Story Lectionary 2023-2025
This Week's Scriptures
December 22, 2024
The Fourth Sunday in the Advent of Our Lord's Birth
Abraham Journeys from Ur of Chaldees to the Promised Land (Genesis 12)
Moses Journeys with God's People to the Promised Land and Consecrates Firstborn (Exodus 13-15)
Elijah Journeys to Horeb (1 Kings 19)
Psalm 1: He Who Walks with the Lord
Psalm 23: The Lord Leads into Green Grasses
Psalm 25: Walking the Lord's Paths
Psalm 121: The Lord Watches Over Your Coming and Going
Ezra Journeys from Babylon to Jerusalem (Ezra 7)
Mary and Joseph Journey to Bethlehem to the Home of Joseph's Family (Luke 2:1-7)
Paul's First Journeys (Acts 13)
Key Metaphors
Milk and Honey, Land/Food, Field/Vineyard/Grass, Path/Way, Bethlehem
Colors
Red, Green, Gold
NOW find the entire 2023-25 Two-Year Story Lectionary online here on the site FREE! Scroll down!
Always Free!
Access to the weekly Story Lectionary selections is always FREE. Those purchasing the ring-bound copy will receive additional benefits, including musical selections, metaphors, samples, series suggestions, blogs, cultural information and articles, art, and the entire two-year lectionary. Look for the next two-year 2025-27 Story Lectionary coming out this fall of 2024!
Contact Dr. Lori Wagner at loribethwagner@gmail.com or through https://loribethwagner.com.
Blessings in your preaching and in your ministry!
Introduction to The Story Lectionary
How does it work?
Introduction to The Story Lectionary
The Story Lectionary is going into its ninth year of use internationally. Each year, I’ve welcomed your feedback and suggestions on how to help you make the most of this unique resource for worship and sermon building using the metaphors of scripture. This year’s print copy includes instruction on how pastors and others might use The Story Lectionary to create powerful, metaphor-based messages that link the Hebrew and Christian witnesses and bring the stories of Jesus and his beloved scriptures to life.
The Story Lectionary is built around the interconnected metaphors of scripture. Originally oral stories, the scriptures contain a highly complex and layered network of symbols and metaphors, embedded in narratives that were intended to convey not just an intellectual but a sensory and dramatic, emotional, and dynamic experience to the listener. Once written down, the scriptures were written in deep metaphor, in a variety of combined narrative forms, and in circular, not linear, form. The Hebrew method of exegesis involved delving into these stories, as though digging into a garden by layers. The initial reading might be literal, but it gave you little “food” for thought. The next layer would be allegorical, the deeper layer, metaphorical, and the deepest layer at the root, revelatory and spiritual.
Jesus used this method to teach his parables. Those satisfied merely with hearing the story and going their way would get something out of the experience, but they would be missing the deeper meaning and ultimately the shock value of Jesus’ messages. Those interested in coming into “relationship” with Jesus as disciples and learners would spend more time with him delving into the deeper meanings of the stories.
Everything Jesus said and did is a kind of paraphrase of the Hebrew scriptures, the scriptures Jesus knew and loved and those he felt prophesied to His own mission, ministry, and identity. In order truly to appreciate the power of Jesus’ message, his interactions with others, his laser-sharp critiques, and his revolutionary love, we need to understand the scriptural metaphors he reframed and the way he sought to reposition his contemporaries’ understandings of their scriptural heritage.
This lectionary therefore seeks to accomplish three primary goals:
1) This lectionary follows Jesus’ life and ministry narratively and sequentially. Whereas other lectionaries portray a piecemeal and often a-historic timeline of Jesus’ life, The Story Lectionary narrates Jesus' life so that listeners gain a better understanding of how Jesus’ life and ministry unfolded. The events of Jesus’ life and the metaphors he draws upon build naturally upon his ministry focus. The stories from the Torah, the Writings, and the Prophets echo the metaphors Jesus is mining and employing in his own identity, his interactions, and his parables. Many times, Jesus paraphrases directly from the Hebrew scriptures, and these stories are included in the selections for a particular week. This results in a “metaphor-based” lectionary true to Jesus’ own understanding of the Hebrew scriptures as a Jewish rabbi, as well as how he re-visioned those scriptural stories for his disciples and followers.
2) The Story Lectionary reveals the deep interconnectedness of the scriptures and how the primary metaphors of the Torah permeate the entirety of the scriptural landscape. Because this lectionary sees the scriptures as One Entwined Story in its entirety, the lectionary therefore in its construction recreates a deeper love of the Hebrew scriptures, the scriptures that Jesus knew and drew from, and emphasizes the need for a deep understanding of our roots in order to more fully comprehend Jesus and his teaching. While today, many make light of the Hebrew scriptures in understanding the gospel messages, this lectionary argues that you cannot truly appreciate the fullness, richness, and newness of the gospel message until and unless you have understood the beauty of God’s original message as relayed in the Hebrew stories. The Story Lectionary seeks to highlight stories that reveal how God’s original loving messages were falsely relayed throughout history, and how Jesus’ sought to bring people back to their true meaning, exquisite beauty, and God’s original and universal loving message.
3) The Story Lectionary seeks to help people understand the scriptures through their metaphors contextually and to transport them into our own time and place paradigmatically through their original DNA. When the scriptures are split up into single lines or non-contextual pieces, separated from their original history and culture, they lose their “roots.” When the scriptures, like plants in a garden, are uprooted from their DNA, their paradigmatic contexts, they lose their ability to be “transplanted.” The scriptures must be seeded with their DNA intact. By investigating the metaphors of scripture –the DNA of scripture, by seeking to investigate how those metaphors were understood originally and within their historical and contextual soil, we now create a “paradigm” or “seed” for that story that can be replanted within a new time and place. Metaphors allow us to see how the scriptures can remain timeless and eternal while also “home grown” within each generational, contextual situation. This ensures that the scriptures are not irresponsibly transported without regard and therefore misunderstood and misinterpreted or that they are not simply interpreted upon whim or agenda. For example, the original metaphorical meaning of the “garden,” one of the earliest and most pervasive metaphors in scripture, stood in the Hebrew mind for the relational heart itself, where the covenant between oneself and God was seeded and grown. To “till and keep” that “garden” meant to “till and keep” the covenant, one’s relationship with God, and to “bear its fruit” to all generations, so that throughout all time, God will always have a people. Looking at this metaphor’s DNA helps us not to take that scripture as a mere “literalism” or a simple, ecological symbol. Metaphors open up our hearts to the layered, prismatic, exquisite depth of our scriptural stories and to their emotional, spiritual, and physical reverberations. People understand with the mind. But their faith comes from the heart. The Story Lectionary speaks to people holistically, to the mind but also to the heart and spirit.
Each week, you will receive a wide array of suggested stories, some from the Hebrew scriptures, and their corresponding Gospel stories, as well as some readings from Paul, Revelation, and supplemental texts.
This new version of the two-year The Story Lectionary for post Easter 2023 through Easter 2025 also includes weekly KEY METAPHORS and COLORS that can help you to identify your focus for that week. NEW to this lectionary will be MUSICAL SELECTIONS, LINKS, BLOGS, and sermon series’, ARTICLES, CULTURAL INFORMATION, HELPFUL REFERENCES, and more to help you truly craft your best worship and sermon experiences. Look also for workshops and seminars on how to identify, mine, and contextualize metaphors, as well as how to craft sermons in a style that resonates and reverberates.
Each week, look at the suggested key metaphors and colors, read through the selections of scripture, and then choose those scriptures that best speak to the metaphors you would like to focus on that week. For example, you might choose a Hebrew scripture from Genesis 2 in which God and humankind walk the garden together in perfect unity. You might then focus on the gospel in which Jesus is resurrected in the garden. Or in the case of the Hebrew story of Jacob’s ladder, you might then choose Jesus’ interaction in calling Nathaniel, in which he proclaims himself as the “ladder” to heaven. Another time you use these same scriptures, you might choose a different metaphor and a different set of scriptures. You may use as many or as few as you wish. Or if you only use the gospel, then use the Hebrew passages to help you understand the stories that Jesus was drawing upon and why in your own exegetical research. By using this approach, you will be surprised to see new connections and insights that you have never noticed before.
In preparing for your sermon, it’s helpful to create an “image exegesis,” a deep exploration into the metaphor you’ve chosen. You can do this by starting to list the various definitions or uses of that metaphor. Then investigate the original uses of that metaphor in the Jewish tradition. The Jewish Encyclopedia online for example is an excellent beginning source for this information. Think about how these various definitions might be significant in the story you are examining, and then take a look to see if that metaphor appears in other places in scriptures, or in other stories. Many of those stories will be listed for you here. This will help you to see the original meaning of the metaphor. Then look to see how Jesus used the metaphor, and how he may be helping people to see its original meaning.
One example might be the metaphor of “yeast” or “leaven.” At first look, people might be confused because at one point, Jesus notes the “leaven” of the Pharisees and warns his disciples against it. Another time, Jesus compares “leaven” to the kingdom of God spreading quickly like a weed through the world. If you take “leaven” as simple “allegory” or “typology,” you will become confused by this opposite meaning. However, when you understand “leaven” as a metaphor, you understand that “leaven” does not just mean “leaven” but it means the “inner character of one’s heart.” So, don’t have the heart of a Pharisee which is in its very composition an aberration of God’s creation, but have the heart of Jesus, or a child of God, infused with the Holy Spirit, which at its very core spreads the love of God in its inner DNA.
A thorough metaphor exegesis or image exegesis will help you gain a truer understanding of the scriptural stories and will provide interesting fodder for your sermon.
When planning your sermon, use your metaphors in your worship service and in your preaching. Use props, experiential and tangible examples, visuals, and sounds to help bring your metaphors to life. How can those scriptural metaphors translate and link to current life metaphors? This is the key to your creative sermon.
For example, when Isaiah proclaims that God will take away the briars and instead will come up the myrtle, investigate the meanings of “briars” and “myrtle” in the scriptures and in the Hebrew tradition. What does the briar or thistle or thorn stand for? What is the meaning of the myrtle? How can these be used? You might portray Jesus’ crown of thorns as opposed to his resurrection in the garden. You might hand out flowers of myrtle. You might display roses with thorns on the altar. You might anoint with Rose of Sharon. Thinking creatively using the metaphors of scripture will enrich your preaching and make your sermons unforgettable.
Thank you for using The Story Lectionary. I hope this resource will be blessing to your ministry.
--Lori Wagner
March 2023
You can also find we is going into its ninth year of use internationally. Each year, I’ve welcomed your feedback and suggestions on how to help you make the most of this unique resource for worship and sermon building using the metaphors of scripture. This year’s print copy includes instruction on how pastors and others might use this unique resource.
Look for Subscription Options Coming Soon with Great Material and How-To Instruction on Creating Dynamic Worship Experiences.
MUSIC and ART by Alan O. W. Barnes
Coming in the future: New by subscription --Innovative, eclectic, cultural, modern, and traditional music and artwork for accompanying each week's metaphors and scriptures.
Downloads
The Story Lectionary 2023-2025 (docx)
DownloadCopyright © 2024 The Story Lectionary - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy Website Builder