A few days ago I discovered a box in the garage that contained a red three-ring binder. It contained five of the first homilies I ever preached. I offered them at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, a small parish in a small town that billed itself as the Gateway to Mt. Rainier. Four of the homilies were from 1989, twenty-eight years ago. The fifth was from twenty-five years ago. The first page was a Table of Contents that listed the particular Sunday of the Liturgical year and the title of the respective sermons. It was in a transparent plastic protective cover as if the author of these texts had some reason to preserve it. Each of the homilies had a formatted first page with a space for the homilist’s name, the date, the year and Sunday of the liturgical cycle, the three texts of the day’s scripture readings, and the title of the homily. At the bottom was a black and white piece of clip art depicting Jesus preaching to his disciples. Each sermon was printed on a different color paper making it easy for the reader to distinguish where one sermon ended and another one began.

All in all, it had the look of a sincere, determined, overly enthusiastic novice with big intentions, the kind neophyte dieters and repeat offenders have every New Year’s Day until they wise up and learn not to make public their skinny resolutions. I sat down in what was either to become an extended moment of self-indulgence or self-punishment and read them all in one sitting.

For the most part they held up pretty well, offering either glimpses or more fully fleshed out expressions of what are still some of my deepest theological convictions: story as the most evocative and memorable form of verbal communication, the Christ-life as a conscious, intentional, tangible way of being in the world, the love of the Eucharist and its implications for our lives, the primacy of raising and living significant questions versus the temptation to seek or offer easy, ready-made answers, prayer as an embodied way to live rather than an infantile echo of “I want, I desire, I need – you give,” the Oz-like spiritual journey as the deep yearning of our hearts for wholeness and home, concern for the most vulnerable and marginalized, and the inestimable, sacred worth of each and every person who is an image of God.

On the whole, they were all too long. Above, I call them homilies and sermons, but they were definitely sermons that were supposed to be homilies, one distinction between a homily and a sermon being the length. Clearly, these early efforts still bore the mark of my first preaching class which was taught by a Scottish Presbyterian named Macleod at Princeton Theological Seminary. As if ordered from on high, he asserted each sermon is to be exactly twenty-two minutes in length, have three points, each with its own illustration. He added, for every minute in the pulpit, you need to spend one minute in your study. And dear old Professor Macleod didn’t look like he had spent many hours, let alone days, outside his study.

Even though I didn’t abide by or resonate with these principles, identifying them with a Protestant approach to preaching in which the sermon is considered the peak of the worship service, and even though they didn’t clock out at twenty-two minutes, my homily-sermons were still too long. Every once in a while I’d stop reading, turn the page to see how much more there was, only to see a couple more double-spaced pages remained and let out an audible “Sheeez!” It’s not that they weren’t well-written, not even that they were boring, it’s just that they were – how can I say it – toooooo looooong! My heart goes out to some of my former parishioners and more so to some of my evangelical brothers and sisters who endure sermons that are anywhere from Dr. Macleod’s sacred cow of twenty-two minutes to upwards of 45 minutes. Wow! It must tempt even the most devout listener at times to want to resurrect the idea of indulgences.

Now I am of the mind that if you can’t say it in twelve minutes – fifteen max – you can’t say it. I’m not sure how much longer it took me back then to realize that with the exception of a Bruce Springsteen concert, loving sex, cheesecake, time with my kids, and a few other proven delights, less is almost always more.

These texts also show the influence of Frederick Buechner, a wise, witty, and eloquent writer and ordained minister who I had the pleasure to hear read from his works and preach several times while back east in the 1980’s. His sermons were prose-poems not much different than his novels, autobiography, and theological texts that were crafted with the precision of a calligrapher’s pen, every stroke and every word counting. Like Buechner’s sermons, mine too were probably better read than heard. I was still a few years away from chucking the detailed manuscripts, coming out from behind the ambo (pulpit for you Protestants), and moving down front, up close and personal with the people, and telling more stories.

As I read, the obvious effort of these first “homilies” reminded me of the fact that my boss, mentor, and friend Fr. Dick Basso, with whom I shared Sunday preaching duties, was as good a homilist as I had heard. I remember how much of my preparation was related to not wanting to make Dick’s judgment look poor given that he was going out on a limb in the late 1980’s and allowing a lay person (albeit a theologically-trained one) to preach on a regular basis at the Sunday Masses. I also didn’t want to embarrass myself, cheat the community, and have chants of “We want Dick! We want Dick!” suddenly break out from the pews while I was preaching. Parenthetically, I do remember more than once in those early days a few people fainting (was it something I said) and another time when a man had a heart attack (was it something I said) and being laid out in the center aisle and worked on by the paramedics while Dick encouraged me to keep on preaching to distract the congregants and keep them from getting any more upset. Preaching as distraction – that was a novel concept. At best these kinds of incidents make you wonder if you are in the right business and at worst whether or not you should take out some liability insurance.

Amidst all the words, here are two periscopes I still stand by from a homily in 1992 on the passage from the Gospel of Luke (14: 1, 7-14) in which Jesus is invited to dinner at the house of a ruler who belonged to the Pharisees. Jesus tells a parable aimed at those who have presumptuously taken the seats of honor at a wedding feast. Later, addressing the host, he encourages that the next time the man has a dinner party “do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kin or rich neighbors lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid.” Instead, Jesus encourages his host to invite the poorest, most vulnerable, ostracized, and rejected members of society that he can find. I wrote:

Contrary to what may be our first impression, today’s gospel is not about etiquette; it’s not about wedding decorum or dinner manners. Luke is not domesticating Jesus into some wise, churchy version of Emily Post. In fact, the gospel contrasts the etiquette of the Pharisees with the ethic of Jesus. And that’s what we’re confronted with: living a life of spiritless propriety which is what etiquette is often about or living at the center of a sphere with no circumference which is what the ethic of Jesus is always about. Jesus challenges the people of his day, especially the religious know-it-alls — and us as the church today -– not to reduce the life of faith to etiquette, to religious decorum, to following rules and regulations.

Etiquette has to do with what is socially acceptable;
Ethics has to do with what is socially responsible.

Etiquette has to do with what is proper;
Ethics has to do with what is just.

Etiquette has to do with what is correct;
Ethics has to do with what is true.

Despite some of the shortcomings of these early homilies, I must admit it pleases me to see the following words in the same homily mentioned above that I preached twenty-five years ago:

Closer to home I would suggest that the ethic of Jesus doesn’t have very much to do with whether we kneel or stand during the Eucharistic Prayer [I prefer standing] . . . or make the sign of the cross with our left or right hand. But it has everything to do with whether or not we . . .  welcome and reverence each other. Reverence and welcome people of all ages, all genders, all sexual persuasions, all races, and all creeds.

I didn’t say TOLERATE the gay man.
I didn’t say PUT UP WITH the antsy child in the pew in front of us.
I didn’t say RESIGN ONESELF to the presence of women leader’s in the Church.
I didn’t say PERMIT people of other cultures or races to be part of MY church.
Based on today’s gospel, I said the ethic of Jesus has everything to do with our reverencing and welcoming all people into our midst.

I know the need for new wineskins. But sometimes there is still some juice in the old wineskins as well. If nothing else, it’s an excuse to clean the garage.