This post continues the Obsculta Preaching Series, sponsored by the Obsculta Preaching Initiative at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary. In these posts, our authors engage a variety of ways in which scripture, preaching, and liturgical worship interact with the life of the faithful.
In the United States we are in the last days of a presidential election season. For those of us who are Roman Catholic or in churches keeping a similar liturgical calendar and lectionary cycle, we are in the last weeks of the ordinary time or season of the church year. The convergence invites reflection on the nature and function—and thus, content—of the homily in these last weeks of the church year, and in this particular year. What has preaching to do with the political?
Preaching. Political. Each term is fraught with a range of meanings (positive and negative), a range of emotions—and not surprisingly so. For each entails power, power basically understood as the ability to realize a desired goal, a defined good. Power is thereby contextual, relational, and personal. The identity of the good is never a given but, rather, is formed amidst social bodies, wherein the “buy in” among the members is crucial to its realization. Words, preeminently yet in concert with other symbolic forms, are crucial in the exercise and negotiation of power. To say words are essential to the political is an understatement. This is no less true for Christianity, a faith grounded on the word of God, “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12, NRSV).
In a democratic society, such as the United States, church and state comprise two social bodies, among others, overlapping in the Venn diagram of each Christian’s life. They overlap and yet must officially be kept separate in the public sphere. The U.S. constitutional separation of church and state directly affects the content the preacher may speak in exercising the ministry of the word in the context of the liturgical assembly. Obedience to two types of authority—state and church—are in play. Preachers must prepare their homilies with both in mind.
The intersection of the governmental body and the ecclesial body is sharply pronounced through the powers of government and finance, should a given church wish to retain tax exempt status. The Internal Revenue Code strictly prohibits any tax-exempt organization “from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate,” including by “public statements of position (verbal or written).” Permissible, nonetheless, are “activities intended to encourage people to participate in the electoral process,” so long as they do not have “the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates.”
The authority to which the preacher answers in the church is the very word of God. Most fundamentally, that is the Word Incarnate, whose mission, in the power of the Spirit, has a church, a sacramental body witnessing, by word and deed, to the divine vision for the world: the reign of God. Every Sunday the Risen Christ empowers the members of his body for that witness through his presence in the assembled body, the presiding minister, the proclaimed word, and the shared sacrament. Therein lies not only the authority but also liturgical nature of the preaching, whose proper form is the homily, which “should draw its content mainly from scriptural and liturgical sources” (Sacrosanctum concilium, 53.2).
This present essay serves as a brief theological introduction to two further ones, wherein I shall attempt to demonstrate how the homilist—responsible to the word, liturgy, and assembly—may approach the duty of preaching in this liturgical but also political season. The first, for the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (Nov. 3rd) will be close to Election Day (Nov. 5th). The second, for the Feast of Christ the King (Nov. 24th) will come in the wake of the elections, a period that nonetheless will no doubt witness citizens’ strong thoughts and emotions in the wake—or possible contestation—of the results.
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