A Theory of the Homily: the Sermon in Context

I.

The liturgy is not formless, but has a structure to it, a shape. From start to finish, there is a logic to its parts and its flow.

While each of the “parts” of the liturgy can be meaningfully spoken of by their headings and traditional names (the “Sanctus,” the “Sursum Corda,” the “Benediction,” etc), the parts of the liturgy are not discrete units that can be meaningfully spoken of as isolated atoms arbitrarily strung about through a vacuum of meaning. Rather, each part of the liturgy exists in relation to all the other parts of the liturgy, and thus part of the meaning of each of the individual parts is derived from their relationship to the other parts of the liturgy. So for example, the placement of the Lord’s Prayer prior to the reception of Communion gives it the sense of a mealtime blessing as well as draws out the communio aspect of communion, that this is the meal of one people who pray one prayer together in the voice of one man, Jesus Christ. Placing the Lord’s Prayer elsewhere in the liturgy would certainly draw out and amplify some resonances of the Prayer and downplay others. Placing it next to the Confession would certainly draw out, to a greater extent, the phrases about forgiveness and debts.

Thus, liturgy is a sort of craft, an art, a work of the hands. A craft requires care and thoughtfulness. The skilled woodworker doesn’t just randomly carve and cut through a piece of wood leaving an amalgamation of disorganized grooves and gashes. He sets to the piece with a unitary vision of what shape should emerge from the block of wood when he is done whittling – and if he has done his work well, something beautiful is produced. Likewise, a painter doesn’t arbitrarily create an assemblage of shapes in blank space and then say, “Here, I have created a painting.” Rather, the skill of painting is using color to organize shape in a space, where each of the objects in the painting derive their clarity and coherence in their relationships, be it relationships of proportionality or relationships of contrast, to each other. And of course, finally, what makes it one painting, and not just a collage, is the appearance of an underlying unity of relationship between all the parts together.

The liturgy of the Church is, by definition, a work. It is the people’s collective work of sacrifice offered to God. As such a work, its construction and implementation is something that should be treated with not less care than the work of any other craft. The superlative trait of the master craftsman is the care that goes into their work. And the Church, charged with the worship of the one true God, rightly understands her labor as the same sort of thing, a thing which must be done “decently and in order,” showing great care in the offering of her prayers.

One such part of that worship is the sermon (or “homily,” if you prefer). The sermon exists within a network of other related liturgical parts. As such, it is not something that can be correctly discussed, considered, or conceived in isolation from those parts. To attempt to do so is to admit that it has no place in the liturgy. But the sermon does have a place in the liturgy. So if we are going to set out to discuss its purpose and role, and idealize about its structure and even “best practices,” we should take for granted that each of those things can only meaningfully be done if done with thoughtfulness to how they relate to the other parts of the larger liturgical context in which they exist.

II.

Now, there are a variety of theories about what a sermon should entail and what a good sermon looks like, how long it should be, what it should (or should not) contain, what its tone should be, what its effect should be, and so on. Whatever one believes concerning these matters, it should be agreed that this set of beliefs is, among other things, a theory – a theoretical concept that can be justified and strengthened, or even criticised and questioned – but it can only ever be that. There is not much in the way of hard and fast teaching or timeless principle that can exhaustively be laid out as “rules” or “models” of what the sermon is or ought to be. One will find a variety of things in scripture that instruct us as to what we should imitate in preaching, and one will find a good bit of those things in traditional practice – but upon serious reflection and examination of those sources, both in Scripture and Tradition, you will find that there is no universal embodiment of the homily. The “sermon” itself is an anachronism, especially with respect to Scripture, though it has many analogies. While each of those analogies give insight into the virtuous ideal, there is no singular, coherent, systematically demonstrable thing that the sermon should conform to. Hence, the best description for any prescription regarding homiletics is still only a theory.

That being the case, there are many good and helpful theories of homiletics. There are also some very bad ones. A theory differs from an opinion in that it can receive such evaluations and judgments. I have a particular theory about the homily that I think is good and helpful and implies a set of criteria that can be used to judge the quality of a sermon as well as provide guidelines that a pastor can use in constructing a sermon. As a theory, it is moldable and even falsifiable – but also, I think, provides a real aid towards doing the work of the ministry and makes sense of the sermon in a coherent way that can be replicated in multiple contexts.

III.

The sermon, as part of the liturgy, finds its meaning and context in the liturgy.

IV.

The sermon, as part of the liturgy, is to be judged by its liturgical continuity and fittingness with the other parts of the liturgy.

V.

A sermon that can be conceived of and understood properly outside of the context of the liturgy is not properly a sermon, but is something else.

VI.

The sermon, as rhetorical discourse, plays a unique role in the liturgy. It is the least scripted part of the liturgy. “The Books of Homilies” notwithstanding, the sermon is frequently something new and fresh to the liturgy. The fact that the liturgy in the prayerbook simply says “The Sermon,” with no other text, is a unique feature of this part of the liturgy. Every other part of the liturgy is prewritten and repeated in every service. The sermon is not.

For this reason, the sermon stands out for many people as the most memorable part of the liturgy, despite the fact that its inherently non-repetitive quality lends it to be the least memorable. Perhaps better than calling it “memorable,” we can use the word “impressive,” in that it can make the most impression on the participants because of the way it is distinguished from the rest of the liturgy.

The “impressive” nature of the sermon has led many people to believe that this means it is the most important part of the liturgy. This theory would be true if the purpose of the liturgy was to make an impression. Naturally, if the purpose of the liturgy is to make an impression on its participants, it logically follows that the most impressive part of the liturgy is the most important. I am not so sure, however, that the purpose of the liturgy is to make an impression. I have my doubts about the helpfulness of this theory.

Nonetheless, the common acceptance of this theory has certainly shaped and molded the practices of a number of ministers and churches. Once we take for granted the primary importance of the sermon, the liturgy morphs into a window dressing for the main event. Every other aspect of the service takes on a meaning and importance relative to the way it magnifies or reinforces the impression that the sermon itself seeks to make. The point of the Scripture readings, for example, do not have an importance in themselves, but instead buttress the larger point of the service, the sermon, by functioning as launching pads to the “real” experience to come: the sermon that follows them. The sermonic speech becomes the climax of the service. Not surprisingly, when that speech is the crux of the service, the person who creates and/or delivers that speech risks becoming the central focus of service. This theory of the homily has enabled the cult of personality model of church membership and discipleship. It is this theory of the homily that enables one to conceive of church attendance as the act of going somewhere to hear someone speak – rather than, say, to go to church for the purpose of offering oneself as a living sacrifice to God. Incidentally, this same theory raises real questions, given the innovations in technology, about the value of even going to church. If the point of church attendance is hearing a sermon, then attending the church at all seems quite extraneous. When the sermon is livestreamed, recorded, e-mailed, and posted online, one begins to wonder about the logic of a brick-and-mortar church at all.

I do not subscribe to this theory.

VII.

I believe that the “impressive” nature of the sermon sheds some light on its role in the liturgy.

A question that is not asked, but requires an answer is why include a sermon at all in the liturgy? How does it even fit?

Asking such a question presupposes that the sermon does not have a meaning independent of the liturgy, but instead finds its meaning and purpose within the liturgy. This presupposition helps check the excesses of the theory of the sermon’s primacy. It communicates that, whatever else a sermon is, it suggests that, in fact, it is not its own justification for its existence and that the liturgy very well may operate without its existence.

The sermon is not, strictly speaking, essential to the service of worshipping God. The fact is, from a traditional perspective, it is optional. This means that the choice to include it implies a conscious enrichment of the service. So then, how is it that the sermon can enrich a service? What does its “impressive” quality allow it to do well?

VIII.

The impressive quality of the sermon allows the participants to step back from the service they are participating in, and throw the service into relief, so that they can rationally reflect on the acts they are performing.

IX.

I like to describe the sermon as “a commentary on the Divine Service.”

I say it this way in order to affirm the commentary nature of the sermon. It is a reflective act that examines certain objects and draws attention to their features in order to draw out certain truths about them and share them with others. In the Protestant tradition, this is often manifest as a comment solely focused on the texts of Scripture that have been read in the service. There is usually a deliberate explanation and exposition of what those texts say, often coupled with illustrations for clarity, as well as very clear exhortations that necessarily follow from those texts.

I phrase my description as a “commentary on the Divine Service” in order to broaden the homiletic focus away from only the biblical texts. In the liturgy, the public reading of the biblical texts are an important feature of the service. They are not the only feature. The liturgy is complete with opening sentences, daily collects, eucharistic prefaces, as well as all of the ordinary components that surround and create the context for those biblical texts.

Additionally, each of those sentences, collects, and prefaces vary, not according to whim or expediency, but according to time. Thus the liturgical service is molded by, among other things, our historical circumstances, be it Advent or Christmas or Lent, be it morning or evening, each of those temporal conditions are formative in the worship we offer. And that means that all of those things, taken together, compose our divine service to God, our liturgy. The role, then, of the sermon is to draw out those things and weave them together and present them as a single coherent unity that can be rationally internalized by the participants in order to allow them to comprehend the nature of the work they do and its purpose in their lives.

It may bear stating that such a sense of the sermon empties the “shared” sermon, outside of the context of worship, of its fullness. While one may find the content of a particular sermon edifying or enjoyable, the meaning of the sermon can only be truly understood by those participating in the service itself.

X.

For clarity’s sake, while the phrasing of “commentary” may connote a sense of “dryness” and “technicality” and even “irrelevance” and “impracticalness,” it does not follow that this is what I intend a sermon should be.

I have already pointed out that one of the unique qualities of the sermon is its “impressiveness.” That means that, even if as commentary, the sermon should be capable of “making an impression.” No one said that a commentary cannot be written so that it is interesting. All the tools of rhetoric and persuasion that usually go into public speaking are no less applicable in this case. It simply means that whatever emotive force the sermon has, the force is directed in a specific way, towards evoking a growing sense of what is happening to the people in the midst of their worship.

Likewise, one should neither assume from this particular theory of the sermon that it should be free of “moral application” or “practice.” Rather, it simply broadens what we mean by moral application and practice. Sometimes the moral application of a sermon is that we should “love our neighbor.” Other times, however, the moral application is that the Christian should confess the Nicene Creed. The liturgy provides just such an opportunity. Comprehending the work of liturgy as a practice and not a passive experience enables one to, for example, pray the prayer of confession with greater joy and understanding – which is to say, the “point” or the “take away” from a sermon very well could (and often should) be “worship God.” It is hard to find fault in that.

Reducing the purpose of the sermon to always requiring a “moral” implies, first of all, that we can’t already hear such teaching in public readings of Scripture and, secondly, that the only point of going to Church is to learn how to live righteously. But again, one can read the Bible at home and learn quite easily what God wants of them. A sermon is not necessary for that. If we do not see the sermon as one part among many in the liturgical work of the Church, we continue to call into the question the point of church attendance at all. My theory gives an answer to that.