For this week's parish bulletin, I wrote this brief reflection on this coming Sunday's Gospel reading. Offering it here in case it stirs any interest. I could have said more (thinking of something to say is never my problem!) but I had a word count limit.
The readings for this coming Sunday are here.
Petitioning God
Any parent
with a newborn in the house knows what it feels like to be pestered! An infant needs to be fed, sometimes every
hour, regardless of how early or late it is.
A parent who awakens to a newborn’s cries at 2 am does not always leap
gladly out of bed! But parents can’t not
respond when their children cry. When
our children call, we parents answer. That
is what a parent does; that is who a parent is.
That
experience of parenthood may help us to understand Jesus’s teachings today. First, Jesus teaches us to pray a version of
the Our Father (the Lord’s Prayer). The
more familiar version of the prayer, which we pray at mass, in the rosary and
in our daily prayers, is found in Matthew’s Gospel; Matthew’s version consists
of seven petitions, while Luke’s version, proclaimed today, has five
petitions. Petitions are things
we ask of God. In Luke’s version, Jesus
teaches us to ask God for five things: (1) that he make his holy name known to
all the world; (2) that his kingdom, which Jesus announces and fulfills, be
made present here and now; (3) that he give us what we’ll need to live; (4)
that he forgive us our sins, because we’ve forgiven those who have sinned
against us; and (5) that he spare us severe tests of our faith. Note that all five of these petitions consist
of our asking God to prepare us to be with him, now and always.
The
remaining passages of today’s Gospel drive home the point that God wants us to
pester him! Just as a parent wants to
feed her children, God wants to be the one to care for us. Quite simply, that’s who God is – the one who
loves us like a parent.
We may feel
reluctant to petition God; we may not feel worthy to ask God for help. Today, God reassures us that we can set aside
those qualms. Today, he tells us: pester away!
If we ask for what we want, God will give us what we need.
"If we ask for what we want, God will give us what we need."
ReplyDeleteSeems kinda glib to me, though I realize you have space constraints. But this whole idea is constantly peddled by the clergy in many denominations without much explanation.
I don't see that God has any interest in providing us with the daily bread we need to survive in the temporal realm. We all know that there is, even among Christian communities, death by starvation, death by disease, death due to drought, death due to lack of shelter. Having the necessities of life is basically a matter of human willingness and fitness to work at available employment. People without any grace whatever manage to get their daily bread and then some.
If God gives us anything, it is the strength to endure suffering without falling irretrievably into sin OR to feel sorry enough to warrant forgiveness, so that we can go to Heaven.
The five petitions seem more designed to help us focus what is important in this life to get to the next.
I'll ignore my distaste over comparing the faithful to squalling infants and God rushing in like an indulgent parent to feed and coo to us.
Forgive my bitchy tone. But you did ask ...
I see it as you do, Jean. God obviously does not give everyone what they need - not even enough food to survive in many places. If God demands that people "beg" for what they need, it seems that God isn't really a very nice person, but an oversized ego. Which I don't believe. But I also don't think God takes care of people the way people take care of babies. We respond automatically to a baby's need (at least most people do. Some people don't). God may help us when our needs aren't met, as you say, by giving us strength.
DeleteI also don't see how "hallowed be thy name" turns into asking God to make his name known throughout the world. It seems more like an acknowledgment of God's holiness by those who believe. According to several sites online, "hallowed" can be interpreted simply as meaning "holy" with nothing about making God's name known throughout the world.
This piece kind of segues in with Jack's post about the Our Father and the Q Document, and the comparisons with Luke and Matthew. Both speak of perseverance in prayer. The story in Luke about the family who has already gone to bed, and the neighbor who pesters them for bread, makes the point.
ReplyDeleteSt. Teresa of Avila had a famous prayer which goes, "Christ has no other hands but yours.." All the people who work to alleviate hunger, in any way, are helping to answer the prayer to "give us this day our daily bread.". I believe that God really does want us to approach him in faith, as little children. And if he didn't want his name to be known, and to have a relationship with humankind, why would he have laid the groundwork through thousands of years, and come among us as Jesus Christ?
Well, maybe s/he wants people to know God. But “hallowed be thy name” doesn’t seem to actually translate to “ mark God’s name known everywhere “. It simply states a fact - God is holy. God’s name is holy.
DeleteOf course we all have to be God’s hands to help others. But we humans fail at that a good bit of the time. A whole lot of people do still starve to death.
Hi Anne - this is the explanation of the New American Bible editors. To be sure, this footnote is from Matthew's version; but the NAB editors often refer readers to other books with common material for a fuller explanation.
Delete"Hallowed be your name: though the “hallowing” of the divine name could be understood as reverence done to God by human praise and by obedience to his will, this is more probably a petition that God hallow his own name, i.e., that he manifest his glory by an act of power (cf. Ez 36:23), in this case, by the establishment of his kingdom in its fullness."
The key points are (1) this statement "Hallowed be thy name" is a petition, not a mere statement of praise. It is asking God to make holy his name among people; and (2) it needs to be read in conjunction with the rest of the prayer (and the Gospel, and the Bible). In conjunction with "Thy kingdom come" (another petition), "Hallowed be thy name" suggests a more-than-individual or more-than-local context; it is kingdom-wide (i.e. a petition that his name be holy universally, for that is the breadth of his kingdom).
It's a pretty common interpretation of the phrase. See another exegesis here:
https://www.christianity.com/wiki/prayer/why-do-we-say-hallowed-be-thy-name.html
...and here:
https://openthebible.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-pray-hallowed-be-your-name/#:~:text=To%20pray%20'hallowed%20be%20Your%20name'%20means%20to%20ask%20God,treasure%20Him%20above%20all%20else.
A good example of a major problem with the Bible. It can be interpreted in a million ways, and some interpretations are really a stretch - like this one. It doesn’t come across as a petition to God. It comes across as stating a fact. It could also be interpreted as a way of giving respect in addressing the individual - God in this case. It says nothing at all - rien de tout- about local or global spread. So often the people doing the official interpretations seem to twist and stretch passages to mean something the interpreter believes, and is trying to prove, but which bears little relationship to the actual words used. This is an example of that tendency.
Delete" It doesn’t come across as a petition to God. It comes across as stating a fact."
DeleteI agree! Part of the problem is that the Elizabethan-era words and phrasing have been retained for the Lord's Prayer. (I am not sure what the origination is of the version we all memorized as children; perhaps the Book of Common Prayer?) I've also heard somewhere that there have been proposals to update the Our Father for liturgical purposes, but the people will have none of it.
Here is how the NAB editors translate Matthew's version - seems to me they are trying to strike a balance between accurate translation and preserving some of the traditional words/phrases:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven
Give us today our daily bread;
and forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors;
and do not subject us to the final test,
but deliver us from the evil one.
Prayer is about changing our minds and hearts.
ReplyDeleteHallowed be thy name. God is holy. The reality is that we differ among ourselves greatly in our understanding of the Divine and holy things. Even more so if you look at our deeds rather than our words. The challenge is to have a relationship of divine intimacy without ending up with a god made to our image of ourselves, rather than opening ourselves to being refashioned into an image of the divine.
Thy kingdom come. Again, there are enormous differences among us about the kingdom, and about what the divine will is for all of us. Most of the time we are interested in imposing our wills upon others. I once described my political philosophy as limited anarchy. There should be rules for everyone else but not for me. I think there are a lot of limited anarchists.
Give us our daily bread. Obviously, we also have a lot of disagreement upon the essentials of human life.
The above leads to the reality of human life, the dark side of the prayer. Forgive us our sins as we forgive others. Lead us not into temptation. Deliver us from evil.
It is interesting that the doxology came to added to the prayer. After facing the realities of our understanding of God, the Kingdom, and human life, we recognize its consequences: sin, temptation, evil. We certainly need the reassurance that all things ultimately will be right.
At the risk of being a complete pain in the ass:
ReplyDeleteNothing I can argue with in Jack's analysis. The Lord's Prayer and the Psalms have been used to talk to God for thousands of years because they are layered with literal and metaphorical meaning. They speak to us differently on different days.
The Psalms acknowledge that terrible things happen to our bodies and spirits, but God is with us. The Lord's Prayer acknowledges that we do awful things and stand in need of forgiveness.
Scripture promises that in the Kingdom Come, Jesus will wipe away our tears and wash away our sins (as long as we're sorry).
Maybe that's what Jim means when he says God gives us what we need. But the metaphor of Daddy God running in to kiss our boo boos every time we squawk just doesn't speak to me.
Katherine says God wants us to approach him as little children in trust.
But God knows I never had childlike trust even as a child. I was always a cautious kid, always waiting for the other shoe to drop, always making contingencies, always demanding answers. As a result, I am skeptical, critical, argumentative.
Am I supposed to change all that and become an Innocent Ray of Sunshine? Or is it possible that God will help me find ways to put those traits in God's service?
"The Lord's Prayer and the Psalms have been used to talk to God for thousands of years because they are layered with literal and metaphorical meaning. They speak to us differently on different days.". Well there you are. Especially the part about it speaking to us differently on different days. Sometimes I have childlike trust. But not always. I'm getting better at it, which is funny, because I pretty much didn't when I was an actual child. You bring to God what you have, when you have it. Because what else can you do?
DeleteThank you and everyone else for indulging my piques.
DeleteJean (and everyone) - I'm grateful for the feedback. I hope we're all allowed to disagree and to say what we think. If I miss the mark on something, you're doing me a favor by calling me out on it. And there are many "problem passages" in the Bible, and many difficult Christian teachings. It would be a boring blog if all we did was offer insincere affirmations!
DeleteJean, I join you in thanking all here. I am the most heretical person here, so I’m grateful you all put up with me. The discussions are never dull, and almost always a good challenge to my heretical way of thinking.
DeleteI think there is great wisdom in biblical writings. But unlike the rest of you, I don’t really believe that the scriptures are literally ‘the Word of the Lord”. I have learned too much about how they were written, about who wrote them, and about the cultural and historical contexts of when these ancient texts were written. I’ve also learned too much about the physical aspects of how they were written, including the many, many errors made by scribes, especially in differing translations of the ancient Greek in which the oral traditions were permanently written. As we know, the scriptures were rewritten thousands of times. Rather than believing that God literally manipulated the minds of the very wise authors of scripture in some supernatural way, I lean to Marcus Borg’s understanding that they represent the response of two ancient human communities to what they experienced in their own lives and culture, and tribal history. They responded to God’s creation and the events of their lives and history with incredible insights and wisdom. As Jean notes, the scriptures are layered with meaning, both literal and metaphorical. They are an incomparable compilation of wisdom literature, and a sacred history. In current use there are hundreds thousands of different versions of the Bible. Dozens in just one language. The most popular English versions differ pretty dramatically at times. Jack points out different meanings for individual translations or understandings of single Greek words. Every time a text is translated into a new language meaning can change. We don’t have a copy of the very first Greek versions of the Bible. There are two thousand years of errors and changes to the original texts that have come down to us. So what does “ hallowed” mean? Could mean any number of things.
Most human beings throughout history have tried to understand the eternal mysteries - to grasp the meaning of life issues. Where did we human beings come from. Who created this incredible world we live in. How did the stars and planets in the sky get there? Why do we die? What happens to us after we die?
Even the ancients could see the small part of the universe that our planet is part of although they didn’t understand the physics and mechanics of it. After all, some beliefs about our planet’s relationship with the universe we’re deemed heresy Not all that long ago to state that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the opposite resulted in a tria! Now we see billions of galaxies - uncountable.
So humans realized long, long ago that something or someone not human had to be out there, somewhere. Religions arose as smart human beings tried to understand these mysteries. But of course, limited human minds can only make educated guesses about all of it, including about God. So we say that “ we believe in God, the Father Almighty….”. Because we don’t know. We can’t know. So religions - all of them - are accepted “on faith”.
Final thought: When my friend Ronnie was dying, she began reciting The Lord's Prayer. It's the first prayer many of us learn, and maybe the last to go, though she was unable to finish it.
ReplyDeleteMy memory of our long friendship, her struggle to remain Catholic, and our many discussions over the years deeply colored how I looked at the prayer afterwards. It wasn't the words as much as an affirmation: You are God, I was brought up to believe in you, and that this is how you want me to pray. I turn to you now in my last conscious moments because I am beyond human help. I don't have the strength to articulate the particulars. So you're going to have to read my heart. Please forgive me, and bless the people I love.
No, that's not what the words actually say. But it's what I felt going out to the Universe on that occasion.
The prayer has meaning that hovers on a plane above the linguistic and textual interpretations.
Hope everyone is able to balance keeping cool and not stressing the grid too much. We are getting sudden heavy, much needed rain. Hoping for a good amount.
I think your interpretation of the prayer is much closer to them” true” meaning than the official explanations
DeleteA transcript of a talk that Diana Butler Bass gave recently at an annual gathering of progressive christians. It fits in both with the discussion on interpreting scripture and the Mary Martha discussion. Very interesting.
ReplyDeletehttps://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/mary-the-tower?utm_source=email
Yes, interesting but not surprising. Hagiography is full of accretions, deletions, embellishments, bifurcation or melding of characters, etc. I expect the same happened to the many versions of the Gospel, not just the four that made it into the canon.
DeleteHumans cannot stand random events. They want cohesive narratives that *explain* things.
I don't doubt that most of the events in the Gospels happened, more or less, but things get changed in rewriting and passing things down. Things get emphasized or dropped to for specific audiences.
Even the oldest versions of the Gospel, such as the one her friend Libbie was looking at, is not necessarily the "truest" version.
In thinking about this some more: the theta in Mary's name might have been an error or correction. We don't know. I have been studying the Beowulf manuscript this summer, and the text tells its own story of the two scribes who wrote it.
DeleteMary the Tower is an interesting image, and worth contemplating. And I think it's important to see that women scholars can give Scripture fresh insights.
I don't know if the interpretation is correct, but it takes nothing away from what we know about Mary ... unless you are a hide bound patriarch intent on pushing the point that women should be seen and not heard.
Yup. The oldest versions of the bible have disappeared. We only have some early copies and they aren't all that early.
DeleteThis is why I not only disagree with the evangelical approach to the bible, especially those who read it literally, I have problems with a lot of RCC teachings, such as how it interprets Jesus' words at the Last Supper, which eventually resulted in the church adopting Aquinas' rather far-fetched explanation of transubstantiation. The various branches of christianity can't even agree on which books really belong in the bible, much less on the translations or interpretations, so we have Catholic bibles and Protestant bibles and I have no idea which version the Orthodox use. Maybe a third selection of books are in their bible.
Thanks, Anne, for this link. A very interesting article.
DeleteMy impression was that it is unlikely that this Martha and Mary story were related to the Martha, Mary and Lazarus of John. Just making Martha the head of the house tells us that is unlikely.
We have to put ourselves in the place of these copyists. They knew that manuscripts often contained errors. So, the desire to correct things was always there.
Figuring out the best text of the NT is not easy. The German committee that does this have come up with some unusual decisions. In one cast they came to decide that the evidence of all the manuscripts favored one thing for the first half of sentence and one thing for the second part of a sentence. Yet when they put the two parts of the sentence together, they ended up with a sentence that appears in NO manuscripts.
The NT texts and copies were not done under high quality control conditions until the Age of Constantine. Wealthy individuals who had a text simply made copies for their friends using their own scribes.
DeleteLast year sometime, PBS had a very interesting series on all of this, from the earliest era to the Gutenberg Bible to our present day use of technology to piece together fragments etc. I’ll try to see if it’s still available for streaming.
DeleteOne of the things we don't know is whether all scribes (of anything) were literate. The number of mistakes in some manuscripts sort of suggests the scribe was adept at calligraphy, but could make no sense of the words.
DeleteWhich reminds me of the terrible story of John (Paradise Lost) Milton. As he was going blind, he taught his daughter to read, but not understand, Greek so she could read to him. Can you imagine the life of that poor girl droning out gibberish by the hour to that exacting old geezer? Talk about hellish ...
I never thought about that. I have always assumed that the scribes were literate. Interesting possibility.
DeleteJean - I have been studying the Beowulf manuscript this summer, and the text tells its own story of the two scribes who wrote it. Also interesting.
Mary the Tower is an interesting image, and worth contemplating. And I think it's important to see that women scholars can give Scripture fresh insights.
That’s one reason women should be priests. Their insights into scripture are so valuable, as I learned when I switched to EC pews. Homilies don’t have to be so trite and boring. But the celibate males don’t even have a Katherine or Theresa to help them see beyond what they were taught in seminary so they all just repeat the same old stuff whenever the readings roll around again in the cycle. God made them male and female in God’s image. But the RCC suppresses the feminine, and is really hurt by this.
Nothing against Episcopal women priests. But preaching is not necessarily a skill that women do better. There are complaints sometimes that men use too many football analogies in homilies, and women use too many analogies to motherhood.
DeleteThe RCC actually has a much longer history of women doing Scriptural commentary than the Anglicans. Women could not be priests, but they could be saints and their writing venerated and respected for centuries.
My EC experience is limited compared to yours. But three of the very best homilies I’ve ever heard were given by two women priests (one was the associate pastor at our EC parish who was an outstanding homilist in general. The other that stayed with me was a priest at a different parish) and the woman seminarian assigned to our parish one year. I actually remember what they all said, unlike the homilies of the dozens of male priests I’ve had to listen to most of my life. Of all those many, many homilies I’ve heard in RC churches throughout my life I only remember one or two. So the women have a higher batting average. I think that they were memorable for me because they interpreted the gospel in a way that completely resonated with me. Only one of their homilies had to do with motherhood - it was very appropriate since it was the gospel about Mary visiting Elizabeth. No male priest I’ve ever heard «got it » the way she did. The seminarian gave by far the best homily on the sacrament of reconciliation that I’ve heard in my life. However, in an EC parish I was visiting once, the woman priest there gave one of the very worst homilies I’ve ever heard. I also remember that one. ;)
DeleteVery few Catholics read scripture commentary at all - whether by women or men. But they do hear homilies, and there are no homilies by women in the RCC.
We have a few Scripture commentaries around the house. K's favorites are the Collegeville one, and the Barclay. We also have the Jerome Commentary, by Raymond Brown. It is an erudite, very thick tome. Once when he was about five, our younger son was mad at his older brother and hurled the Jerome down the stairs at him. I suppose it was the closest weapon at hand. Fortunately he missed. That's taking weaponizing Scripture to a different level!
DeleteThe way I look at homilies is that there is usually a good thought one can take away from them (notice I said usually!). They speak to different people in different ways. I am glad that they are only part of the Mass, and not the most important part. I have accompanied evangelical Protestant relatives to their services, and it has seemed that the homily is the main focus. Certainly occupies the largest footprint in the service, 45 minutes in length wouldn't be unusual. Glad I don't have to listen to that on a regular basis.
Katherine, I agree. At some point in the last couple of years both my evangelical brother in law, and also an evangelical friend, sent me links to their churches’ virtual services. The focus was the homily - very, very long- and singing. Lots of praise music. One pastor gave a decent homily but even he was struggling to fill the allotted time, which did seem to be around 45 minutes. My brother in law’s minister was not nearly as good. I couldn’t finish watching it. Both ministers used screens to put up various scripture passages as they referenced them. Some people were invited up to the stage to give testimonies. The interior of my brother in law’s church looks like someone’s basement with a small stage for the praise band. It has rough wood paneled walls. When I looked at the website the exterior of the church looks conventional, complete with steeple. I will have to ask them about the inside . I couldn’t see anything on the video except the stage and the sort of rustic wood paneling. The service in the other church had a rock concert vibe - a bigger stage, and lighting that would change colors, mostly shades of blue and purple. It’s a newly built church not too far from us, in Annapolis, that we drive past sometimes. It also looks conventional from the outside. I didn’t see windows in either video, but maybe they are there somewhere. The pastor there gave a much better homily though, until he ran out of steam at about 30 minutes.
DeleteI didn’t watch more than one of these services all the way through. They reminded me of doing grad school papers. When the professor asked for too many pages, everyone just padded with filler. We had one professor who was different - he said 8-10 pages max. He told us that if we couldn’t cover the topic with ten pages, we either needed to narrow the subject a bit or that we didn’t really understand what we were writing about. The 5 minute homilies during weekday mass at Holy Trinity, the Jesuit parish in Georgetown, were perfect. No filler. Maybe I just have ADHD, but the 20 minute homilies at the parish mass on Sunday could never keep me listening no matter how often I vowed not to let my attention stray. But they weren’t interesting homilies very often. The best were the priests they recruited from one of the Catholic universities in town for one on the seven weekend masses. They were professors and they could usually keep my attention for all 20 minutes. At our second parish the back up Sunday priest taught homiletics at one of the schools. He also gave really interesting homilies, - not just the same old things I’ve heard parish priests say for 50 years. When I complimented the homiletics professor when chatting after mass one Sunday ( I knew him a little since his sister, a nun, had been the social justice minister at my previous parish) he thanked me. He said most people were really uncomfortable with his approach to the scriptures that Sunday. I had told him it was the first homily on the subject that I had heard that ever made sense to me.
Since I realized that the liturgical form of Sunday mass had been imprinted on me since birth, when I left the RCC, the only other church that felt comfortable was the EC. And I liked the openness to non- orthodox understandings- the minimal demands of “must believes”.
Unitarian sermons and talks generally ran an hour, bracketed by a collect and closing prayer/meditation. Sometimes a hymn was thrown in on a special occasion. The sermons were interesting and in-depth.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, Episcopalian and Catholic homilies still seem shallow, juvenile, and perfunctory to me, especially given the theological wealth of writing from the saints that humiliate could draw on. I have resigned myself to perpetual disappointment on the homily front.
I don't know how Christians can say they know the Bible if all they're getting are these pallid 10 minute bits of explanation.
humiliate s/b homilists.
DeleteMaybe I’ll try a UU church someday. I can’t imagine homilies that aren’t trite and which can keep attention for an hour!
DeleteOur now retired EC pastor was consistently the best priest- homilist I ever encountered. He was extremely knowledgeable, well- read in literature, and in the writings of spiritual leaders from multiple traditions, christian and not. The second best in consistency was the assistant pastor, the woman who gave the Mary/ Elizabeth homily. She is also gone - she’s rector of a church in NC now.
We haven’t been to church physically since Covid. We had started parish shopping after our rector retired and the assistant moved to the NC parish. We didn’t like the interim rector. A huge letdown compared to the two previous priests. I occasionally watch the Cathedral services virtually. The homilies are often pretty good. The music is almost always excellent.
I prefer to read books and articles by religious scholars and spiritual writers. I can pause when I need to, reread, and really try to absorb and understand . Often the text raises questions so I can stop, research a bit of background, and then continue with the text. That’s the same reason I never watch any kind of TV news or the talking head shows, even on PBS. I prefer to get the news and political commentary in written form.
I would steer clear of the Unitarians nowadays. They are full of Wiccans, atheists, neo pagans, and what not. However there is a huge variety from church to church.
DeleteUnitarians don't do communion, so the whole shebang never lasted longer than a Mass or other service.
Of course people can sit for an hour if the talk is interesting! We all did it in college. The Unitarian church I attended had a lot of guest speakers, often other Christian ministers talking about social justice, as well as Jewish and Bahai speakers.
Also, there was always question time after the sermon.
DeleteWhat do people want in a homily?
ReplyDeleteDo they want instruction? My several years as a college professor taught me how to deliver a fifty-minute lecture. I always put an outline on the board and told students that while I might digress from the outline, the outline was what they needed to know for the exams. I always got high marks for being well prepared, informed, and fair teacher. However, not always high marks for being entertaining and interesting! I quickly found out that depended more upon my students responding with questions and comments.
When I was a member of a mostly voluntary pastoral staff, my colleagues wanted me to be a deacon so that I could preach. I told them I was a former college professor who knew how to talk for fifty minutes on any topic simple or complicated. That discouraged the deacon talk.
Actually, I think they were on to something. When I took my turn at leading prayer for the group, I usually did a presentation of liturgical music with commentary. That really is close to what the homily is supposed to be about. Rabbi Heschel said that a homily should come out of prayer and lead to prayer. I presented them with my experience of liturgy to encourage them to become more prayerful.
The only priest I know who does that is our local orthodox pastor. It is always about Christian life in relation to the liturgy, the Sacred Mysteries. It always starts with the Liturgy and ends with the Liturgy.
Some preachers and worshipers seem to be focused upon personal spiritual experience, i.e., having the preachers experience connect to their spiritual experience. From coming to know a variety of people in small faith sharing groups, I think almost everyone has at least one and perhaps several good homilies within themselves. However, we all have great limits on that. I suspect if I cataloged them, I would come out at several interesting spiritual insights per year. But that means that after about 2 or 3 years of fifty some sermons per year, I would be running out of material!
Francis seems to have a good Jesuit model. It comes out of the exercises, where Ignatius encourages the spiritual guide to give the retreatant a few brief points and let them alone to encounter God. Francis usually chooses three points.
I almost always experience the homily as an interruption in worship. It is like a commercial, even if like a commercial it can sometimes be entertaining.
Some good observations in there, Jack.
DeleteFr Paul, our first Catholic priest, had one theme for every homily: Jesus loves you and wants to be your friend.
All his homilies were related to the reading, and they all explained how to be friends with Jesus. They often started with what I call the Andy Rooney Lede, ex, Did you ever notice that people hate most the sins they don't commit?
He'd give you a few minutes to ponder the sins you hate. At the end, he left time for self reflection and prayer by asking how we can be better friends with Jesus.
In my view, this approach was Scriptural, practical, listener-centered and -appropriate, worked with the liturgy, and invited prayerful improvement of ourselves.
He generally took about 15 minutes, which many people complained about.
While I prefer something that makes lots of connections to the Church's art and literature, the historical and linguistic challenges of Scriptural translations, etc., that is NOT what fits into the Mass, and it is NOT what most Catholics will stand for.
You can get depth into 15 minutes. But you have to leave out the cliches about your sainted mother, your hard-ass father, your Catholic upbringing in the 1950s when everything was better, jokes, and your favorite coach's quotes. I actually heard a priest one time quote a coach who said, We came to play! and then tell everyone we need to "come to play" on God's team.
That was an absolute low water mark.