Job, Psalms, and the Leviathan

Things are still busy. We are more than halfway through Proper 19; Job has left us; we celebrate the feast of St. Matthew; and we are currently nestled nicely in the middle of three days of fasting and abstinence.

Job ended on a great note. The Daily Office lectionary decided to go out of sequence a bit to wrap up the book with a very beautiful and poetic meditation on seeking wisdom. I found it to be quite approproate. I'm also excited about starting Esther--an odd book, kind of like a novel or short story, with frankly very little theology in it. Some argue that the book exists simply to justify the rather secular festival of Purim. Come read it with me, and we shall make up our own minds.

Tonight we read Psalm 74 (and by the way, your Daily Officer follows the 7-week Psalm cycle), and it will be instantly familiar to:

1. regular readers of the Office, and
2. fans of the Leviathan.

Unfortunately, the Leviathan doesn't fare to well this time. But on a happier note, office readers will appreciate these familiar lines from the Psalm:

¹⁶ Yours is the day, yours also the night; *
you established the moon and the sun.
¹⁷ You fixed all the boundaries of the earth; *
you made both summer and winter.

These lines, of course, are sometimes said as a "sentence" at the beginning of Evening Prayer. Which brings up an interesting question: unlike the Anglican Breviary, the Book of Common Prayer doesn't tell the user explicitly which sentence of scripture to say; it merely offers a selection of eight to chose from. (The Breviary has it all spelled out according to excruciatingly detailed and completely incomprehensible rubrics. Selecting the proper sentence or antiphon from the Breviary requires the use of a Kalendar, a slide rule, an Excel spreadsheet, and an astrolabe.) Anyway, the BCP offers eight sentences with which to begin Evening Prayer. How you you choose which one to say?

Here's what I do: I say the first ("Let my prayer...") on Sunday, the second ("Grace to you...") on Monday, the third on Tuesday, and so on. I say the eighth along with the first on Sunday as well. (Being a Sunday, I decided it deserves two sentences.) I came up with that idea myself. Any other people want to comment on how they select an appropriate sentence?