To Preach or to Impassion? by Gene Ciarlo

The homily proclaimed in the Liturgy of the Word at Mass is more compelling today than ever before for several reasons, not the least of which is to try to stem the gradual erosion-to-demise of Catholic Christian life and worship as we have known it in its long history.

The word “homily” is the relatively new word for the sermon. The word comes from the Greek homilos, which means a gathering. Homilia is the interaction that happens in a gathering of people who are sharing a common interest, a common cause, so the homily refers to a gathering and a sharing. A sermon, on the other hand, is a discourse, a pronouncement. As I have come to understand it through experience, it is a moral lesson. To preach a sermon means for a person in a position of authority to moralize, to tell people what they may or may not be doing according to the church’s teaching, and to set matters right. Obviously there is a radical difference between a homily and a sermon.

In our historic time and from my faith perspective, the homily at Mass is at least as important as any other part of Catholic Eucharistic worship. In this moment the church is on the proverbial rocks as the secular seas unwittingly pound our Christian shores threatening to destroy everything in their path. Our task as church, the people of God who profess Jesus as Lord, is to weather the storm by word and sacrament. It is a battle, and I am not speaking in hyperbole. We are in a battle to gain ground or to be overwhelmed.

When we say the Lord’s Prayer, do we really mean “Thy kingdom come on earth…”?  Our task is to become strong in faith and understanding so that we might fight the good fight against the overwhelming secularism that doesn’t even recognize a God, let alone a God who became one of us and lived our life to show us how it ought to be done.

I don’t mean to say in my drama that we are threatened with annihilation. There will always be a few of us, but—and here is the rub—too few to make a meaningful mark upon our society in general and our world in particular. Our task is to win the world for God through the message and example of the Son of Man, Jesus, whom we call God. There may be and there are other paths to this end, but our way as Christians is through Christ. We are not Christians for ourselves alone. That kind of so-called salvation is too selfish and it is not what Jesus was about.

Yet I don’t think Jesus, when he walked among us, intended to capture the whole world by his lifestyle and teaching. John and Paul, who amplified and theologized on his words and work, had that intention. They wanted nothing less than that all men and women should come to know Jesus, his lifestyle and his message, and thus convert the world for the kingdom of God. If not, then what is the sense of “Thy kingdom come on earth…”?

But to get back to my point, in our time we are threatened with a meaningless endgame, and the tendency is to trivialize religion as something nice to have in reserve, an historical artifact, something that was simply a cultural habit and phenomenon at one time in our history but has since become something that we have outgrown in favor of science and technology. Humanity has grown up and progress is the order of the day, but look around and be conscious and insightful: We are destroying the earth and ourselves in the process. “Thy kingdom come on earth…”

Those in the know likewise realize that the earth is threatened with extinction, but will it be the lady or the lion that will cede first to the forces of human care-less-ness? The earth is being destroyed because of human myopia, which translates into selfishness and greed. In like manner due to our frailty as humans, Christianity as a serious life-changing way of thwarting negative human instincts is in jeopardy. It is the path not instinctively chosen, the road traveled intentionally only by those who hear the beat of a different drummer. My words may appear overly dramatic, but I am unwittingly verging on and obviously affirming why the homily is so important in our time.

The homily used to be a more or less interesting talk by Father or the deacon after the gospel at Mass. People occasionally may have commented on it among themselves after Mass or told the presenter how wonderful it was. And perhaps it was wonderful. Today it is vital that the homily be packed with practical and realistic truths, a substantial summons to walk the path less traveled. It cannot be a spiritual nosegay, a moralizing lesson that tells people where they may have fallen short in following the Christian way. It cannot be a reprimand and it must not be a flowery presentation, a “my dear brothers and sisters in Christ,” cute, spiritual nosegay. Such a presentation by the deacon or priest would imply that he does not realize nor recognize what is going on in our world and the threat that is being leveled against the Christian way of life.

As for politicians bringing the Christian “excuse” into the political forum in our time by invoking religion in the same breath as allegiance to country or political party; that is nothing less than a belittling insult, not only to Christianity but to Jesus the Christ himself. It is a form of blasphemy, taking the name of God in vain, which in this context means self-serving, useless, ineffectual and political in the worst sense of the term. It is the height of selfishness, self-seeking and myopia.  

The world is in the throes of spiritual hunger which is manifested in a misplaced turn toward mundane, secular realities in an attempt to excite a feeling of being inspired and raised up to a new level. I think it is part of human nature to want more, to be raised up out of the ordinary, to be inspired. There is something in us that cries out for much more than what we have here on planet earth. Starting with Plato and then on to Augustine and Aquinas, all realized that the human heart thirsts unconsciously for truth, goodness, and beauty. Many of us hungry and thirsty humans find it ephemerally in the fads of the day. The fad du jour. We have plenty of proof of this in our social media and our pop culture. Just go online or turn on the popular TV shows. Examples are definitely in order.

Why the great groundswell and surge, especially among our youth, for popular celebrities and glitz? The young and old alike will go to the ends of the earth to be at a Taylor Swift concert. As always it started out small, but then our herd instinct kicked in and people inadvertently followed and still follow the crowd. We do not want to be alone, we fear being alone, and so we seek company in the common and crowded, the momentarily prominent, the socially approved and admired. Thus we join the stampeding masses, often just following because “this is what everybody is doing” and we don’t want to be left out or considered uncool. Is it really Taylor Swift or Usher, or is it the need to breathe free, to rush away from the chaos of our society and into a new, ephemeral world of glitz and glamour, an escape that really says, “Inspire me. Raise me up. Get me out of the pain that is daily life in a chaotic world.”  

We are living through a spiritual hunger that is not being satisfied in our time, and the priest or clergyperson who stands at the lectern or pulpit to open up the Word of God must know, in their hearts, that the world is crying out in desperation for something to raise it up, to raise us up, and show us the way to something above and beyond ourselves and our confused world of alternate facts and half truths. If they do not realize that in themselves and feel the urgency of the moment to deliver something alive and meaningful to their people, then they have failed themselves, their people, and their vocation to preach the Word of God. They are watching Rome burn while they fiddle with pious platitudes and spiritual nosegays. ♦

Gene Ciarlo is a priest no longer active in the ministry. Ordained from the American College, University of Louvain, Belgium, he spent most of his ministry in parish life. After receiving a master’s degree in liturgical studies from Notre Dame University he returned to his alma mater in Louvain as director of liturgy and homiletics. Gene lives in Vermont, where everything is gracefully green when it is not solemnly white.  

Image: Detail from Saint Bernardino Preaching from a Pulpit, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, ca. 1470–75