Preaching: A Ministry of Listening

Thank you for your way of saying God.

These are the words with which Jean-Pierre Sonnet, a friend of mine, heard an elderly parishioner express her thanks to him for the way he preached and the way he presided over the Eucharist: Thank you for the way you say God. I do not know how theologically literate the woman was, but the phrase expresses in a pitch perfect way one of the key tenets of our understanding of how words work in the realm of our sacramental life, indeed, how revelation itself works. God has chosen to reach out to humanity through the life and words of others. Our Advent hope is in an incarnated God. Nowhere is this more palpable than when we come together to celebrate our faith. The whole of our eucharistic liturgy is a dialogue, a performance of the care and presence of God for and to the People of God. We are amplifying and enacting communion with God and with each other; and the ministry of preaching is at the heart of that reality.

Much has been said of the word of God and its preaching in the last few years, especially in the context of Australia’s Plenary Council. Its final decrees identify the fact that the universal Church has broadened criteria for admission to the ministries of Lector and Acolyte. With the recognition of the ministry of Catechist, we are witnessing a wider range of formal ministry opportunities in the Church (Decree 5, para 2). The Council affirms the universal baptismal participation in the prophetic ministry of Christ, and seeks to support this by revisiting the ACBC’s May 2003 guidelines for lay people to participate in a formal ministry of preaching in the Latin Church. The Council expresses a certain lament about the state of preaching in the Church in Australia and calls for the renewal of preaching, in particular, that of excellent preaching in the homily in the celebration of the Eucharist (see SC 52).

Most of what I am going to say in this article applies to any teaching or preaching of the word of God, but in the context of a publication on liturgy, I want to focus particularly on the word within our shared celebration of the sacraments, in the desire to raise awareness of what, or how, it might have meaning.

The first thing I would say is that, when we come together as Church, as a community of the baptised faithful, from start to end we inhabit a sacramental space. By sacramental, I mean the reality that God comes to meet us in and through the human realities of flesh, blood and matter. There are interwoven encounters taking place as we celebrate: God through the people of God, the body of Christ; God through the words proclaimed and spoken; God in the prayed silences and pauses; God through the bread and wine we eat and drink. God is becoming present to us…

for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

to the Father through the features of men's faces.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire)

In the sacramental space, what does preaching do? What is it for? What happens when someone preaches? I would invite you, as readers, to think about the words that have stayed with you, the homilies that still resonate, the voices that rained down gently from heaven on the earth of your life and did not leave you unchanged (see Is 55:10-11). Which words pierced your soul, judging the thought and intentions of your heart (see Heb 4:12), and why you think that might have happened?

The Sermon on the Mount, woodcut 1503 (Rijksmuseum)

We know that God’s grace cannot be controlled, and there might be many factors involved: our own life journeys, a point of crisis or of joy, a Scripture reading we love. But I would also suggest that it can – more often than we admit – have to do with the way the preacher managed to speak that word, on that day… how the preacher said God to you. Much of that efficacy has to do with something we do not always think of immediately when we think of preaching: how the people listened to the Spirit of Jesus in the word and the Spirit of God in the preacher.

The distinction between speaking and listening is a false one, especially in relation to sermons, homilies, evangelisation, teaching and preaching. The better the preacher listens, at depth, to what is happening in people’s lives, to what the Spirit is whispering to us in the silence of our prayer-times, to what God is asking of each one of us, the better the Word of God through whom we came into being (see John 1:1-4) can resonate through the act of preaching. The reality is that this is how God has chosen to reach people: through human beings and human words.

My favourite definition of preaching is that of the Dominican Mary Catherine Hilkert OP (1997, p. 45): That is the art of any ministry of the word: to speak the name of God neither too soon nor too late. Preaching is the art of naming God’s grace, of putting words on what the Spirit is doing, of calling into life what God is offering people. There are various dimensions to this definition. One is the awareness of the powerful sacramentality of words: they name grace! They enable people to recognise how God is present in their lives. This means that a preacher needs to speak words that people can in fact understand, offer words for which they are ready. There is no point speaking a word before they can understand it. But equally a preacher is negligent not to speak when there is a need for meaning to be made. God entrusts people to the Church’s ministers who are called to accompany them with the words they need to hear. Thus people encounter the God who comes to meet us and they understand the faith they are seeking to live out.

There is another layer of depth to this. It is the recognition that God is already at work in the world before the preacher arrives with a word of clarification of the word of Christ. God wants the salvation of all and God’s grace works in an unseen way in the depths of the hearts of all those who allow it to, the hearts of all people of good will. So, in proclaiming the word of God, the preacher is not ‘bringing’ God to a place where there was an absence before. Rather, like Paul, the preacher is being sent to name Christ for people in whom the Spirit is already at work, albeit in unfinished ways. The preacher’s job is to recognise how this is happening and to name it. The ministry includes, of course, naming where that grace might be held up or blocked, (although never completely absent). For the preacher, then, it implies first and foremost listening – to God, to people, to culture, to how things are done in that place; otherwise the preacher will not be able to name the mystery of the Triune God.

Finally we come to the issues of language, cultures and outreach. In our beautiful, pluralist and diverse Church in Australia, it is essential that good preaching make a conscious effort to understand how people live and move and exist (Acts 17:28) in their lives of faith. This is an ongoing process, for forthcoming generations are constantly changing. The Church’s minister must love them enough to listen and learn, and find the right words to say to them.

Of course, in the act of preaching and receiving the word, it is important to note that the listening goes both ways. The people are invited to hear who God is and to be open to the transformative power of the word. People listen not only to the words, but to the preacher’s whole life. Words are not empty. Jesus calls the eyes the ‘lamp of the body’ (Mt 6:22); they tell people who we are and what we are living, even as we try to find a way to say God.

My own community’s charism is that of prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4). I will finish this article with one of my favourite lines from our Constitutions. Who God is for us comes through in our words; the cautionary subtext is that who we are does as well.

After the words, only Jesus and the living experience of Christ should remain in the hearts of the listeners.

(Verbum Dei Community, Constitutions 47)

This article was originally published in Liturgy News ​Vol 52(4) December 2022. Reprinted with permission.