Methodist Advent Readings For 2014

Methodist Advent Readings For 2014 — A Plain Guide

The United Methodist Church follows the Revised Common Lectionary for its liturgical calendar, so the Advent readings for 2014 are the same ones any church using the RCL would have used that year. Advent begins on the Sunday nearest November 30, which in 2014 fell on December 1. That means there were five Sundays with Advent-colored lectionary readings if you count Christmas Day separately, but the core Advent period covers the first four Sundays leading into December 25. Here's how the readings break down week by week: First Sunday of Advent — December 1, 2014 (Year C)

• Isaiah 63:16b–17, 19a; 64:1–9
• Psalms 80:1–7, 17–19
• 1 Corinthians 1:3–9
• Matthew 24:36–9 (or Matthew 24:36–47)

Second Sunday of Advent — December 8, 2014 (Year C) Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudete Sunday) — December 15, 2014 (Year C) Fourth Sunday of Advent — December 22, 2014 (Year C)

Christmas Day — December 25, 2014 Year C is the third cycle of the three-year lectionary rotation. If your church follows the full RCL rather than a condensed pastoral lectionary, these are the exact passages you'd see from the pulpit. The easiest places to pull the complete reading texts are BibleGateway.com and USCCB.org (the Catholic lectionary shares the same RCL structure for Catholic churches, so the verses line up identically for Protestants using the Revised Common version). For the United Methodist Church specifically, the United Methodist Database of Sermons (umds.org) and the United Methodist Communications site both archive annual lectionary guides going back well past 2014.

If you want a downloadable PDF, the WorkingPreacher.org site posts the full lectionary for each year with commentary attached to every passage. Their 2014 Advent section has all five weeks laid out with the standard RCL citations plus optional alternative readings noted in smaller print.

How It Actually Works in a Church Setting

I've sat in sanctuary pulpits and checked communion elements for enough worship committees to know the practical side of this. The pastor or lay reader pulls the texts from a printed lectionary book or a tablet, usually the Lectionary for Worship published by Abingdon Press for United Methodist use. The readings are organized chronologically through the liturgical year, not thematically, which trips up a lot of people who expect a single volume arranged by topic. The pastor typically gets the Scripture passages two to four weeks ahead of time so they can prepare the sermon. The cantorial team or organist sees the psalm responsories a bit later since those are less formulaic. Ushers and communion planners don't need the lectionary at all — they're working off a separate liturgy order sheet that references the same Sundays but pulls from the prayer book rather than the Bible.

A Thing That Annoyed Me in 2014

One edge case I ran into specifically with the 2014 Advent calendar: the overlap between the Revised Common Lectionary and the Revised Episcopal Lectionary caused confusion in some United churches that serve bilingual congregations or use resources from multiple denominations. The RCL and the RELev sometimes assign slightly different secondary readings for the same Sunday, and in December 2014 that showed up when a visiting priest brought a lectionary printed under the Episcopal tradition. The Fourth Sunday reading on Luke 1:26–38 was identical, but the Old Testament alternate in the Episcopal version included a different Isaiah citation that threw off the posted bulletin order. I just flagged it with the pastor beforehand and swapped the bulletins to match the United Methodist Abingdon text, which resolved it in about five minutes. Nothing dramatic, just a practical gotcha. The biggest one I see is assuming all four Gospel readings for Advent come from the same Gospel. They don't. Matthew leads off the first Sunday, Mark or Luke shows up the second week, John returns for the third, and Luke delivers the Annunciation on the fourth. Each week pairs a different prophet, a different epistle author, and a different Gospel pericope. Trying to force a single narrative thread across all four Sundays produces a sermon that's half accurate and half wishful thinking. Another thing: people conflate the Advent wreath progression with the lectionary progression. The wreath has its own rhythm — one candle per week, pink on the third — but the Scripture readings don't always follow that visual pattern. The third Sunday's Gospel in 2014 is John the Baptist, not something about joy despite the Gaudete label, even though the psalm and epistle both emphasize rejoicing. The lectionary and the liturgical symbols operate on parallel tracks, not the same track.

What This System Doesn't Handle Well

The Revised Common Lectionary assumes a church that meets weekly and follows an academic year calendar. If your congregation skips Sundays during the winter holidays, or if you run a missional church that doesn't observe the liturgical calendar at all, these readings are just texts on a page with no functional role. The RCL also compresses some longer prophetic books — Isaiah 40–66 gets spread across Advent and Christmas with almost no connective tissue between the sections, which makes it hard to preach a continuous series without doing extra homework to fill in the gaps. If you need something more thematic or more flexible, the Pastor's Lectionary offered by Fortress Press gives alternate pathways through the same texts with less rigid structure. It's not better — it's just looser. Whether that helps depends entirely on whether your congregation needs predictability or room to maneuver.

Quick Reference Table

For those who just want the citations without the commentary attached: Advent 1 (Dec 1): Isa 63–64; Ps 80; 1 Cor 1; Matt 24
Advent 2 (Dec 8): Isa 40; Ps 85; 2 Pet 3; Mk 1/Lk 3/Jn 1
Advent 3 (Dec 15): Isa 61; Ps 146; 1 Thess 5; Jn 1/Lk 3
Advent 4 (Dec 22): Isa 7; Ps 80/Mic 5; Heb 10; Lk 1
Christmas (Dec 25): Isa 9; Ps 96; Titus 2–3/Titus 3; Lk 2/Jn 1/Isa 64+Lk 2 The texts themselves haven't changed since the RCL was finalized in the late 1980s and updated in 1992. The 2014 cycle is identical to 2008 and 2011, which used Year C as well. If you're looking for the actual Bible text rather than the lectionary schedule, any standard English translation will work — NIV, NRSV, ESV, or the United Methodist-recommended New Revised Standard Version. The NRSV is what most pulpits read from because it's the translation the lectionary was originally keyed to.