What is a homily?

Fall break gives me two weekends free of preaching, and I didn't want to leave this blog fallow for that long, so here's an article I once wrote to answer the question in the title: "What is a homily?"

At Mass, you are told to lift up your hearts.  God wants your hearts uplifted; He wants them on fire with the love in which and for which you were created.  If this command is given at Mass, there must be some means provided by which you may be formed (or, better, re-formed) into creatures who have their hearts lifted to their Creator.  He must be trying to lift your hearts.  The aim of the Eucharistic homily is to enable your hearts to be lifted.

The homily, then, is not something static: it has direction, and that direction is up. We move to praise, to worship God in spirit and truth and to continue to worship the God whom we experience in the least of these.  But, to have direction one must also start somewhere, and where we start is with your hearts, the hearts that are precious enough to God that He wants them lifted up to Him.  The homily starts with the assembly and can be tailored to the precise here-and-now situation, to the joys and hopes, the needs and concerns. 

It does not seek to describe the world neutrally, as a social scientist might try to.  As the Little Prince learnt, you can only see properly with your heart.  So, the preacher tries to look to your hearts from the heart.  There is no such thing as neutral looking, so we look with eyes of faith.  We preach as fellow believers.  Like any intimate act, preaching can only make sense given a shared commitment.  In this case, the commitment is to faith as a common way of interpreting the world.

We start with your hearts and move towards God, but that does not involve moving away from your hearts, for, as the Church taught in the Second Vatican Council, Christ is present in the gathered assembly.  The homily does not bring you something you aren’t (as if we could move an omnipotent omnipresent God around!): when preaching, we address the body of Christ that it might become fully itself, that it might worship.  We direct you to what you are, even though that inextinguishable presence might have been dimmed and defiled by the ravages of a fallen world: by grief, by poverty, by illness; by our sin, by someone else’s sin, by the structures of sin we inhabit.  Preaching seeks to reveal another layer of meaning to our lives which is deeper and realer than sin and death.  Preaching confesses that the mundane can reveal God, that flesh can be divinized, that death is conquered by life.

If we preach to raise the hearts of the body Christ to worship of Christ, there are yet more ways Christ is present in this act: we also preach from Christ.  Preaching is not a lecture on the scriptural texts assigned for that day’s mass, but is from and through them.  In these sacred and inspired texts, Christ is present.  Our trust in the power of these texts is that they will have something to say to the concrete situations that delight and afflict your hearts.  The texts are privileged expressions of that faith which can interpret life in such a way that the hearers can lift their hearts to God, to be reconciled with each other and approach the Table with love and devotion.

The homily should proclaim to you the Good News that God acts in your life.  The response is “Amen.”  The response is praise.  The response is proclamation, normally not in liturgical preaching, but in your life the next week.  Be careful, your life might be the only preaching some people hear.