Homily re-tread for Epiphany... (with an excursus on "Holy Borrowing" and insights on the Art of Preaching)

   Merry Christmas and Blessed Epiphany!

   It's been a busy time for me the last month, so blogging has been totally on the back burner.  In the parishes and even here, there are sometimes those weekends when a priest and preacher needs to not re-invent the wheel and instead dip back into his bag of tricks to come up with something that doesn't take too much prep time.  This is especially important in the exhausted gasp after the frenetic holiday season.

   In past years on Epiphany, I have preached on the meaning of the 12 Days of Christmas... found conveniently on the Internet all over the place--Snopes has a good discussion about it.  I have also preached on the meaning of the gifts of the Magi as signs of the Christ Child's identity as priest (frankincense), prophet (myrrh), and king (gold)... although that sounds like something I might have done as a "Holy Borrow" from Fr. Barron some years ago?  These talks are meant to be crowd-pleasers, which while informative, are not necessarily deep theological presentations.  It is challenging to keep people 'in the season' when Christmas trees already line the streets for pickup by sanitation workers and the XM-Sirius holiday channels are already gone (Channel 17, "Holly" has already turned into "Love", presumably in anticipation of Valentine's day??)

[An aside, when someone takes substantial points from another's preaching or writing and used it to preach, back in the seminary and among priests today, we wink at each other and call it "holy borrowing".  Strictly speaking, this activity is not usually considered plagiarism or intended as taking other's works as our own... although credit needs to be given where it is due, (and I will usually invoke the names of original scholars when it is something unique or recent or otherwise too smart for me to have come up with on my own).  But in preaching, all of us who stand at the plate come with little more than the ideas and the teachings of others... often from long-buried sources from the writings of the saints and Church teachings and the scripture itself... and most of us, I am guessing, use substantially same words and ideas of others to get the job done every week.  As good as the originals are, preachers and congregations know that one cannot simply take the transcript of a homily from St. Jerome or St. Augustine or Robert Barron or even one's bishop and preach it in a life-giving way from the text alone.  The original preachers, I am sure, knew that as well.  Art of preaching requires the preacher to take perhaps those very same ideas and contextualize it to the time and place where the message is preached... if they don't then the word falls flat and dies.  While giving credit where due, it is the re-animation of great thoughts and teachings for THIS Sunday at THIS Church, under the inspiration of the Spirit... victories, defeats, warts and all, THAT is the art of preaching, moreso than the words or ideas themselves.  It's a process not only of speaking and delivery, but of discernment with respect to what does the flock need to hear?  The short time we have as priests is very, very valuable.  But I digress... this will all be a blog posting later as I see that a cursory search of the term "holy borrowing" does not seem to come back with anything on the Internet, so maybe I'll be the one to put that out there?]

   Anyway, back to my point... I find myself in the mornings speaking to a very different group, being among the sisters.  They have a good theological and spiritual foundation which allows me to enter into an already-established theological context that requires less background, teaching, and scriptural exegesis than I would have to do in a parish setting.  Indeed, the preaching licks that I am learning here are those that progress rather more quickly from the printed word and the theological insights that come from it, into proposing nuggets to sustain the spiritual lives and practices of these amazing women... along with myself.  It's been a most satisfying experience in, all-in-all, and a gift to my priesthood to work in this 'preaching lab' where the rules are... different... than what one tends to find in a parish nowadays.  Knowing this crowd, I think it prudent to step away from the 12-days Internet meme, which they have likely heard.  Indeed, while interesting, even if not familiar, such preaching probably would not have enough take-away points to sustain meditation and prayer...so let's all dig a little deeper.

 

   Epiphany celebrates the feast of the manifestation of God through his Son, recognized as priest, prophet, and king by the foreign astrologers who were brought by the light of reason (and not by mystical tropes such as angels and prophecies and such) to acknowledge the God-child.  In the Eastern Church, this feast is the major celebration of the Incarnation.  As Western Catholics, we acknowledge it as a solemnity-- and it would be a Holy Day of Obligation if it didn't fall on a Sunday, except that in the United States the celebration is transferred to the second Sunday after Christmas.  (I think the only place in the West that regularly celebrates it as the real, 12th day of Christmas (Jan 5, whatever day of the week that is,) is Rome... where that is probably done, as much as anything, as a tip of the biretta to our Eastern brethren.)

   So, the manifestation of God... through natural and supernatural means.  Through the humanity and divinity of the Christ child.  Through the recognition of supernatural events among those present in Bethlehem, and through the recognition of natural signs of those throughout the world.  This is what I see we have to work with in the preaching this week.  My mind is naturally drawn to the modern conundrum of solving the false lines drawn between between faith and reason... the proposition that one cannot simultaneously be a man of science and a man of faith.  I would argue the counterpoint: truth does not contradict truth.  Until the scientific revolution of the last 100 years or so such thinking on my part would not be considered a radical departure ...indeed in some circles, 'heresy' for someone who supposedly has studied science (as I have).

   And so, what I intend to do is go back into the saddle bags and present the sources and basic argument from this post I made on the blog last February on Science and Faith, obviously only to summarize the points, but to bring forward the deeper, and more beautiful idea, that God loves us so much that he desires to speak our language in leading us to understand his... a deeper appreciation of what it means that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

   The glory of the angel's song that first Christmas night reveals a supernatural order of glory and worship and divine love-- even as the beauty of the earth and the stars and the seas reveal in nature the everyday language of God's abiding love.  They need not compete or be mutually exclusive.  Indeed, to accept the humanity of Christ is to accept that he entered into (and took upon himself) an orderly universe of physical laws which have merit and standing and integrity within themselves as God's creation.  In accepting the divinity of Christ, we know that the natural order is vectored from a divine origin and tends towards a divine end.  The two natures come together in the person of Christ... a very Christological argument on my part, which while theologically insightful and essentially correct, points to an even greater truth for us to hear today: God loves us.  (Isn't that something?)  He loves us in our humanity as we stand an look out at the stars try to make sense of the "many and varied ways" he has spoken to us in the past, and the confusion and imperfect striving which are the hallmarks of living in the natural world.  He loves us so much that he gave us a destiny which lies in the glory of a nature above our own... the 'supernatural' which eye has not seen nor ear has heard... where freed from the constructs of space and time, we may view him face-to-face in the 'eternal now', the beatific vision belonging to heaven and his divine presence.  We are clued into the importance of both of these realms by the Christmas story... it was not complete in hearing the angels singing.  It is completed in the wakening of the whole earth, coming to know and love her God made manifest through the little Christ child.  We poor sinners, slogging around in the challenges of humanity circumscribed by a nature that often is very dark and enclosed, sick and ignorant, poor and mean, have a reason for hope as heaven and earth come embrace, and God announces salvation to all.

   I'm not quite sure how I am going to say this all, and do so in an efficient manner.  That's the part of preaching I am still working on.  I think the new material I have created here has a bigger part to say than the older stuff I linked to... simply because it is relevant to the specific feast, rather than serving as mere background material.  One of the neat things about preaching in the parishes as a parish priest is that you typically get 3-4 times to get it right by that last Mass on Sunday.  Here it's a one-time shot.  One Sunday Mass.  Come away from it for good or ill, you think about what went well and what didn't work, put the notes in the computer, and it is done.  Back at the parish, sometimes I have managed to rescue a lame Saturday night preach in time for some Sunday redemption... but I have also managed to turn a sharp Saturday night into a bloated, overwrought titanic of a  presentation by that last Mass on Sunday as well as random thoughts get added or shakier points begin to crumble under further consideration.  But as for now, I need a good night's sleep and we'll let the Holy Spirit churn the ideas around so that, hopefully, whatever is said, is what he wants... and that whatever is said might give fitting worship to the mysteries we celebrate at the Altar tomorrow morning.                            --Fr. Tom Donovan