Lectionaries

A general web-site for lectionaries, with resources far beyond anything here:

Fr. Felix Just's lectionary page, with links to many tables.
His Calendar page.
The 1998/2002 daily lectionary
Fr. Just's homepage.

The 1928 Book of Common Prayer Daily Office Lectionary

The 1928 Lectionary can be found on this web-site here.
The same in plain text, (alter and format as you like)
and formatted in PostScript,
and PDF.

Some other Prayer Book resources: bcponline.org. It has the full text, including the Psalter.
www.bookofcommonprayer.net, meaning the 1979 BCP.
Google will find many more pages with BCP lectionary resources.

Why an old lectionary? (It was actually added to the 1928 PrayerBook only in 1940, but it is generally known as the 1928 book anyway.) It has a structure uncommon in other lectionaries. The Ordo for daily Mass has three readings for each day, an Old Testament, Epistle, and Gospel reading, and while the seasonal coverage is from the same tradition, it does not cover as much as the 1928 lectionary. The Daily Office lectionary for the 1979 Book of Common Prayer is structured like the Ordo: three readings for each day, in a two-year cycle, suited for use at Mass.

The Common Three-Year Sunday lectionary does not include weekdays, and it, too, is designed for Mass, not the Daily Office.

The 1928 Daily Office lectionary has two readings for both Morning and Evening Prayer, usually one from each Testament; Sometimes both morning and evening readings are taken from the same book, as the intense Isaiah readings during Advent.

In this tradition, the Church reads Isaiah from Advent to Trinity, Jeremiah in Lent, Genesis through the Former Prophets from after Epiphany to late in the Autumn. There are epistle and gospel readings always.

Not all the narrative parts of Genesis and Exodus are present, and if one reads also the patristic selections from the Roman Breviary (making three readings in the morning), one can simply substitute course readings from Genesis to Second Kings in the period from Septuagesima to late Fall, one chapter in the morning and one in the evening.

It often has more than one set of readings for Sundays, to give preachers some choices; and the Sunday readings provide a break in the sequence of daily readings. It's a plan that works acceptably well.

Sometimes one wonders what they had in mind, but the readings are always suitable in some sense. Those of us who are not Anglicans are indebted and grateful to the Episcopal Church's Standing Liturgical Commission.

To add to the thrill, it is in the style of a pre-Vatican II calendar: you will have to learn to count Sundays after Trinity. There will be software to do that, here, in source code. (Find jd.tar and easter.*) It runs on Linux, should compile on a Mac, and I have no information about C compilers or executables for Windows.