by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early-retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk
We know from LLF (and the ordination of women, and the safeguarding crisis, and countless other examples) that the Church of England, especially in Synod, is very good at pursuing secondary details, to the point of absurdity or worse, and very bad at seeing the bigger picture, very bad at seeing the perspective of the people actually affected, very bad at seeing the perspective of the ordinary faithful lay person in the pew, and very bad indeed at seeing the perspective of the ordinary person walking past outside.
Reading the Bible from the lectern, during the main Sunday morning service of the week, is something the Church of England really should be able to manage. But somehow, in 1997, the Church of England managed to accidentally abolish The Sermon on the Mount.
Churches all over the world have been adopting the same universal Sunday lectionary since it was first published as Lectionary for Mass (LFM) in 1969 – because it’s superb, not least in its clarity and simplicity. The main programme for the year runs from 7 January to 26 November, reading through one gospel and a series of epistles each year, on a three-year cycle. An Old Testament reading each Sunday helps illustrate the gospel reading for the day. The main programme pauses for a fifteen-week Easter series from Lent 1 to Trinity Sunday, which includes themed readings through Lent, and after Easter has readings from Acts, Revelation, and more epistles. John is read in sections during the Year of Mark, and during the Easter series. A Christmas series, from Advent Sunday to The Epiphany, completes the programme. The Church of England was late to the party in only adopting this Sunday lectionary in 1997 – long after most of the rest of the Anglican Communion, and the other main denominations in the UK and across the world.
As more and more denominations adopted what is essentially the same Sunday lectionary, each one enriched it with their own variations and additional options. The “common” in Common Lectionary (1983) and in Revised Common Lectionary (RCL, 1992) means “common” amongst protestants (attempting to bring increasing diversity back together), not “in common” with the catholic original; even so, very few denominations use “pure” RCL as published. But none deviates as far from “pure” RCL as the Church of England. The Church of England tinkered with RCL so much that it actually managed to abolish the Sermon on the Mount.
Year A of the three year cycle is the year of Matthew. Chapters 3 to 25 are read in sequence on the Sundays from 7 January to 26 November. The Sermon on the Mount is the vital, fundamental context for all that follows in the gospel for the year. As Matthew chapters 5 to 7, it is read on the six Sundays beginning 28 January, known as Sundays 4 to 9 of the main programme, or Sundays 4 to 9 in Ordinary Time, or Sundays 4 to 9 after Epiphany.
For every possible date of Easter, the Beatitudes are read before Lent intervenes. For every actual date of Easter for the rest of this century, we shall hear the next reading as well: salt and light, the law and the prophets (not abolished but fulfilled), and a call to a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees. And in the next two occurrences of Year A – 2026 and 2029 – we shall also hear the introduction to the great theme, “you have heard it said – but I say to you”: in 2026, and in 2029, there will be three readings from Matthew 5 before Lent.
But in the Church of England, in 2026, and in 2029, there will be none.
In fact, there will be no readings at all from Matthew 5 before Lent in the Church of England until 2038 – fourteen years from now.
And even then, in 2038, the Church of England’s selection will not include the Beatitudes.
The Beatitudes are not set to be read before Lent in the Church of England, even as an option, ever.
The Church of England has managed to adopt the principle of reading through Matthew, in sequence, every three years, but almost never with any part of the Sermon on the Mount included in the right place, and absolutely never with the Beatitudes included in the right place.
For what it’s worth, the Beatitudes are permitted as an alternative in early November, for those who choose to interrupt the systematic reading of the gospel again, for All Saints Sunday – the Beatitudes there, of course, demoted from being a revolutionary challenge to the living at the beginning of the year, to being a sweet eulogy for the departed at the end – and even then only as an option.
It is a quirk of the LFM original that there is provision for 55 Sundays each year instead of 53 – and most years can only accommodate 52. Every extra option that is added then threatens to squeeze out yet another ‘ordinary’ Sunday. And no church has added more options than the Church of England – which has also made many of them compulsory. They all do violence to the fundamental principles of the universal lectionary, but none more so than those which combine to abolish the Sermon on the Mount. First, the Transfiguration is moved out of Lent, presumably for being insufficiently gloomy, and placed on the last Sunday before Lent instead. Then Creation Sunday (remembered fondly from ASB’s quirky Ninth Sunday before Christmas) is placed, for no particular reason at all, on the Second Sunday before Lent. In the 1990s there was a brief obsession with Candlemas that we daren’t let go, so there goes the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany; or for those who choose not to mark Candlemas in Year A (it is made compulsory only in Year C), we insist again, in Year A, on the Wedding at Cana, even though the Church of England alone has already insisted on having it on slightly different Epiphany Sundays in both Year B and Year C. And that completes the great offence: by squeezing three additional Sundays out of the variable gap between The Epiphany and Lent, for truly ‘secondary’ reasons, the Church of England has abolished the Sermon on the Mount completely until 2038, and the Beatitudes for ever.
And this is what happens when you don’t keep your eye on the main thing that actually matters, while being distracted by secondary details; when you lose sight of the bigger picture, when you forget the perspective of the ordinary faithful lay person in the pew, when you become distracted by clerical obsessions and forget, however briefly, about the millions of people out there in the rain who need to hear the truth spoken by Jesus of Nazareth on a windy hillside in Palestine: for the sake of secondary details, however worthy, you accidentally abolish the Sermon on the Mount.
And more than a quarter of a century later, I’m not convinced that anybody has actually noticed.
2025 is the year of Luke, Year C. Easter is late: there will be eight Sundays – almost two months – between The Epiphany and Lent, presenting an excellent opportunity to enter into the themes of the gospel for the year. Across those eight Sundays, there’s the opportunity to read, in sequence, from Luke chapters 2 to 6, of the prophecy spoken over the infant Christ by Simeon; of the 12-year-old Jesus confounding the teachers in temple; of Jesus reading from Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth, and being rejected there; of the call of the first disciples; and then three readings from the Sermon on The Plain.
You could look at the various options offered in the Common Worship Principal Service Lectionary – the one that abolished the Sermon on the Mount – and eventually work out that the maximum number of readings permitted from the above selection is just four, and not even in the right order. Alternatively, you could use a little bit of the local discretion that the Church of England surely still allows, and revert instead to the core principles of the universal lectionary. Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, which will still give you the Sermon on the Mount in 2026, and 2029, will also give you that eight-week series from Luke between The Epiphany and Lent in 2025. It’s about being focussed, without secondary distraction, on the task of reading the scriptures from the lectern during the main Sunday morning service of the week. It’s about being in harmony with the global church. It’s about ordinary Christianity, for ordinary churches, on the ordinary Sundays of the year.
In a church which can’t do LLF, or safeguarding, or the ordination of women, properly, we might at least use a Sunday lectionary that “prioritises the systematic reading of the gospels and epistles for the year, reducing interruptions and omissions to a minimum” – and doesn’t accidentally abolish the Sermon on the Mount.
The SSRA lectionary and all associated resources are available free online at ssra.uk
Any thoughts?