At first, I suspected my desire to appear more southern than I have a right to claim to be. Homily. Hominy. Homily. Hominy. Homily. Hominy. This word association evokes all things truly southern. The very sound of it suggests a languid, non-pretentious, warm morning, southern repast. Perhaps I will even develop a drawl.
“Hominy” derives from the Algonquin term for grain; it never occurs alone. What is its partner? “Grits.” True grits. Real Southerners spot us interlopers a mile away:
"Sir, what would you like for breakfast?"
“I’ll have a grit.”
“A grit? I’m sorry, sir. They never come alone.”
I think a good sermon
ought to be a little “gritty”, don’t
you? Grits on your plate keep you
humble. The best upscale sermons ever savored still
have some down-home common
sense about them.
But I don’t think this is it. My Catholic friends point out that they “do” homilies while Protestants
“do” sermons. So maybe there’s a wannabe
priest lurking in my robe. But while I
confess to being an ecu-maniac, and believe with every fiber of my being that we should work that “all may be one”, I have no desire to exchange
the riotous freedoms of my tradition for
the particular restrictions of another.
I asked my erudite colleagues to tell me the difference between a homily
and a sermon. No one seems to know. I asked
you who sit through them. “Homilies
are shorter,” you say. With all due respect,
I think you beg the question. Certainly
my homilies are not shorter.
(“Pastor,” pleaded one member, “your words don’t have to be eternal in
order for them to be immortal.”)
Finally I looked in the dictionary. Homily is rooted in the Greek homi-letikos, meaning "conversation." Sermon comes directly from medieval Latin for "speech", and that probably derives from serere, “to link together or string together” like beads on a necklace. While both words carry the meaning of “a religious discourse before a congregation,” the nuance of homily is “an informal exposition usually of Scripture.” Sermon carries the additional shade of “an annoying harangue”.
I am allergic by
temperament to harangues. I cherish dialogue.
I like the thought that what I say from the pulpit is one piece
of a much longer conversation that has been
going on for centuries.
So as I prepare for our worship, perhaps I am asking myself this question: “What shall it be this Sunday? An informal exposition,
or an annoying harangue? A speech, or a searching conversation?”
© Gilbert Friend-Jones, in Faith in a Minor Key.