People compliment my homilies. They are the main reason my Mass attendance has continued to grow over the years. I don't mean to steal Mass attendance from other parishes, but I do. The homily is the reason why.
If I write good ones, it’s only because I’ve heard so many bad ones. The majority of the homilies I’ve heard are sad, pointless things. I try to make mine less sad, and I've learned via negativa.
So here’s a post for priests. A post about what you may doing right or wrong. Take it for what it’s worth.
Use a Script
You have to write a homily out. You’re no orator, and neither am I, even if I have more formal training in rhetoric than most. Exceptions exist, they always do. Mark Antony did pretty good, and I’m sure some of the Greeks could talk up a storm. But they’re all dead, and so is the cultural context in which they lived. If you go up to the lectern without a script, it’s strike one.
I wing my Daily Mass homilies without a script. I have a rough idea of what I’m going to talk about before I begin. Sometimes they’re compact, good, to the point. Other times they’re an incoherent sprawl of ideas, a mess unified by no central point. Those are the worst kind of homilies. Forgivable at Daily Mass, failures though they are, but inexcusable on Sundays. If you don’t use a script on Sundays, you’ve probably lost the plot more often than you’ve kept it.
One Specific Thesis Only
You must have a central thesis. One specific thing. “The Gospel is about Lazarus, so I am going to write about death.” Good luck. Death is too broad, and you’ll end up rambling on as the pagans do, so what is it about death that you want to say? How about refining that, going deeper: “I am going to write about how God detests death as something foreign to Him.” Aha. Now you’re working with something.
Every sentence should serve only this thesis. Every single one. If you remember this, you’ll avoid the temptation to spend three minutes and 200 words recapping the Gospel everyone just heard. If a sentence does not somehow serve your thesis directly — that God detests death — then it is a bad sentence. Remove it. Kill it. Obliterate it. Or else set that sentence or point aside: the good news is, you’ll likely be doing this next week all over again, and you could have yourself a fresh thesis even if it doesn’t fit for this homily.
A friend once described this process as "returning to the beat." Good YouTubers know how to do this, even. You return to the thesis constantly, to the point of the video, or else you'll lose your audience. One point. Hit it hard, fast, and always.
If you cannot do this, or struggle to do this, bad news: you don't know what you're talking about. You have no insight. You could be struggling for the right words to describe your thesis, and that's okay. Writing is hard. Think about the thesis some more, and take it to prayer.
Most bad homilies are the result of priests and deacons not really knowing what they're talking about, so they veer off in other directions. That's why it becomes disjointed and people tune you out.
Stories are good. Life experience is good. They can serve the thesis. Just make sure it all adds up, points in the right direction. If it doesn’t, send that story to the grave.
Brevity is a Sign of a Thesis Well Served
One of the smartest things Pope Francis ever said is that homilies should be five minutes. Of course, if he ever gave a five minute homily himself, I can't say. Perhaps he should be forgiven for being the pope: do as I say, not as I do, etc. etc.
People have no attention spans for oratory. A terrible fact, but don’t fight it, bub. You’ll lose that war and be ineffective. You have five minutes at the most. Back twenty years ago, when I was active in the English Lit world, they said it was seven minutes. Things haven’t exactly improved. It doesn’t matter what you have to say, or how good you are, or whether or not you’ve written a long-form masterpiece. You. have. five. minutes.
My homily last weekend, on how God detests death, was 457 words long. It was over and done in under five minutes, even with delivering it slowly for rhetorical effect.
If you have a good thesis, you’ll be limited in what you can say about it anyway. You only have one point to make, after all, and you’re not going to use a single sentence that deviates from it, if you do it right. Just write one true sentence after another about that thesis. All it takes.
Composition & Mastery
It might take you a couple of days to figure out what the central thesis is as you kick around the Gospel in your mind. But when it comes time to write, you should be done in under twenty minutes, because what you have to say is brief and to the point. You’re not too busy to write it down and to organize your thoughts. So do it.
Back when I was a seminarian, I once boldly proclaimed, in frustration over the bad homilies the professors would give, bloviating as they did about whatever their current hobby horse was: “Any idiot can preach for twenty minutes. But it takes a master to make his point in two.”
I stand by that. I’m no master, which is why it still takes me five, but maybe I'll get there one day.