A listener named Brenda asks Father Dave about the content of a homily. “One Sunday, a priest was giving his homily and began to explain something. He added, ‘The homily should not be academic,’” Brenda says. “I thought that ‘academic’ meant ‘instructional.’ Am I wrong to think that it is fine for a homily to be teaching us something? I really appreciate it when the priest gives us background information such as common practices in biblical times. The more I can learn, the happier I am.”
Father Dave parses out Brenda’s definition of academic. “Certainly the teaching of the Church is not to prevent priests from teaching in homilies,” he says. “Maybe he meant overly academic. If we who have master’s degrees in theology and Scripture are talking at a level that is flying over the heads of most of the people in the congregation, then that tends to be not helpful.”
LISTEN: What’s The Difference Between a Homily and a Sermon?
“To make the word of God practical in our everyday lives now, it is very often helpful to understand some of the images or practices that are described in the Scriptures. They’re using very mundane and everyday examples for them, that in most cases, are not mundane and everyday examples for us,” Father Dave continues. “How many of us work in vineyards? Some of us do in this day and age, but most of us don’t. How many of us understand sheep and shepherding? There’s not a lot of shepherding that happens in our modern day world, and yet that’s used a lot in the Scriptures.”
Father Dave notes that the content of a homily may differ depending on the congregation. “He’s not saying you’re not supposed to learn, but ideally the preacher should know fairly well his audience, just like any communication,” he says. “I studied communications in college, and day one of freshman year you learn that you have to know your audience in order to communicate effectively. If the preacher is preaching in certain areas of the world where people’s education level tops out at elementary school, then that homily should sound different than preaching for people who come to Mass at the Berkeley at the Graduate School of Theology.”
LISTEN: Father Dave’s Homilies
Regardless of the audience, Father Dave notes that a homily’s purpose is not merely to educate. “It should not be exclusively a teaching moment, because it’s not a class,” he says. “The homily should ideally allow be God’s word to touch the hearts and lives of the people in the congregation. That can happen in a lot of ways.”
“It shouldn’t be a 12-minute portion of a theology lecture at a university. A homily is different from that,” Father Dave adds. “Jesus didn’t teach like that; He told stories and parables that helped people to think. A homily should not necessarily end with a literal question mark, but should sort of leave you wondering, How am I going to do that?”
