By TC Lo (12/23/2023)
Christmas or Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday roughly every 11 years. Tomorrow morning 7:00 AM, Christmas Eve, to the on-line Church <天空聖城> which I am serving, I shall preach a message based on John 1:1-18.
A question being asked: “TC, why do you preach John on Christmas Eve?” This seems to be a trivial question on the surface, but beneath which there is a strategic answer. Therefore, I love to take this opportunity to answer this rare question from a historic context.
Traditionally, most preachers preach Christmas message with such popular passages as Luke 2:1-20 (the nativity story), Matthew 1:18-25 (Joseph’s perspective), and Isaiah 9:6 (a prophecy about the birth of Jesus), but I use a different methodology to select sermon Scripture.
Within Christianity, the use of pre-assigned, scheduled readings from the scriptures can be traced back to the early church, and seems to have developed out of the practices of the second temple period. Before Reformation, there is no such thing as Roman Catholic and Protestant distinction, the Middle Age Church designed the “Lectionary” to make sure the preachers follow the instruction of Matthew 24:45 to “give them (congregation) their food (the Word) at the proper time （按時分糧).” After the Reformation, Protestant churches freely developed many lectionaries to achieve the same goal.
A Lectionary, in a word, was a schedule of assigning a host of suggested passages for each and every Sunday of the year in a three years cycle, so the congregations are well fed with a broad spectrum of the Bible and the preachers have no trouble of thinking “What should I preach this coming Sunday?” In this approach, the preachers have lots of freedom to choose from for their expository sermons, yet they don’t have totally unrestrained freedom to pick whatever they like or pick the most familiar ones; otherwise, for example, the congregation may hear “1 Corinthians 13” many times over within a year.
The Lectionary I use is the modern version which can be found in:
https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=113
For this Sunday, John 1:1-18 is the verses I have selected from the pool of suggested passages. After all, having studied carefully, we all will be convinced that John 1:1-18 DOES have a very strong Christmas message! So, the Lectionary designers were not ignorant of the timely-ness of seasonal considerations.
In passing, may I humbly suggested that the guest-speakers are to take this into considerations when going to your hosting church to preach.
