For many Catholics, including me, the lowest point of the week is the sermon at Sunday mass. Hell isn’t the place where the priest who’s preaching the homily says you might go—it’s the homily itself.
Here’s a sample opener from the kind of sermon I’m talking about: “This morning, as I was doing my laundry, I noticed my two socks.” Makes you sit up and think, doesn’t it? That priest read somewhere in a homily handbook that you ought to “hook” your audience by recounting an episode from your daily life. So he did. It’s called getting down with the people. The apotheosis of this sort of thing for me came from a priest at a trendy Georgetown church who didn’t just get down with the people. He invited the people (or the “assembly,” as they’re called these days in the hippest Catholic circles) to preach his sermon for him. The parishioners had a field day with that one: “Oh, Faa-ther, this gospel is about community.” Very enlightening.
Monsignor Metaphor
Whenever I behold the priest I privately call Monsignor Metaphor making for the pulpit, I shudder with dread. Monsignor is addicted to adorning his homilies with elaborate figures of speech. But those sneaky linguistic adornments have a nasty habit of leading him over hill and dale, up and down highways and byways, inevitably ending in a cul-de-sac of utter confusion. I shall never forget his announcing that the topic of his sermon would be the closet monster. I knew I was in for a good one. A “closet monster,” Monsignor Metaphor informed us, is one of those creepy creatures that children imagine live in the dark crevices of their homes. So far, so good, although what was the point? Then Monsignor began to adumbrate: Closet Monster is also the name of an anticlutter service that cleans closets for a fee. Oh. I looked around at Monsignor’s largely poor, largely Hispanic congregation and wondered whether anyone in the church had ever employed such a service.
Monsignor Metaphor wasn’t through. He told us that Christ would “shine a flashlight on our fears.” Let’s see: Does this mean that our fears are imaginary, or does it mean that Christ is the Great Cleaning Service in the Sky? Monsignor never sorted out the images and told us.
In another of his metaphorical meanderings, he narrated a yarn about people who’d won a contest. The prize was that they could take home all the groceries they could grab off the shelves of a market in the course of an hour. Monsignor really got into this one, describing in loving detail every last kiwi fruit they snatched. He dwelt at length on the havoc that these greedy wretches created as they raced up and down the aisles, pulling items off the shelves and throwing them into their shopping carts—except for one woman, who pushed her cart serenely around the displays showing no signs of avarice. As it turned out, Monsignor told us, her dad owned the grocery chain.
I waited for him to get to the point, any point. We can afford to be relaxed and gracious because Our Father in Heaven owns the store, so to speak? Property owners are nicer than other people? But it was a typical Monsignor Metaphor performance: After a lengthy lead-in, he never got around to clarifying what, if any, relation his story bore to the lectionary readings for the day—which is supposed to be the purpose of the Catholic Sunday sermon.
Monsignor Metaphor isn’t the only priest I know whose homilies specialize in the detailed, lovingly layered, unfailingly banal analogy. The beautiful Advent gospel about John the Baptist (now known as John the Baptizer, presumably because we might otherwise think he belonged to the same denomination as former President Clinton) contains a quotation from the Book of Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his path.”
A priest in Northern Virginia one December Sunday managed to turn that path into a long, rambling road, or actually, a long, rambling freeway. “Often, life is very much like a highway full of cloverleaf intersections with no road signs pointing out just where the exits lead to,” he began. Then he started to spin around one of those very cloverleafs: Politicians in Virginia, he informed us, “have come to realize that, since they cannot leave their footprints in the sands of time, what they can best do for posterity is to leave more roads.”
King of the Road
Then he seemed to veer onto an off-ramp: “Isn’t it amazing how a hundred years ago, our forebears blazed the trails, and now their descendants burn up the roads?” And if that didn’t leave us scratching our heads, he proceeded to quote in toto the lyrics of King of the Road: “Boxcar, midnight train / Destination: Bangor, Maine….” That was “a 1965 mega-hit,” Fr. Cool informed us. Finally, he did manage to steer the car, or the train, or whatever his sermon had morphed into, back to Advent for a few closing remarks about sin that seemed finally pertinent.
Preaching, as you might have guessed by now, is not the forte of the contemporary Catholic clergy. My theory is that they try too hard to show that they’re with it—indeed, plugged into—the mundane concerns of us laypeople. A perusal of Fulfilled in Your Hearing, the document on preaching and Sunday sermons adopted by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1982, only confirms this impression of mine.
The bishops make it sound as if getting down to our level takes a lot of work. “If preachers are to know and understand their congregations today, some familiarity with popular forms of entertainment may be necessary,” they write, helpfully adding, “We need not spend whole afternoons watching soap operas, memorizing baseball statistics, or listening to the latest albums?’ Whew.
“Yet,” Fulfilled in Your Hearing continues, “if we are totally unaware, or give the impression that we are unaware of the activities and interests to which people devote a good deal of their leisure time, energy, and money, it will be difficult for us to make connections between their lives and the gospel, or to call them to fuller, richer, and deeper levels of a faith response.”
But what a dim lot the bishops think we are. The document sums up the Christian story in a paragraph: A loving God created us, we turned away from Him through sin, God sent Christ, and Christ became, through the cross, a source of eternal life for us. Nicely said. But then the document goes on to note: “No individual in the community would very likely express the faith in quite these words. Some might find it difficult to express their faith in words at all. They do not possess the background of theology to enable them to do so.”
Our ignorance of theology is no handicap, according to the bishops. The bottom line, according to Fulfilled in Your Hearing: We’re to help Father prepare his sermon. The method: focus groups.
Of course, Fulfilled in Your Hearing doesn’t use the term “focus group.” It uses “homily preparation group.” That’s the priest and four or five church members, who get together on a weeknight, read the readings for the next Sunday, and “share the challenge these words offer us.” “It may be a surprise to hear what parts of the Scriptures are being highlighted” at those midweek lectionary schmooze-fests, Fulfilled chirps. “These responses are already a sign of the concerns, questions, and interests that are present in the lives of the congregation.” Oh, so that’s why the sermons are so bad: They’re written by a committee.
Meat and Potatoes
One of my favorite preachers, an older monsignor who manages to turn his Sunday homily into gold, seems not to have read Fulfilled in Your Hearing. He preaches a pithy meat-and¬potatoes sermon, always based on the week’s gospel reading, and always in a monotone. His sermons are simplicity itself, and he always gives me something to think about. If he’d opened up Fulfilled, however, he would realize that the very form that serves him so well is a no-no nowadays. “Many homilies,” the document sniffs, “seem to fall into the same three-part pattern: ‘In today’s readings…. This reminds us…. Therefore let us….”
I would argue that too few sermons fall into this honest, straightforward, and readily understandable template. Fulfilled opines otherwise: “The very structure of such homilies [the old-fashioned kind my favorite monsignor delivers] gives the impression that the preacher’s principal purpose is to interpret Scripture texts rather than communicate with real people, and that he interprets texts primarily to extract ethical demands to impose on a congregation.”
What’s wrong with that? Perhaps someone should inform our shepherds that this description of a supposedly inferior sermon isn’t too far off the mark from what sermons were originally were intended to be. “The sermons to the faithful in the early ages were of the simplest kind, being merely expositions or paraphrases of the passage of Scripture that was read, coupled with extempore effusions of the heart,” says the Catholic Encyclopedia.
It does not follow from this that artifice is necessarily a bad thing. If the preacher has the gifts of a Lancelot Andrews, whose sermon on the Magi inspired T.S. Eliot’s poem on the subject, or Msgr. Ronald Knox, “the cleverest young man in England” during the first half of the 20th century, by all means let him dazzle us. One of my all-time-favorite preachers (alas, a fictional preacher and not a Catholic) is a master of linguistic flamboyance. He is Rev. Amos Starkadder in Stella Gibbons’s hilarious 1933 novel, Cold Comfort Farm. After hearing Rev. Starkadder discourse at his Church of the Quivering Brotherhood on “the great crimson lickin’ flames o’ hellfire,” his sophisticated London cousin, Flora, is awed. “The man was an artist,” she correctly recognizes.
Alas, we shall not soon see his like again. For one thing, Fulfilled in Your Hearing frowns on “meaningless broadsides about the wickedness of the modern world,” which would have pretty much put the kibosh on Rev. Starkadder—and also on Savonarola. That admonition from Fulfilled may be the reason so many Catholic preachers put on a smiley face in their pulpits these days.
Homilies for Sale
Those who lack the preaching artistry of a Rev. Starkadder, or even a Monsignor Metaphor, typically turn to a homily service. The hordes of frantic clerics who suddenly realize that it’s Saturday night and they don’t know what to preach about the next day used to consult books of canned sermons. Now, they click onto the Internet, which positively bristles with homiletic e-commerce. For example, a Protestant site offers tips on “21 Ways to Jump Start Your Sermon” and “gigglebytes” designed to keep them in stitches between apothegms.
Catholic sites bear such titles as Homilies Alive (www.homiliesalive.com) and Deacon Sil’s Homiletic Resources Web site (www.deaconsil.com), which advertises itself as “the one- stop shop for preachers, homilists, and all others interested in the Spoken Word.” The deacon asks, “Who knows better what a preacher of the Word needs to help their ministry than a fellow preacher?” Who indeed? Like other homily vendors, Sil, who also sells a large selection of clerical apparel, doesn’t actually post his sermons, which are available for purchase on CD-ROM.
There is nothing wrong with a commercial homily service, especially when it comes to brushing up on the historical setting or theological underpinnings of a particular Scripture reading. Some homilists, however, do not bother to digest the material before inflicting it on a congregation.
A deacon in a prominent Washington, D.C., church subscribes to two services, and he typically mingles—and mangles—them together on a single Sunday. In one such sermon, the poor man got two Greek theological terms hopelessly confused: metanoia, or conversion, and parousia, or the Second Coming. Every time he mentioned either, he meant the other. You might say that it was all Greek to him.
There is yet another kind of homily that I abhor: the “social justice” sermon. A priest, of course, has every right to preach on social justice; indeed, in some instances he may be obligated to do so. Most social justice preaching, however, is just a stringing together of simplistic, liberal clichés. Preaching the Just Word, an institute at the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, D.C. (see its Web site, www.georgetown.edu/centers/woodstock/pjw.htm), is a hub of this kind of 1960s sermonizing, founded by the Rev. Walter Burghardt, a Jesuit in his 70s who still likes to use phrases like “mind-blowing.” Typical of the Preaching the Just Word offerings is a homily by a bishop who attested that Christ had told him, “I invite you to broaden your skills.” The bishop went on to recall his experiences at a workshop titled “Dismantling Racism,” at which he dutifully apologized for a list of politically incorrect attributes: “bishop, Roman Catholic, white, male, heterosexual, middle economic status, good health, good education, American, middle age.”
This kind of preaching offers the platitudes instead of the Beatitudes. The parable of the Good Samaritan becomes a tract on diversity. Isaiah’s “voice crying in the wilderness,” becomes (I quote from a sermon I recently heard) “our inner voice, which is hampered by society’s institutions.”
The Good Sermon
What makes a good sermon? A few years ago, a large cathedral where I often found myself on Sunday mornings printed in its bulletin guidelines by which attendees could rate the homily. Though perhaps not verbatim, I distinctly recall that two of the pointers were: Does the preacher “appear to” believe his message [!], and are his gestures suitable to his words?
Worshippers were invited to write to the rectory and evaluate the homilies at the cathedral using these standards. I seized the invitation with unholy alacrity. While I can’t imagine bothering to critique a sermon that the preacher does not at least “appear to” believe, I decided that this was my chance at last to unburden myself and tell the priests what I regarded as the gospel truth: that the preaching in this great church was my cross to bear. I worked hard on my letter. Knowing that I was expressing an accumulation of years of displeasure with the cathedral’s homily offerings, I asked several people to read the letter before I sent it, in case it sounded overly harsh. Of course, I never received an acknowledgment—an indication to me that the request for input had been as phony as the Monsignor Metaphor–style analogies that regularly appeared in the cathedral’s preaching.
Follow These Rules, Father
Nevertheless, I proffer my three simple Hays rules for evaluating a homily. The most important thing is instruction. Does the sermon clarify a point of dogma or a Scripture reading, or does it help me to lead a better life? A sermon that becomes a dissertation about highways in Northern Virginia tells me nothing about making straight the path. Or there was the sermon I heard one Good Shepherd Sunday in Georgetown. The text was, “Verily, verily, I say unto you: He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” This generated a long discourse, not on Christ or His flock or Satan but on doors. I gained no fresh understanding of the gospel words, but I did leave the church with the unsettling impression that Father had spent quite a lot of time looking up the front steps of rich people in Georgetown.
My second point: Is the sermon interesting? Priests who fondly imagine that we will be “hooked” by humdrum images of their socks in the washing machine bore and insult us. Even priests who make perceptive confessors on Saturday afternoon can drive me to distraction in this manner on Sunday morning. I think this happens because, when confronted with the pulpit, otherwise eloquent pastors suddenly suffer from stage fright. So, instead of saying something simple and keeping it short, they overly rely on Fulfilled in Your Hearing and other awful directives, leading to self-conscious and condescending sermons. Please, Father, try to think of us parishioners as sentient beings who are not entirely unintelligent—rather like yourself—and speak to us accordingly.
In the Middle Ages, the monk and scholar Hugh of St. Victor set forth what he thought were the conditions of a good sermon: It should be “holy, prudent, and noble.” This required from the preacher sanctity, knowledge, and eloquence. Such a homily would not bore. Hugh’s prescriptions are as good today as then, and if the preacher can’t muster all of them, he can at least be brief. Of course, this violates one of the hall-monitor tenets of Fulfilled in Your Hearing: that a sermon must always take up a significant amount of time. No, Your Excellencies: A single idea, briefly explained, is more effective than a long disquisition signifying very little.
My third prescription: Might I actually remember small bits and pieces of the sermon when I get home? This is the mark of a master homilist and is more likely a preacher’s ideal rather than a regular attainment. But I have heard a few such gems from the pulpit in my time. I’ll never forget the priest, who, preaching on the apostle Thomas and his very human doubt about the resurrection, recalled that one of the popes had once said the gospel tells us it is okay to ask questions and we should always ask to put our hands in Christ’s wounds, as Thomas did. Ever since, I’ve understood the great favor that Thomas did for all of us in asking the questions that we all have—so that we all might know who Christ is.
I also remember a young priest who said in his sermon that when a priest goes up to the altar to celebrate the Eucharist, he is going up to Calvary. Now there’s a good image! But I don’t expect all sermons to end up graven on my mind, and, if a preacher meets two out of three of my homiletic criteria, I am filled with awe and gratitude.
For example, a preacher in Washington whom I always enjoy and learn from draws a large crowd for his Sunday evening Mass, including many college students, although no university is nearby. He’s not a brilliant speaker, but he always sticks to the readings. On one recent Sunday, he focused on the difference between the sacrifices offered by the ancient Hebrew priests and that offered by Catholic priests—a simple point but one that probably needs to be made in our era of abysmal ignorance about the basics of Catholicism. His delivery is natural and straightforward. A priest doesn’t have to indulge in verbal pyrotechnics to preach a satisfying homily.
I am not one of those Catholics who yearns for the return of the Latin Mass. But it seems to me that when a church limits the use of Latin on the grounds that the congregation can’t understand it, but allows its priests to preach gobbledygook in English that the congregation can’t understand, something is seriously wrong. A sermon should, quite simply, instruct the people. And help is at hand: It’s in the gospel, Father. Oh, yes, and let’s build a bonfire and burn all copies of Fulfilled in Your Hearing.