The Gottesdienst liturgical calendar for 2023 will be featured in our Christmas issue of Gottesdienst (which, incidentally, is already at the printer, so if you need to renew or subscribe, do so right now), and, as our courtesy to all of you, The Gottesdienst Crowd, is also available for free at this website. You can see it here, or you can even download it.

A word of explanation about this calendar (also to be printed in the Christmas issue):

Since the year 2008, Gottesdienst has been providing annually a sanctoral calendar for Sundays throughout the year for our readers. Every Christmas issue since then, a calendar has been made available for the following year. As those who have used the calendar are aware, we have observed what’s called the “Michaelmas skip” when coming to the Sundays after Michaelmas, September 29. But recently new evidence has come to light that has led to a change for 2023. Exhaustive research has been done by Fr. Stefan Gramenz and Fr. Evan Scamman, representatives from the Lutheran Missal editorial board, leading toward the production of a new Lutheran Missal, and the results of this research were presented at the St. Michael Conference at Zion in Detroit this year. (An explanation and the video of that presentation are available here.) We learned from them that there was a much greater consensus among dioceses of Western Christendom than previously thought regarding the lectionary for the church year. These men, with whom I spoke the next day, also indicated to me that they found no authority for the Michaelmas skip anywhere among the historic sources, a consensus of which instead simply count the Sundays after Trinity in order until the last, when finally, a skip to Trinity 27 is made. In addition, the editors of Gottesdienst share a desire that it’s helpful to move toward uniformity in such matters, and inasmuch as a great number of our churches have never included the skip, we thought it would be prudent for us at this time to discontinue it as well. The calendar provided in [the Christmas 2022] issue does not make the Michaelmas skip, though readers who wish to continue using it will find an asterisk where it would take place; of course, they will need to find their own information for some of the Sundays. In addition, we are recommending that the Festival of the Reformation be observed on its day, October 31, though the option of observing it on the last Sunday of October, an American custom, is also indicated with an asterisk.