Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink!

P. T. Barnum, American showman and businessman, is said to have made a small fortune selling tuna labeled with the slogan “Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can.” Barnum wasn’t lying. His tuna didn’t turn pink, but then, neither did the competition’s. His tuna was no different than theirs, save for the label. By means of this clever marketing ploy, Barnum “solved” a problem unrelated to the canning of tuna and conned his way into the pocketbooks of countless American housewives.

I believe that a similar tactic was used to promote the novel Vatican II lectionary of 1969—“Guaranteed to contain more of the Bible!” Well, who could argue against that? So, before one could say Ordo Lectionum Missae, the entirety of Western Christianity, it would seem, had adopted some form of the pope’s new lectionary, confident that this would increase Biblical literacy and foster ecumenical unity. I wasn’t around for the 60s or early 70s, so I wonder: Did anyone think to question this promise of pink-free tuna?

One of my professors at seminary, Dr. Naomichi Masaki, was fond of saying, “You ask wrong question.” (If you haven’t heard Dr. Masaki speak, just imagine those words in the voice of Mr. Miyagi.) Wrong questions often expose fundamental errors in thinking. (For example, “Is this a valid baptism?” is the wrong question and reflects a misunderstanding of God’s agency in baptism. There is no such thing as valid vs. invalid baptism. There is only baptism—water applied in the Triune name—or there is not baptism.) For fifty years now, people have been asking what I consider to be the wrong question: “Which lectionary covers the most Scripture?” The question arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the lectionary.

If the Church’s ancient lectionary were intended to cover as much Scripture as possible, then our fathers who compiled and refined it over more than a millennium must not have been very bright. A twelve-year-old could come up with a better plan in just a few hours. And if a three-year cycle is better because it has more Bible verses, then wouldn’t a ten-year cycle with all of Scripture be better still? In the same way that Barnum solved a false pink-tuna problem, so the pope’s new lectionary solved a false lack-of-Biblical-coverage-in-the-Divine-Service problem.

But shouldn’t Christians read all of Scripture? Absolutely. It’s one of the reasons God gives “house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all that I have.” But the noble pursuit of reading the Bible from cover to cover is not accomplished in the Divine Service. The Divine Service was instituted for another purpose—it is where Christ serves us with His saving Gospel and Sacraments—and the readings of the Divine Service were chosen in service to that end. They are focused on Christ and His saving work, particularly as recorded in the Gospels. No, the historic lectionary does not cover all of Scripture—it was never intended to—but it does teach every major point of doctrine within a single yearly cycle. It covers the whole of salvific history, teaching the faith through repetition, hiding the core tenets of Christian doctrine deep within the heart, helping us to order our comings and goings around the life and death of Christ.

What should one do when the car runs out of gas? Replace the transmission, of course. This is what we did fifty years ago when, for the first time in our synod’s history, church membership began to decline. In a state of panic, we tried to solve the problem of poor catechesis in the home by replacing things that weren’t broken, things that were, in fact, priceless treasures of the Church. We jettisoned our lectionary, much of our hymnody (often written for specific texts of the lectionary), our Bible translation, and even the long-established English text of the Small Catechism. It’s a wonder we didn’t attempt to replace Luther’s catechism entirely, since, after all, it only covers a small portion of Scripture. Surely a new catechism with more of the Bible would be better, yes?

When we first listened to the sales pitch for the pope’s new lectionary, we asked the wrong questions. We were promised greater unity within the Church, and we should have asked, “How will adopting a new lectionary bring greater unity when virtually all of Western Christendom has used our present lectionary for over 1600 years?” We might also have followed up with, “And how will losing our connection to the irreplaceable corpus of sermons, hymnody, chants, and sacred music unify the Church?” Or, “How will we have greater unity after every denomination adopts its own version of this new lectionary?” But most of all, instead of asking, “Does it have more of the Bible?**”, we should have asked, “Does it more effectively teach of Christ and His saving work?” Then perhaps, Dr. Masaki would have beamed, saying, “Ah! Now, you ask right question!”, and the parish pantry would not be stocked with so many tins of pink-free tuna.

** Ironically, the answer to this wrong question is that the historic lectionary, which includes a large number of mid-week occasions, covers slightly more of the Bible than the three-year lectionary.