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New Creation: The Revised Common Lectionary and the Earth's Paschal Life

Along with the other contributors to this issue of Liturgy and an increasing number of Christians around the world, I share the conviction that attention to the plight and care of creation is central to the Christian life. This reality is coming into ever more urgent focus today. The proclamation of attentive divine engagement with creation fills the Hebrew scriptures, and the Christian testament witnesses to a redemption in Jesus Christ that embraces all things, all the cosmos. Yet, too many Christians remain ignorant of—or even resistant to—this fundamental connection between the Christian vision of redemption and the life of the earth itself. Too often Christians speak and act as if the meaning of Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection were limited to the salvation of individual believers alone, often imaged as taking place in an afterlife beyond this created world. Even when the Christian message includes attention to God’s desire in Christ for just and peaceful human community, it often still remains detached from explicit attention to the biological systems on which our lives depend and from the beauty and integrity of the creation itself. This relative detachment of the Christian witness from the life and care of creation is visible in the church’s worship, the most symbolically important public witness to the shape of our faith, hope, and love. In this essay I explore the role of the scriptural choices used in worship— specifically those found in the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) in use in many Protestant churches in the United States. These texts shape the public witness to what our faith means and form Christians at the deepest levels of our being in Christ. Because this lectionary is based on and closely related to the Roman Catholic lectionary also in current use, the analysis in this essay has relevance, in its broad scope and in most of its particulars, to worshipers in that much larger global communion as well. Broadly defined, a lectionary is the set of biblical texts chosen—whether in a formal communal selection process or informally from week to week—to be used in a given Christian community for proclamation in its Sunday assembly. The principles or rationale of selection vary according to the theology of the community or person=s making the choices; since no one can proclaim the entire Bible every Sunday, there must be choices based on discernment of where the Spirit is leading the