The Lectionary Committee of Lutheran Service Book strongly desired to preserve the historic collects of the church. These prayers have been used for centuries and continue to give voice to the heartfelt pleas of God’s people.
The committee’s work on the collects was two-fold. The first concerns the assignment of collects. The committee determined that for the festival half of the church year the same collects are used for the majority of Sundays in both the One- and Three-Year Lectionaries. In many cases, the Holy Gospel is the same in either lectionary (e.g., Christmas, Epiphany, Transfiguration, Ash Wednesday).
In several collects the committee made minor revisions to the content in order to highlight the Holy Gospel for the day. An example is the collect for the Second Sunday of Easter, where the Gospel recounts the story of Thomas seeing the risen Christ:
“Almighty God, grant that we, who have celebrated the Lord’s resurrection, may by Your grace confess in our life and conversation that Jesus is Lord and God; through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns ...”
For the second half of the church year, however, each lectionary is handled differently. For the One-Year Lectionary, the historic collects continue to be used.
For the Three-Year Lectionary, different collects are provided for all three series. In some cases, the committee assigned historic collects to Sundays where they best relate to the Gospel reading.
In other cases, the committee chose historic collects as a starting point but revised the collect to reflect better the theme of the day.
In a few cases, completely new collects were chosen, often drawing on other sources.
The second aspect of the committee’s work concerned the language of the collects. The historic collects were originally written in Latin. The translations of many of these collects were prepared in the sixteenth century by Thomas Cranmer.
In many cases, these translations demonstrate the beauty of the English language; nevertheless, these very literal translations of the terse Latin originals often result in collects that make for challenging listening.
The committee approached the task of revision fairly conservatively, frequently limiting the changes to a simplification of awkward constructions. An example is the collect for Passion Sunday:
“Almighty and everlasting God, You sent Your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, to take upon Himself our flesh and to suffer death upon the cross. Mercifully grant that we may follow the example of His great humility and patience and be made partakers of His resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns ...”
In general, the purpose of these revisions was to retain the elegance of the collects while at the same time simplifying them so that they can be better understood.