Comments

The Comments web site provides three pages for each week:

• a commentary on the week's lessons, with links to the texts as found on the Vanderbilt University Lectionary site;
• Introductions for Readers, which may be used in the liturgy;
• Clippings - more extensive notes that were not used in the commentary because of space limitations or complexity.

Where there are choices of readings within the option, commentaries and introductions are supplied for all the readings, and a note concerning the option is provided. Where feast days occur, which may take precedence over the Sunday readings in some denominations, Comments are normally provided for both the Sunday lections and the Feast day.

The second option for Old Testament readings does relate these to the Gospel lesson. This option is used by a minority of churches and does not appear in Comments. The reason for not including this option is entirely arbitrary: the Anglican Church of Canada recommends the semi-continuous option, and we have limited energy to comment on extra texts, which we tend to expend for special days.

In either case, the Psalm or Canticle is always related thematically to the first reading.

During special seasons (the non-Green coloured ones of Lent, Easter, Advent and Christmas) all the readings for a given Sunday are related to each other by theme.

Comments follows the wisdom of the Revised Common Lectionary in not generally providing for extra feasts, with the exception of those mandated by the Anglican Church of Canada. Your denomination's rules may differ somewhat, and therefore you may find that a given feast day appears to be excluded for an arbitrary reason.

For more detail, see the next question.

Comments follows the calendar of the Anglican Church of Canada, though we do try to take ecumenical considerations into account. In our calendar, only certain Principal Feasts and Holy Days may supplant the Sunday Readings. Most feasts cannot be transferred on to a Sunday unless that feast is the Patronal Festival of the parish. Certain feasts may optionally be celebrated on a Sunday if the date naturally falls on a Sunday. Other feasts are always transferred off the Sunday if they are to be kept at all.

The feasts that may supercede a Sunday observance are:

• The Naming of Jesus (January 1)
• The Epiphany (January 6)
• The Presentation of the Lord (February 2)
• The Birth of St John the Baptist (June 24)*
• Saint Peter and Saint Paul (June 29)*
• The Transfiguration of the Lord (August 6)**
• Saint Mary the Virgin (August 15)*
• Holy Cross (September 14)
• Saint Michael and All Angels (September 29)*
• All Saints (November 1)
• Christmas Day (December 25)

In addition to these, the Epiphany (January 6) may optionally be transferred onto the preceding Sunday, and All Saints (November 1) may optionally be transferred onto the following Sunday. Harvest Thanksgiving may be observed on a Sunday according to local custom. Some parishes observe Thanksgiving on Sunday before the second Monday of October (the Canadian Thanksgiving Day), while some observe the festival on the Sunday previous. The Revised Common Lectionary supplies texts for this observance.

The Revised Common Lectionary does not provide for feasts above marked with an asterisk. For those feasts we use the texts specified by the Anglican Church of Canada.

For the Transfiguration, the Revised Common Lectionary provides for the feast as the Last Sunday After Epiphany. We use those readings for the current year when the Transfiguration is to be celebrated on a Sunday in August (as in 2000). In future, this feast's place in the calendar may be subject to review, as its inclusion in August is redundant.

Extra material, which may be more technical in nature, is included in Clippings.

• we really don't have the energy or time to devote to a high-quality set of links;
• others do that task far better than we could;
• we see those sites as partners in our mission.

1. The Lectionary texts are not on our site, and thus we can neither take responsibility for them, nor make any changes to them. The texts are provided by the Divinity Library of Vanderbilt University.
2. As we understand it, part of the mandate of the Lectionary Project at Vanderbilt is to display some of their art collection. Hence the fancy backgrounds. The backgrounds often require that the text be displayed in a colour other than black. Hence the trouble printing in these cases.

In those cases where it proves difficult to print the text, we suggest you use the cut-and-paste technique to copy the text to a standard word-processing document. From there you can reformat the text as desired and print in the usual way. The process is quite simple and is described below. Incidentally, you can use this technique to copy text from any web page. Just be careful not to violate copyright.

Instructions to cut-and-paste from any web page to your word processor:
(These instructions will work with any MS-Windows software)

1. Place your mouse cursor at the beginning of the section you want to copy;
2. Click and hold the mouse button;
3. Drag the cursor to the end of the section you want to copy (the text will change colour);
4. Press Ctrl-C to copy to the Windows Clipboard;
5. Open a new file in your favourite Word Processor;
6. Place the cursor where you would like to place the copied text;
7. Press Ctrl-V to insert the text.