobiography because he actually wrote a section on this very topic, but since I didn’t read it until the end of Year B, I’ll share my own thoughts instead of quoting his.

Sermon Planning

First, preaching through the lectionary means that every primary sermon text is already picked out for you before well in advance. You never have to think “I wonder what passage I’ll preach from on the fifteenth Sunday of the year” because that has already been decided for you.

For many preachers, deciding what to speak on can be one of the more difficult parts of their job, especially if they don’t follow a system, theme, or schedule. Using a lectionary cuts out at least some of the decision making process, but it certainly doesn’t eliminate all of it.

No More Skipping Difficult Passages

Second, preaching through the lectionary means you have to talk about passages you normally wouldn’t talk about. Preachers tend to stick with what they know. It’s easy to preach on the passages that are most familiar to us, and since most people in the congregation won’t remember what you talk about week to week anyway, it’s possible to reuse illustrations, preach on the same passages, and even use the same sermons over and over.

It’s also possible to stick to one subject or “ride a hobby horse” as some older preachers used to say. This may be fun for the minister, but it can leave the congregation spiritually malnourished and possibly even bored or burnt out.

When you systematically preach through the lectionary, you give yourself no choice but to speak about whatever that passage talks about. If the passage is on the relationship between riches and following Jesus, you have to handle it. If the passage is on marriage and divorce, you have to cover it. Now, it’s possible to chose an alternate text or emphasize a different aspect of the passage, but with a lectionary, the preacher is more aware than ever of the subjects he or she is comfortable with and those he or she is not.

There were times over the last year when I thought, “Oh, brother. Do I really have to talk about that?” This can be uncomfortable at first, but really it is a lot of fun for the serious Bible student.

The Holy Spirit is at Work

Now, someone may shy away from using the lectionary because a situation may come up in the congregation or in the world that would be better addressed with another sermon. While I’m sure this can happen, I actually found the opposite to be true. It seemed as if the passages before me always had relevance to the subject at hand. There was never a time when I said, “Man, I really wish we were in a different text today.”

There were even times when the subject matter was so on-the-nose that I thought some might suspect I picked out the text just for that situation, when really it was already picked out for me before I had ever even heard of a lectionary.

Now, a lot of these same benefits can be achieved through preaching through a book of the Bible verse by verse, but I found that even when I used that system, I still gravitated towards books with which I was comfortable.

The Downside of Using a Lectionary

Why Skip Stories?

Okay, let me be the first to say that the Revised Common Lectionary did a great job of adding in verses to help better establish the context of the passage, but there are times when it seems like key passages are left off, skipped, or entire stories are missing.

If I’m preaching through the book of Mark, I want to preach through the whole thing.

Also, on a somewhat related point, during Advent through Easter, you are obviously building somewhere. There’s anticipation, there’s excitement, there’s a story. But after Pentecost, it’s like, “What do we do now?” Where’s the story? Where’s the build up?

I enjoyed preaching through Ordinary Time, but it didn’t flow as good as the rest of the year did.

What Happens in Two Years?

Another question is, “What happens in two years?” So the lectionary has a three-year cycle based on the gospel texts.

Let me interrupt this to say that someone should be penalized for not having an entire year of John. What is up with that?

Anyways, Year A is Matthew, Year B is Mark, and Year C is Luke. Now that I’ve finished Year B, what do I do when we get back to Year B? I thought I could preach through the New Testament readings, but it seems like those are so sporadic. I’d hate to leave out huge chunks of the epistles. And the Old Testament readings could be fun to preach through, but, again, you can’t cover the entire Hebrew Bible in three years, so what is being left out?

I think preaching a psalm a month could be fun, but I also don’t see me doing the psalms for a whole year either.

So what do I do? As of right now, I’ve already planned all of 2025’s sermons, and I want to preach through Year A as well, but do I really want to do this over and over again?

Sharing a Pulpit

The last downside to preaching through the lectionary is probably unique to me. I share a pulpit with another minster. He preaches about once a month. While he knows I use the lectionary and has used it quite a bit himself, there are times when he doesn’t really get to the texts.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, because I haven’t ever made a big deal out of the fact that I’ve been using a lectionary for sermon prompts, but it can disrupt the flow in my own brain, which, again, isn’t a big deal.

However, if he does go off script, it’s possible that he might accidentally preach on a text that is coming up in the lectionary. This happened one time where he did a two-part series on John 6 when the lectionary was going to spend about five weeks in John 6 right after his time to preach. I called an audible and broke from the lectionary, the only time I did so all year. During that time, I still wrote lectionary sermons which I posted here, though.

I Had Fun

Above all, I enjoyed using the lectionary. While it handled a huge part of the planning for me, it was still a challenge because I had to study new texts, consider how to preach difficult passages, and be a little creative in my sermon planning.

It made me get out of my comfort zone and try something new.

I look forward to preaching through Luke next year.

What This Means for You

During Advent, you’ll notice a change to my posting schedule. Usually, I can’t post my sermon video until sometime during the day, and this breaks one of the important rules of posting blogs and videos: sticking to a schedule can increase the chances someone will read or watch what you publish became they come to expect the consistency.

My sermons typically have less views than my other posts, and I’d like to change that, so here is my current plan:

1. I’m going to post my sermons the Monday before I preach them. Like my other scheduled posts, these will go out at 5am. This will be helpful to you for two reasons: (1) if you also preach through the lectionary, you are free to use me as a resource, and (2) if you are a member where I preach or you listen online, you’ll be familiar with the material already which will help with retention.

2. On Mondays at 3:00pm, I’ll share the video from my sermon on the previous day, a link to the sermon text, and, when I’m able, a short blog on how the sermon went as well as the creative process. I think this will be helpful because it will give you a behind the scenes peak into the inner workings of my mind, and if you are in a position where you need to create something, perhaps my process will inspire you.

Sermon—November 24th || Year B: Christ the King

Sermon Text

Not of this World

Video

Reflection

General Thoughts

There are some Sundays when the points flow together, the audience was engaged, and the delivery was fine, but you still walk away feeling like you didn’t quite do what you wanted to do, which is how I felt the past two Sundays.

I have two friends who both tell me I shouldn’t worry about these sorts of things, that I can’t expect to walk away from every sermon feeling like I hit it out of the park. But what I really felt was missing from these two sermons was the “existential urgency.”

In most sermons I preach, articles I write, or talks I give, it feels like there is something needing to be spoken. It feels as if I don’t say whatever it is then my head will explode. In these sermons it feels like preaching this sermon at this time in this place is what I was put on earth to do.

And, to be honest, I haven’t published a lot of articles and even a couple of books because they didn’t have the this factor.

And I don’t know why these two sermons didn’t feel like that.

My sermon last week was on a wonderful psalm which we view as a foreshadowing of Jesus’s resurrection and our own experience of resurrection in Christ. The sermon this week was on one of my favorite passages from John 18 about the nature of the kingdom, and while I know the material was good and true and helpful, it just seemed like something was missing from either the message or me.

Regardless, I think both messages were beneficial to those who heard them, and I don’t want to allow my own inner monologue and critical eye take away from that important fact.

Creative Process

I typically don’t preach three-point sermons, but this sermon was a rare exception simply because there were three points I wanted to make. I knew I wanted to say something about Jesus as king, the nature of the kingdom, and the answer to Pilate’s question—“what is truth?”

So, I sketched a few ideas in my Moleskine notebook and really focused in on the phrase “not of this word.” To me, this was the key phrase because of its use throughout John—from being “born from above” to the disciples being “in the world but not of the world.”

Emphasizing this truth, especially in light of a recent election, helped me to reiterate that regardless of whether or not elections go in our favor, whatever that may be, the most important thing to keep in mind is that Jesus is King. Even if the world around us falls apart, we still have a better hope, better peace, and a better citizenship than any government official can offer us.

So I decided to focus on repetition of the following phrases: “What kind of King is this? A king not of this world!” “What kind of Kingdom is this? A Kingdom not of this world!” “What kind of Truth is this? A Truth not of this world!”

Building the presentation around these phrases helped me organize my thoughts, but it also helped me to progress through the text linearly. I was able to go verse by verse, which seems to be the easiest way for most people to follow along. I included a few passages on the fly, such as 2 Corinthians 10, but I tried to stick with the key text in John 18.

So, the key takeaways here are (1) repetition using a key phrase in the text, (2) tying the passage into the greater context of John, and (3) going verse by verse so people could follow along.