Designed to be Read: The Architecture of the ACNA Daily Office Lectionary
(Read our Rookie Anglican Guide to the ACNA’s 2019 BCP here.)
The Daily Office Lectionary, which assigns readings for the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, underwent several stages of development during its five years in trial form. The final form, as it appears in the 2019 Book of Common Prayer, looks quite different to users accustomed to the 1979 version.
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Cranmer’s Preface to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer
The differences in these particulars will make more sense in the light of a great guiding light of Daily Office Lectionary revision: Thomas Cranmer’s preface to the Book of Common Prayer of 1549. In his preface to the whole prayer book, Cranmer concentrates chiefly on the Daily Office and his revision of it, which had one singular aim: to restore the centrality of the plain listening to Scripture to public prayer.
The whole preface is worth reading, but here are the key extracts.
The Fathers of the Early Church gave shape to the Daily Office so that it would be the most useful for godliness and the knowledge of God:
For they so ordered the matter, that all the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof) should be read over once in the year.
But these many years passed, this godly and decent order of the ancient fathers has been so altered, broken, and neglected…that commonlywhen any book of the Bible was begun, before three or four Chapters were read out, all the rest were unread.
And just trying to locate the correct readings was a chore:
…to turn the Book only, was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times, there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.
To remedy these errors, in Cranmer’s lectionary:
the reading of Holy Scripture is so set forth, that all things shall be done in order, without breaking one piece thereof from another…
Structural Features of the ACNA Daily Office Lectionary
A number of “architectural” features give meaning to the lectionary’s content that, though discernible to the careful student over time, might benefit from highlighting on the front end.
So, if I may serve as your tour guide to the new Daily Office Lectionary, here are some of its key features.
The Calendar Year
In keeping with the Daily Office Lectionary drafted by Cranmer, continued in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (BCP), and only altered in the 1870s, it bases its structure on the Calendar year (January-December) rather than the Church Year (Advent through the Season after Pentecost).
The reason for this profound re-ordering rests on three notions:
- It is in keeping with the Liturgy Task Force’s principle of allowing 1662 to be the norm.
- It created a much more accessible Daily Office Lectionary for new users and new Anglicans, for whom phrases like “The Tuesday of the Week begins with the Sunday that falls between June 6 and Jun 11” prove quite intimidating.
- The most immediate prompt was eliminating “subduction zones” around the moving liturgical seasons that clip and truncate the continuous reading of Scripture.
This third point was Cranmer’s chief concern: how many points there are in the Church year that would mutate continuous reading of Scripture:
- How many days there are between Epiphany and the first Sunday of Epiphany,
- How many weeks of Epiphany there are before Lent,
- How many days there are in the fourth week of Advent before Christmas,
- How many weeks there are in the season after Pentecost, and
- How many Sundays there are between Christmas and Epiphany.
It is impossible to facilitate continuous reading of Scripture while following the Church Year.
The Church Year
Nevertheless, the new Daily Office Lectionary still maps onto the Church Year. While a little something is lost by not reinforcing the names and shape of the Church Year, the mapping of biblical content onto the Church Year still exists.
For instance, Isaiah still fills Advent by being assigned to the months of November and December. Exodus, with its 40 days on Sinai and 40 years in the wilderness, falls through Lent.
Genesis begins the year, which captures the spirit of its placement in the older church-year lectionaries. Cranmer said that Genesis began with Septuagesima, but in the 16th century, this nearly coincided with the Calendar New Year, which began on March 1st.
The dual nature of Advent—referring to both Christ’s first coming and his yet-to-be second coming—receives emphasis by the fact that we read Revelation alongside Isaiah. And crowning the year is the Song of Songs, which we read in parallel with the final chapters of Revelation, thus suggesting a typological reading of the Song that connects the Bridegroom with our Lord.
Red-Letter Days
A system of special readings for “Red-Letter Days” remains in the new lectionary, with the letter modified but keeping the spirit.
Cranmer inherited an elaborate system of feast ranks, including singles, doubles, doubles of the first class, doubles of the second class, and so on. He distilled this to incorporate proper readings for Holy Days of different numbers according to their rank.
Thus, Christmas Day, as one of the five feasts that celebrate the Incarnation of the Lord, had all four of its readings break from the usual continuous readings and instead fit the theme of the feast. But the feast of St. Matthias, being of a lower rank, only got two proper readings. Other feasts had 3.
The principle of this system remains the same, with an extension; it means to interrupt the continuous readings as little as possible.
Therefore, the traditional “highest” ranking fixed-date feasts get two proper lessons. And all other “red-letter” Holy Days get only one proper lesson. The days of the Triduum have their own proper lessons, which displace the fixed-date lessons on which they fall.
In addition, if a specific desire arises to emphasize the celebration of a particular Holy Day in a particular setting, the directions at the beginning of the Daily Office Lectionary suggest that lessons from the Sunday and Holy Day Lectionary can also be used as readings on that day if they’re not already being used during a Eucharist on that day.
Chapters and Pericopes
Old Testament Lessons always divide at the chapter divisions, making day-to-day, continuous reading very easy. This was Cranmer’s idea.
New Testament and Gospel pericopes follow the divisions that were created for the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer.
This means that Old Testament readings are 2-3 times as long as the readings in the 1979 Daily Office Lectionary, but New Testament readings are only slightly longer.
In Cranmer’s lectionary, the New Testament was read three times a year. It is read through twice in the new lectionary, just as it was in the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer.
The Order of the Gospels
The Gospels appear in the sequence in which they exist in one of our oldest Bible codices: Codex Sinaiticus. We begin with John and then proceed with the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) in their traditional order.
Among other things, this allows for the intertextuality between Genesis 1 and John 1 to be caught on January 1.
One-Year vs. Two-Year
It is a one-year cycle of readings rather than a two-year cycle, although it CAN be adapted as a two-year cycle if desired. This is why the Old Testament readings do not connect between Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer as they do in the 1662 version.
One set of two readings can be chosen for the day: one reading could be read in Morning Prayer and the other in Evening Prayer, or both lessons could be split in half and divided between the two offices.
Optional Abbreviations
For those for whom time is tight, the 2019 Daily Office also provides optional abbreviations for the longer Old Testament chapters: Abbreviations that do not alter the core communication of the chapter but excise additional details that can be spared for narrative comprehension.
Almost the Entire Bible
It covers almost the entire Bible. The Old Testament historical books are read chronologically, so the over-arching “story of the Bible” is spotlighted.
Passages that are omitted are either duplicates (e.g., 1-2 Chronicles) or extremely sparse when it comes to edification in the context of public reading (e.g., the land allotments in Joshua).
Apocrypha
The new lectionary contains a smaller portion of the Apocrypha than 1662 (by about half). However, it retains a “best of” selection that allows readers to listen to the Apocryphal writings without being inundated with the peculiarities of that corpus.
In addition, for those who prefer not to read the Apocrypha, the option is available in November and December to replace the reading with the Old Testament reading from the other office.
Pauline Letters
Paul’s letters are arranged not according to their canonical order (which, by the way, is the result of sequencing the letters by length, nothing else) but according to the date that they were written.
While there is some academic contest regarding one or two details of the dating, there is a general consensus for most of the corpus.
This produces two advantages to the reader:
- It begins the year with Galatians, presenting a clear and foundational message of justification by faith. The 1662 Daily Office Lectionary began the year with the book of Romans.
- It allows the reader to see the developing pastoral situation of the Apostolic Age: How the conflicts shift from Jew-Gentile relations to new heresies; how the language shifts from pastoral exigency (as in Galatians) to cosmic, systematic theology (as in Ephesians), as the Gospel spreads and takes root in all lands.
The Length of the Readings
Lastly, a note on the length of the readings. When most new users encounter the Daily Office Lectionary in the BCP 2019, one of their first reactions is, “This is so long!”
Compared to the 1979 Daily Office Lectionary, it is. However, in terms of actual minutes added, workshopping the new lectionary makes the office only about five minutes longer than when the lections were shorter, which is not a great burden.
But more than this, the nearly universal experience of the Liturgy Task Force (and many others who tested the “beta” version of the lectionary) was that the longer lections actually had a great advantage: They invite the listener into a story.
The readings are long enough that it is now possible to really get comfy and enter into the lesson with one’s mind and heart. Additionally, the continuous nature of the lections allows for each office’s reading to be a fresh installment of the story, creating a much more immersive and formative Bible-listening experience.
Moreover, the length of these readings makes it easier to locate passages in a book and in relation to other stories.
It is the sincere hope of the Liturgy Task Force that others will, after a couple of months of getting used to them, likewise come to relish these longer lections (And, if not, there are always the many options that allow for abbreviation and adaptation). And not just for their own sake, but, in the words of Thomas Cranmer’s 1549 Preface:
that the people (by daily hearing of Holy Scripture read in the Church) should continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true religion.
Photo by David Henry from Pexels, courtesy of Canva.
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