NEARLY 1.4 BILLION Christians around the world receive their weekly exposure to the Bible through a lectionary. In the U.S., as many as 60 percent of Christians attend services in churches that follow a lectionary. For many Christians, this is their only regular exposure to our faith’s sacred narrative.
Even for those who love the ecumenical unifying energy of a common lectionary, we also acknowledge that the scripture snippets we hear on Sundays are chosen almost exclusively by Euro-Anglo male scholars, using Bible translations that reflect the same. (The translation committee for the 2011 Common English Bible was the first to include scholars of color.) It’s hard to embrace the Bible’s liberating power when you can’t find yourself in the story, and it’s even harder to show up when you learn you’ve been edited out of it.
Enter A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, by Wilda C. Gafney, a professor of Hebrew Bible, offering not only an entirely new Christian lectionary but also rigorous and fresh Bible translations that restore women and feminine references to scripture, as well as text notes and preaching prompts—all in accessible language. “Recognizing that the scriptures are an androcentric collection of documents steeped in patriarchy, this lectionary grapples with the gender constructs of the text rather than romanticizing admirable heroines,” Gafney explained. She wrote, “I was (and remain) convinced it ought to be possible to tell the story of God and God’s people through the most marginalized characters in the text.”
Gafney’s paradigm-shifting lectionary “is a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and pastoral usability,” wrote Sister Christine Shenk in National Catholic Reporter. New Testament and Jewish studies scholar Amy-Jill Levine told Sojourners that in “reminding readers that biblical texts have prompted violent and oppressive policies,” Gafney “provides a service both to individual Christians and to the institutional church.”
In October, Gafney attained the highest academic award with which a university can honor a faculty member: a fully endowed professorship at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. In her inaugural lecture, “What if Bathsheba took the throne?” Gafney unfurled skillful textual interpretation, sanctified imagination, and delight in a refreshed lineage for Jesus. He is not only the “son of David” but also the “son of Bathsheba,” Gafney said. “The Jesus of the gospels may have answered to the ‘Son of David,’ but he lived like, laughed like, loved like, wept like, suffered and died like the ‘Son of Bathsheba.’”
The Women’s Lectionary, Gafney said, is a “churchly project,” designed for congregational and devotional life. One of her aims is “for people not only to be introduced to biblical characters and a wider assortment of women’s stories but to hear themselves or hearpeople who are not them reflected in the Divine image explicitly.” Gafney translates the people of God back into the text where we belong and forces us to wrestle not only with our complex biblical inheritance but with the “mixed multitude” (Exodus 12:38) that God calls today.
Only 36 percent of millennials claim church membership. A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church is not only a much-needed catechetical tool, but a beautiful feast for evangelization.
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
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