Homily: What Will You Preach?

Deacon Tony Cecil Homily: Friday 32 OTB (16 November 2018)

Saint Thomas Aquinas Chapel at Saint Meinrad Seminary

…fire and brimstone rained from the sky to destroy them all.

Happy Thanksgiving!

There seems to be a contradiction here.

There’s…fire and brimstone rained from the sky to destroy them all,

And then there’s…[the commandment] we have had from the beginning: let us love one another.

In the midst of the contradiction, there’s also a challenge for a deacon who would much rather preach in a packed parish than under the stress of a chapel filled with his brothers and formators just minutes before everyone leaves for a much-desired and well-earned break.

The challenge is that it seems that it would be much more difficult to preach on the Gospel—that this would call me out of my comfort zone—to find some sort of inspiration in the words of destruction, and people being left behind, and a reminder of Lot’s wife being a salty old gal.

It’s more challenging to imagine a way of preaching on hellfire and brimstone that doesn’t slip into the Calvinism that marks so much good ol southern preachin’.

It’s more challenging to live up to a sort of expectation to step up to the plate here.

But, I like being comfortable.

It’d be more comfortable to stick to that first reading—to all of that love stuff—I mean, that’s much easier to talk about. Who doesn’t like love and mercy and all that gushy stuff?

It feels so much easier—but is it bad to take the road that seems less challenging?

What to do?

Something I’ve learned in the past few years of seminary, and in the past few months of diaconal ministry, is that really, at the end of the day, the words that I say aren’t worth a pile of dung.

The words that I say—the words that we all say in our ministry—are worthless, unless they’re backed by how we live.

And when it comes to that—when it comes to what’s important—how we act, how we live—how we attempt to preach the Gospel with our lives—that seeming contradiction the scriptures provide for us today actually presents us with a set of options.

So, in preaching with our lives, the first option is this: fire and brimstone rained from the sky to destroy them all.

Now, we can say that we don’t do that—we’re seminarians—we’re priests and religious—we’re good people! How could we possibly live in a way that destroys others? That rains down fire?

Well, I don’t know—maybe it looks like—losing our temper with a brother seminarian, or a formator, or a professor—maybe it’s the bad-mouthing our community, or our seminary, or our Church that can so easily happen behind closed doors. Maybe it’s dismaying in the requirements of ministering to people that seem below us, or don’t agree with our ecclesiology—or writing off someone and refusing to see the presence of Christ in them because of whatever crap we want to push onto them.

Suddenly what seems so challenging to preach about in words is actually what we can risk preaching about with our lives so easily.

Then, there’s the second option: the commandment we have had from the beginning: let us love one another.

This one is just the opposite—it’s so easy to talk about—but in reality, it’s much harder to live, that is, if we have a proper understanding of what loving one another really is.

Because loving one another means getting over ourselves.

It means looking past differences and clinging to patience at the point in the semester where we all want to smack our heads against the wall.

It means stopping the incessant complaining and instead, using our words to pray—for our brothers, for our seminary, for our Church, for our world that needs it so desperately.

It means being willing to get into the trenches and into mud and mess of people’s lives and pull them out, and to walk beside them.

It means—it means pattering our lives—all of our lives—after the example given to us on the wall behind me.

It means not seeking to save our lives, because we’ll lose it; but rather seeking to lose our lives—to pour out our lives for the sake of Christ, for the sake of the Church, for the sake of souls that we may never even meet—because it is then and only then that our lives are saved.

In the contradiction, there’s a challenge—and in the challenge, there’s an option.

Our lives will be spent preaching—whether we’re called the priesthood or not.

The question is: what option are you going to choose? What message are you going to pour out your life preaching?

To view the day's readings, click here .

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