After last week’s “Question of the Week” about remembering the readings from Sunday, Liz and I got into a conversation. Liz is often a great asset to me in “church cultural” issues since she didn’t grow up in the Lutheran tribe. Her views are generally valid and helpful by themselves, but often even more so because of the perspective that she brings. 
As we got to talking, we talked about how when she was growing up, there was no distinct “Scripture reading”. Now that doesn’t mean that Liz’s church growing up didn’t know Scripture (in fact, I can safely say that I think her tribe would beat ours in a game of Bible Trivia 99.8% of the time), there just wasn’t a specified time to read and try to digest a hunk of Scripture like we have in our service. Instead, the pastor would just start in to a sermon based on a Biblical topic – like, let’s say forgiving your Christian sister/brother, and then would show where that concept or topic shows up in various verses of the Bible (i.e. Matthew 18:15, Colossians 3:13, etc).
Generally speaking, our Lutheran approach is to start with usually a bigger hunk of the Bible (i.e. Hebrews 11:1-16) and explore that reading alone. We also might possibly show how it may be connected to other parts of the Bible that talk about the same thing, usually from the other lectionary readings that Sunday.
Now neither of these options is technically correct. God didn’t hand down sermon outlines with the 10 commandments. His desire is simply that His Word is proclaimed – which at least theoretically happens with both ways of preaching (again, I bring up that we would more likely fail in Bible trivia). But it does show that there is a Lutheran “preference” to have the Bible read among the gathered people as a chunk. There are reasons for this. The first reason that I can think of is the distrust of things being taken out of context. That happened a lot to us before 1517, and we’re still a little skittish about it. But the other reason is so that we can all say that we heard those things together, and that’s a good reason to do things our way.
You see when we gather for worship here at University Lutheran, we’re not just connecting the dots of how the Scripture readings work with one another. We’re connecting the dots ourselves as “dots” who come from different experiences, vocations, and perspectives – but who are all drawn together, and sent out together, by the Word of God. So the next time we read together, do think about how the readings compliment one another, do think about how the readings are telling you something big about God, but also think about how the readings are drawing us together and making us a congregation of “connected dots” with one another.