Factors to Consider When Preaching
Thank you for your gracious invitatior and warm welcome. It is an honor and a joy to be back with you in the city and the college I so love to speak on matter at the very core of the mission of this; college: preaching. It has always impressed me that on the striking marble frame surrounding the high altar in our chapel an eight episodes: the seven sacraments and yes, almost an eighth one, preaching.
On the Friday after Christmas I had a sac duty, one that I have performed at least dozen times before, one that never leave; you the same: I presided at St. Francis Xavie: Cabrini Parish in West Bend, Wis., at the funeral of Kevin Kryst, a Marine sergeant, committed Catholic, who had been killed it the line of duty in Iraq. As is my custom, arrived about 20 minutes early to visit with his loving, faithful family, among whom wa; his brother, also a Marine.
As is likewise my custom, I mingle with the dozens and dozens of young Marines who had come to pay theirrespects to a fallen comrade. They had assem¬bled in a spacious area outside the sacristy and I greeted each of them. I thanked them, expressed sympathy to them, joked with them and chatted about topics such as the joy of the Christmas holidays, the Green Bay Packers, beer and brats, their girl friends and listened to their good-natured banter.
But I waited for a certain moment which past experience had shown me would cer¬tainly come. As the funeral was ready to begin, an officer crisply sounded a command: The persona of those Marines, their temperament, their bearing, almost, dare I say, their identity was transformed. The chatting, swapping of anecdotes, ribbing, laughing and levity van¬ished; they stood at attention, portraits, as it were, of honor, valor, duty. They now had a sacred mission: to honor a fallen comrade, to console a family, to represent a grieving nation, to personify the Marine Corps. They had a new vocation, a new identity. And as usual, they did it well.
On the way back, I concluded, I have my Carl J. Peter Lecture.
For, my brother bishops, priests and dea¬cons; for, beloved future priests and dear friends who look to us for solid, sustaining, substantive preaching — when we in holy orders preach at the eucharist our persona is transformed. Like those Marines, we assume a new, elevated identity: We preach not in our name, but in the name of Jesus and his church.
Preaching at the eucharist is an ecclesial vocation; it comes from and is an intimate part of the person of Christ and of his bride, the church.
Like those Marines, once the command to "go to the altar of God" and to "do this in memory of me" sounds, the banter, the levity, the personal agenda disappears as we take upon ourselves another identity to act in per¬sona Christi.
Now I must express a couple of caveats, lest one be already tempted to jump to unintended conclusions from my just-stated thesis.
For one, I am not saying that our person¬ality, our temperament, our humanity does not affect our preaching. You bet it does. As St. Thomas Aquinas insisted, grace builds on nature, and we bring our human nature with us — some of us with much more weight than others — every time we stand before God's people and dare to preach. Never are we to be robots, empty shells, devoid of color, care and character in the pulpit.
When I was here as rector, a faculty mem¬ber during an evaluation session praised a . deacon for the substance of his preaching but then observed, "But I will bring an oilcan with me to the sacristy next time you're on, because in the sanctuary and in the pulpit you are about as stiff and mechanical as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz."
So I am not saying that our ecclesial call to preach — not our person but in persona Christi — turns us into mechanical "tin men." We gladly bring our humanity with us to give warmth, color, naturalness, credibility, a heart to what we preach.
But our person is — to borrow again from the Angelic Doctor — only the "accident." The substance must be Christ! And I am afraid that too often today the "accident," our own per¬son, our own agenda, trumps the substance of the person of Christ and the message of his church. That injunction is as fresh as yesterday’s office of readings, when St. Hilary of Poitiers prayed to the Lord. “I am well aware…that in my life I owe you a most particular duty: to make my every thought and word speak of you.”
The second caveat is that although these words are addressed to future and present men in holy orders—a fact for which I hardly need to apologize given the setting and mandate of this lecture—I do not mean to imply that only deacons, priests and bishops can preach. True, only deacons, priests and bishops can preach the homily at the eucharist, but all God’s people, washed clean in baptism, strengthened in confirmation and nourished at the eucharist are bound to obey the Teacher’s last mandate to “Go, preach the Gospel.”
Most of the time they do this by the cogency and credibility of their lives. As St. Francis exhorted, “Preach always, and, if you have to, use words!” In the remark of Pope Paul VI, “Modern men and women learn more from witness than from words.”
Thus, my observations are not intended to eclipse the universal mandate to all the faithful to preach nor to exclude more precise forms of the church’s preaching mission of evangelization, catechesis and even some ritual and liturgical preaching properly allowed to the qualified nonordained on specific occasions.
My words on preaching today are meant for those in holy orders. When we preach at the eucharist — a sacred task Presbyterorum Ordinis, the document of the council on the priesthood, lists as the priority of the priest — to borrow from the apostle, we never "preach ourselves, but Christ crucified." Preaching at the eucharist is an ecclesial, not a personal vocation. It comes from and is an intimate part of the person, not of Timothy Dolan, but of Christ and his church.
Thanks to the towering magisterium of the servant of God Pope John Paul II, the theme of the identity of the priest as one who acts in persona Christi has been revived and empha¬sized. At the core of our being, ordination so configures us, "reorders" us, that we now act in the very person of the second person of the Most Blessed Trinity, a concept developed especially in Pastores Dabo Vobis.
I don't know about you, but I find it rather easy — awesome, to be sure, but simple — to see myself acting in persona Christi when I utter the words of consecration at Mass, for instance, or absolve a penitent in the sacra¬ment of reconciliation, or christen a baby or an adult. What I am proposing in this Carl J. Peter Lecture is that we are also acting inthe person of Christ when we preach. Jesus preaches to his people in and through us. "He who hears you, hears me!" If this does not stop you short, I don't know what will.
Let me elaborate on this in three points:
First, we are called in the ecclesial charism of preaching to preach Jesus. In my home Archdiocese of St. Louis there is a parish church where as you approach the pulpit to preach, you see an inscription from the Gospels carved into the ambo. The passage? "Sir, we would like to see Jesus," the earnest, direct appeal of the Greek visitors to the apos¬tles as recorded in the fourth Gospel. The first time I preached from that pulpit I was cap¬tivated by that statement. As I looked out at the hundreds of people before me, that was their plea, their desire, the mission statement they were giving me: "Sir, we would like to see Jesus."
My good friend and mentor Cardinal Justin Rigali tells the story of once being with Blessed Mother Teresa behind stage right before she was to begin to address thousands of people eager to hear her. "Mother, what do you plan to speak about?" he asked her. She shrugged and replied, "Oh, I don't know, but it will cer¬tainly be something about Jesus." While I can hardly encourage not knowing exactly what we will speak about until moments before we do so, I can certainly encourage us to follow her example to make sure that it is always about Jesus.
I was at a wake service once where the funeral director, trying admirably to be help¬ful, introduced the pastor by saying, "Now Father Mark will preach about the life of George, our beloved deceased." The priest began: "Well, not exactly. I am going to preach about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and how George is now part of that mystery" Well said!
Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile recalls how, as a student here, the class on the Trinity came to the end of the semester. The famed professor closed his notes, removed his glasses and for the first time all semester spoke unscripted and in Italian, not Latin. He looked out at the hundreds of students in the aula and concluded, "When all is said and done, I do not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity!"
Gasps! Consternation throughout the hall.. What? Such heresy at this pontifical univer¬sity?
He waited for silence. "No, I do not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. I believe with all my heart and soul in the God who has revealed it to us!"
Archbishop Lipscomb goes on, "For the first time in my life, I realized that faith
was not in a proposition but in a person."
And we preach a person, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ.
If, as I contend, preaching is an ecclesial charism, then, as homilist we, representing the church, speak lovingly of the church's spouse, Christ. Poetically implicit in the Liturgy of the Word for this second Sunday of ordinary time, in the passage from Isaiah and the fourth Gospel, is that nuptial imagery. While preach¬ing, we speak with, from and for the church, often about her spouse, Jesus Christ.
I remember the weeks and months after my dad dropped dead at 51, frequently visit¬ing mom. Purposefully, I would always get her to talk about him. She would, of course, tear up and cry. One day I said: "I'm sorry, mom, I shouldn't bring up dad all the time. It under¬standably upsets you."
She shot back: "No! Please! You're the only one that gets me talking about him. Everybody else is afraid to upset me. Please let's keep talking about him. I need to! I want to! Never stop."
—A bride eager to speak of her husband. —A church itching to speak of her bride¬groom.
—A preacher always talking about Jesus.
I came upon this allocution of Pope Benedict XVI marvelously elaborating on this relationship between the priest and Christ:
"St. Augustine tried to make clear for him¬self and his faithful the nature of priestly service. It came to him from meditation on the figure of John the Baptist, in whom he finds a prefiguring of the role of the priest. He points out that in the New Testament John is described with a saying borrowed from Isaiah, as a 'voice,' while Christ appears in the Gospel of John as 'the Word.'
"The relation of 'voice' (vox) to 'word' (ver¬bum) helps to make clear the mutual rela¬tionship between Christ and the priest. The word exists in someone's heart before it is ever perceptible to the senses through the voice. Through the mediation of the voice, it then enters into the perception of the other person and is then present likewise in his heart with¬out the speaker's having thereby in any sense lost the word.
"This voice that carries the word from one person to the other (or others) passes away. The word remains. Ultimately, the task of the priest is quite simply to be a voice for the word: 'He must increase, but I must decrease' — the voice has no other purpose than to pass on the word; it then once more effaces itself.
"On this basis the stature and the humble¬ness of priestly service are both equally clear:
The priest is, like John the Baptist, purely a forerunner, a servant of the Word. It is not he who matters but the other. Yet he is, with his entire existence, vox; it is his mission to be a voice for the Word and thus, precisely in his being radically referred to, dependent upon someone else, he takes a share in the stature of the mission of the Baptist and in the mis¬sion of the Logos himself."
Second, as a preacher we speak for, with and from the church. It is an ecclesial act.
This follows logically because for us as Catholics Christ and his church are one. Just ask Saul of Tarsus, who found this out the hard way on the road to Damascus. "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" Not, notice, why do you persecute my church, my people, but "why do you crucify me?"
Buckle your seat belt, future preachers, because this is a real challenge today. As Father Ronald Rolheiser observes, we live not in a post-Christian era — people rarely have a problem with Christ. But we sure do live in a postecclesial era! The folks have trouble with the church. They want the king without the kingdom, Christ without his church and for us as Catholics it's a package deal. "For what would I know of him without her?" as de Lubac asks.
So we hear, "Well, I'm a 'spiritual' person, but not religious."
"I believe in God. I just don't need the church."
But we are totally and unequivocally men of the church as preachers. What St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote for his prospective Jesuits applies to us: We are resolved to serve "the Lord alone and the church, his spouse."
Remember his conclusion of the Spiritual Exercises, where he refuses to admit any dis¬crepancy between the love of Christ and his church? "I must be convinced," he writes, "that in Christ our Lord, the bridegroom, and in his spouse the church, only one Spirit holds sway, which governs and rules for the salvation of souls."
And, as Cardinal Avery Dulles concludes, "St. Ignatius' allegiance is not to some abstract idea of the church but to the church as it con¬cretely exists on earth, with the Roman pontiff at its summit." Referring to St. Ignatius, the cardinal concludes that the hierarchical and Roman church is "the true spouse of Christ our Lord, our holy mother."
So it is imperative that we speak lovingly, tenderly of the church. Once again, as Pastores Dabo Vobis< teaches, through holy orders we are so configured to Christ that we act in his person in loving his bride, the church.
For some preachers it seems obligatory to criticize the church in their homilies. They claim she is hopelessly outmoded, patriar¬chal, oppressive, insensitive, corrupt, unenlightened — all of which really translates: unwilling to do what they want! She is the cause of every problem in the world, from global warming to male-pattern baldness. And so they say, we'll be prophetic in the pul¬pit and chide her, berate her, criticize her! Listen to us, they say, not the church.
Basta! We are in the pulpit not to speak against the church but to speak about her, for her, with her, from her.
We're hardly blind to the defects, flaws and imperfections of the church. Ecclesia sem¬per reformanda. We see her, warts and all. At times we can even agree with Flannery O'Connor and remark, "It's not suffering for the church that bothers me; it's suffering from her." A groom will honor his bride's dark side; a son well knows his mother's eccentricities. But, in the words of the great Newman, our love for and trust in the church, both our bride and our mother, is innate.
I don't know if you still do it, but in my days as rector the first night in September, when all had returned, as we would gather in chapel for evening prayer the deacons-to-be would make their required oath of fidelity and profession of faith. It was almost like the opening ad at the Super Bowl: This is what we're all about folks! We are men for and with the church, and our duty, now sealed by this oath, is to teach what she does, not to preach what we like.
"Love for Christ and his church must be the passion of your lives!" as John Paul the Great told priests.
Third, finally, as we preach of Jesus, as we speak with, for and from his church, we must speak of the cross.
Not too long ago I had the "scourging-at¬the pillar" experience of an 18-hour nonstop mediation session with victim-survivors ofsexual abuse by a priest. When I went in to meet the court-appointed mediator, he looked at the cross I was wearing, held it and glared at me. "You Catholics," he huffed, "you're always showing off the cross!"
Oh, great, I thought. I've got some funda¬mentalist anti-Catholic on my hands. There goes the cathedral!
But then he says: "And I'm glad you're always showing off the cross. In my work I daily hear the stories of people in pain, in agony, who have been hurt in soul, mind and body. There are a lot of times I sneak to the Catholic Church down the block. I'm not even a Catholic but am a man of faith, and I just stand and look up at the cross and that gives me the strength I need to know that our God is on a cross."
Wow! Talk about a sermon! The power of the cross! "We preach Christ and Christ cru¬cified."
The temptation is there to soft-pedal the cross. We have a prominent couple back home in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee who left the church some years ago to join one of the popular, mushrooming, evangelical megachurches in the area. Why? They claimed they wanted solid Bible-based preaching and weren't getting it at their parish.
But after a couple years they came back to the church. Alleluia! Why? Because, they report, they missed the eucharist, and more to our point here, they found the preaching in the new church, while skillful, effective, catchy, well-prepared and exquisitely deliv¬ered, to be — to use their word — sanitized. Sanitized? What does that mean, I asked. That means, they replied, it was always feel-good, affirming, nonthreatening and — get this — absent the cross.
I'm afraid we face that in the church too. Sanitized, feel-good, affirming, nice, thera¬peutic, but no cross.
"A God without wrath brought men with¬out sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministration of a Christ without a cross," in the oft-quoted words of H. Richard Niebuhr.
Well, in the words of that great American philosopher Huckleberry Finn from my home state of Missouri: "It ain't the parts of the Bible that I don't understand that both¬ers me. It's the parts I do understand," and I understand the Bible to teach that the cross is an inevitable part of what we paradoxically call the "good news."
I have always found it compelling that the first thing Jesus did when he appeared to his apostles Easter night was to show them his wounds. He showed them his wounds, yes, to let them know it really was he, the same one crucified last Friday.
But I wonder if he did not also show them his wounds because that's what he wanted his newborn church to do: to preach the wounds. Showing them his wounds, remember what he then remarked? "As the Father sent me" —and, see what happened, these wounds — "so I send you" — and you best get ready for wounds too.
So our preaching, if we preach Christ, if we preach with, for, from and in the church, must preach the cross.
Maybe the greatest threat to the church is not heresy, not dissent, not secularism, not even moral relativism, but this sanitized, feel-good, boutique, therapeutic spirituality that makes no demands, calls for no sacrifice, asks for no conversion, entails no battle against sin but only soothes and affirms. Our preaching can then become cotton-can¬dyish: a lot of fluff, air and sugar but no substance.
As the columnist David Brooks comments, people today seem to want a comfortable, convenient, tolerant complacency; they do not ask "What does the Lord expect of me?" but rather, "What will the Lord do for me, how will he satisfy my needs?" They aren't looking for orthodoxy but what Brooks calls flexidoxy<. As he sums it up, "They aim at being decent, nice, not being saints. They prefer a moral style that doesn't shake things up."
Sorry, folks, but we happen to have a Master who enjoys shaking things up, who nags us to "cast out to the deep," to embrace the cross.
If our charism of preaching is Jesus-centered and ecclesial — as it must be — it must also hold high the cross of Christ.
Rewind to the Friday after Christmas, St. Francis Cabrini Parish, West Bend, Wis., the funeral of Marine Sgt. Kevin Kryst. At the end of the burial, at the grave, another Marine sergeant takes the crisply, perfectly folded flag of our country that had draped the casket. He walks with perfect precision to Sgt. Kryst's mom, salutes her and says, "Accept this flag from a grateful nation."
Do you comprehend the boldness of what just occurred?
That Marine sergeant dares to speak not for himself, but for the entire country.
My brothers, as we exercise the eccle¬sial vocation of preaching, we dare to speak not for ourselves but for Christ, his church and his cross.
Sia lodato Gesit Cristo!
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