PARISH BULLETIN: LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS
Summer Reflections on Preaching: Pondering the Mystagogical

Summer is a time, perhaps, to think back to the basics.

by Edward Foley

While summer is certainly not a vacation for those engaged in liturgical ministries, the onset of June this year does provide an early respite from the demands of the high holy days and their succeeding festivals. Easter arrived early (March 23rd), which meant that the Easter season was already finished by May 11th. The final two Sundays in May were the great festivals of Trinity and the Body and Blood of Christ. June 1st signals a return to "the wearing of the green" and the more gentle rhythm of Ordinary Time. With choirs on summer holiday, school years winding down, and the shifting demographics that come with summer travel, summer worship is often more low keyed and less demanding, especially on musicians and preachers.

If this is a more relaxed season for you as a preacher, it might be an appropriate time to reflect back on the past few months of preaching in service of energizing and enriching your future homilies. The summer of 2008 is a particularly apt moment for doing this, as it is situated between an important anniversary and a looming ecclesial event, both of which are significant for preaching.

Last year was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the landmark document Fulfilled in Your Hearing (FIYH) by the Bishops' Committee on Priestly Life and Ministry. Read by generations of seminarians, deacon candidates and lay preachers, FIYH has been one of the most influential liturgical documents issued by the U. S. bishops. Even in the decades after The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (CSL), the sermon was often an exposition of some dogmatic teaching or an exercise in moralizing. FIYH was a potent antidote to such trends and effectively steered Catholic preachers from an arbitrary syllabus of catechetical topics to unwavering respect for the lectionary as foundational to the homiletic act.

Twenty-six years later, FIYH is still a rich and respected guide for understanding, crafting and engaging in the homiletic event. Yet, there have been many developments and changes over the intervening decades which suggest a critical revisiting of FIYH so that its forward trajectory may be maintained and enhanced. Thus, in November of 2005 the U. S. bishops signaled their intent to rewrite FIYH. Although a draft of that rewrite was available in October of 2006, it was decided to suspend the writing because Pope Benedict XVI announced the convening of a Synod of Bishops on "The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church" for October 2008. The official Lineamenta or "outline" of ideas and questions to be addressed at that synod indicates that liturgical preaching and the Sunday homily are among the topics to be addressed. A rewritten FIYH will need to take into account any significant insights that come out of this synod

In this interim between the original FIYH and its replacement, between the twenty-fifth anniversary and the impending synod, it might be useful to revisit the exact nature of liturgical preaching—especially the Sunday homily. Some believe that this definitional work was finished decades ago when CSL declared that "by means of the homily, the mysteries of the faith and the guiding principles of the Christian life are expounded from the sacred text during the course of the liturgical year" (no. 52). Yet we still seem to be in the process of defining the exact nature of a homily. There appears to be particular confusion around three approaches to preaching today. While not mutually exclusive, I would characterize these three approaches as 1) catechetical preaching, 2) scriptural preaching, and 3) mystagogical preaching. We will consider each of these in turn.

Catechetical Preaching

In The Homilist's Guide to Scripture, Theology and Canon Law (1986), John Burke and Thomas Doyle characterize catechetical preaching as focused "on the living out of the newly professed faith in terms of the customs, tradition, doctrines, and practices of the believing community to which the acceptance of the gospel message has brought the believer" (p. 124). While some may believe that catechetical preaching occurs mostly outside of the Eucharist, Burke and Doyle argued that this was an appropriate style for the Sunday homily.

There is support for thinking about the homily as a “catechetical act” in CSL and the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM). In what seems infelicitous language to me, CSL describes the Liturgy of the Word as the moment in which the readings are proclaimed and “explained in the homily” (no. 24). The image is repeated in the introduction of the revised lectionary (no. 10).

GIRM regularly considers the homily in catechetical terms (e.g., no. 13), and goes so far as to characterize the whole liturgy of the word as a time of instruction (no. 28). The title that GIRM uses to introduce the liturgy of the word is "Reading and Explaining the Word of God" (before no. 29), and GIRM twice speaks of the readings as "explained by the homily" (no. 55 & no. 67).

The problem with such texts is that they could give the impression that the homily, especially in catechetical mode, is more about information than encounter with Christ present in the Word proclaimed and preached (CSL, no. 7). CSL, no. 33, offers an important corrective when it notes that while the liturgy "contains much instruction for the faithful," the liturgy is not fundamentally a didactic or catechetical event. Nor is the homily.

Scriptural Preaching

Some may wonder why scriptural preaching is listed as a point of confusion here. Everybody knows that you are supposed to preach the Scriptures, and anyone who has ever read FIYH knows that one of its great contributions was to steer clergy away from catechetical preaching toward lectionary preaching. FIYH emphasizes the scriptural texts of the liturgy as one of the three major elements of the homily (no. 2), believes the homily should "flow" from these texts (nos. 42, 50 & 61), and even defines the homily as a "scriptural interpretation" (no. 81).

While emphasizing preaching "from and through" the Scriptures (no. 50) is commendable, this one-sided emphasis suggests that apart from the readings, the rest of the liturgy is not a source for the homily. In a statement memorable for capsulizing this imbalance FIYH notes: "Just as a homily flows out of the Scriptures of the Liturgy of the Word, so it should flow into the prayers and actions of the Liturgy of the Eucharist which follows" (no. 100).

In some respects this overemphasis on preaching the Scriptures is a result of the somewhat confused state of other documents at the time. In the conciliar eagerness to embrace God's word and place it at the center of church teaching and worship, CSL actually describes the homily as an "explanation" of the readings. GIRM echoes this perspective when it speaks of the homily as "a living commentary on the word" (no. 29).

However, CSL offers a broader vision of the homily in which "the mysteries of the faith and the guiding principles of the Christian life are expounded from the sacred text during the course of the liturgical year" (no. 52), a text repeated in the 1983 Code of Canon Law (c. 767, 1). The phrase "the sacred text" was clarified in the 1964 Vatican instruction Inter oecumenici: "A homily on the sacred text means an explanation, pertinent to the mystery celebrated and the special needs of the listeners, of some point in either the readings from sacred Scripture or in another text from the Ordinary or Prayer of the day's Mass" (no. 54). GIRM reflects this broader definition of the homily, which "should be an exposition of some aspect of the readings from sacred Scripture or of another text from the Ordinary or from the Proper of the Mass of the day and should take into account both the mystery being celebrated and the particular needs of the listeners" (no. 65). The U.S. bishops actually go further in noting the appropriateness of preaching not only the “sacred texts” but the liturgical rites themselves (Introduction to the Order of Mass, no. 92).

Mystagogical Preaching

This third approach to homilizing might be the most baffling. If people think about mystagogy at all it is through a lens from the rite of Christian initiation of adults, which presents mystagogy as a "moment" in the initiation process. Mystagogy so conceived is much more a "when" than a "how." When considered as an approach to preaching, it is often reduced to "Easter season preaching," which is precisely how it was described in a recent communication on preaching from a major U. S. archdiocese.

As we have written before, however, mystagogy is more about "how" than "when." It is a style of theological reflection that takes the liturgical rites seriously and recognizes their critical role in nurturing and shaping faith. This is the insight embedded in Inter oecumenici (previously quoted) which instructs us to preach the Scriptures or the other texts of the Eucharist and the mystery being celebrated. It also seems to be the impetus behind the U. S. bishops’ call to preach the rites themselves, regardless of whether in or outside of the Easter season.

Liturgical preaching worthy of the name must at its heart be mystagogical. Homilies occur not only "in" the liturgy, but also must be "of” the liturgy, respecting all texts and rites of the Mass as homiletic resources. Such an approach acknowledges what Fritz West calls the "Catholic principle" of the lectionary, i.e., it is not the lectionary that sets the feast or the ritual, but it is the feast or ritual that sets the lectionary. Thus, every wedding and funeral, ordination and confirmation is determinative for selecting the readings. In this vein, even the rite of initiation instructs that if the scrutinies for the elect are celebrated outside of Lent, the readings of Cycle A Lent are still used (no. 146).

The homily is preaching in and of the Eucharist. While the scriptural readings are certainly a central element of the Eucharistic action, they are not the only texts that ground the homiletic act. Preachers need to develop a mystagogical lens, so that the horizon of their preaching extends beyond the lectionary texts.

Closing Thought

So it's summer, and we preachers have a little breather after the close of the high holy days and before the liturgies ramp up again in the fall. In the interim, let's take an inventory of how we preached over the past liturgical seasons. Were we informative without being didactic? Did we engage the scriptural texts in a respectful and imaginative way? And did we exercise our mystagogical eye and consider the whole of the liturgy as both a context and a source of our preaching? All of us can get better ... I know I can. Have a great summer.

The Rev. Edward Foley, O.F.M. Cap. is on the faculty of the Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, Illinois.