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The SEEK Podcast
The Heart of Homily Preparation: Better Preach x SEEK
Join us on the SEEK podcast as Father John Burns opens our hearts to the transformative power of Catholic homilies. Unlike any other form of public speaking, an authentic homily weaves together Scripture, liturgy, and our daily lives, offering a unique conduit for divine grace.
Father Burns delves deep into the essence of impactful preaching, emphasizing that the core of powerful homilies is not in the technique but in prayer. He shares his personal approach to homily preparation, which begins with a prayerful request to understand the hearts of his listeners. This spiritual preparation allows him to transcend his own ideas and deliver messages that resonate deeply with parishioners, often addressing their needs in ways he had not anticipated.
Highlighting the biblical metaphor of sowing seeds, Father Burns reminds us that as preachers, we participate in God’s work by planting the living Word in the hearts of the faithful. It’s a humble reminder that while we may lay the foundations, it is God alone who brings forth the growth.
Father Burns also touches on the need for a holistic approach to Church renewal, suggesting that powerful preaching must go hand in hand with the nurturing roles of both spiritual fathers and mothers within the Church. This unity of masculine and feminine expressions of faith embodies the fullness of God’s design for our spiritual family.
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Welcome to the Seek 25 podcast, featuring some of our favorite podcasters recorded live at the Max Studios podcast stage during Seek 25 in Salt Lake City.
Speaker 2:Hey, welcome to Better Preach. I'm so excited to be here. My name is Ryan O'Hara and in the last couple of years I started a podcast trying to figure out how do we develop and deliver great Catholic talks. Because the thing is, there's youth ministers, there's priests and deacons giving talks every week and so often I hear from the non-professionals that they don't have the confidence that they want to grow in teaching and preaching the Catholic faith. But also we can watch all the videos we want, but I want to hear about what happens behind the scenes before we get the mic, before we step up to the ambo, because I think we can learn a lot from that Father. So that's kind of where the whole podcast comes from. We do interviews with Catholic speakers and priests and religious and Father John, so grateful to have you here on the podcast. Welcome to Better Preach.
Speaker 3:Yeah, super glad to be with you guys, especially here, with everybody having their lunch cold cuts on the floor at the Sikh conference. Yeah, I'm excited to be with you guys Awesome.
Speaker 2:Thank you, father. So we were talking before we started that as Catholics, we hear homilies if we're if I mean we want to every week of our life, for the rest of our life, and sometimes I wonder what expectations should we have as Catholics who listen to homilies each week? But here's the thing what makes a homily unique. It's not like any other kind of teaching and preaching. What is a homily and maybe what isn't a homily?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a good question. I haven't thought about it that way that you are all, every one of the faithful, you're hearing homilies all the time. Every time you go to mass, you're in a homily every weekend or in daily mass. We're like on the other side of that. As priests, we are always preaching homilies and they don't really prepare you. In seminary they're like you know you're going to do that. You come up with a different homily. It's a pretty interesting journey into trying to always be creative, trying to always be fresh and then also stay within, like what the church expects, what you need from a homily. So a question like what is a homily? It's a good question. A homily is. It's unlike any other delivered word, it sits inside the action of the church and the liturgy. So the homily has to be a part of this bigger thing, of what we're doing when we go to mass, which is to worship God and to step out of time into the eternal and evaluate what's going on while we're within time. So the answer to the question of like, what is a homily, what's the ideal homily? There's going to be a lot of different answers.
Speaker 3:I would say, when I prepare a homily or when I preach. My hope is that I can help the assembly, the people who are praying mass. I hope that they can recognize that what we're doing at mass has something to do with their life and their life has something to do with what's happening at mass the connection between the day-to-day of just what happens in our lives and the constant work of the church to bring all of that back to God and into right order. So the homily is like the most creative part. Nothing else at Mass is very creative. You have rubrics, which is liturgical law that tells you what you can and can't do all throughout the Mass. You ought to obey that. Not everybody does. Sometimes there's a little more latitude, but the homily you're given total freedom. It should connect the scriptures to the liturgy and to people's lives and that's about it. So there's a pretty wide latitude, which is why you're going to get a lot of different answers about what is a homily and what's a good homily and how do you write a good homily.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Growing up are there, or even through your conversion. Were there moments in the mass where your heart was pierced? Do you remember those moments, Any particular preaching that had a profound impact on your life, your priesthood, even your call to the priesthood?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I would say actually probably the experience of a lot of us growing up. I remember not being deeply moved by a lot of homilies. I mean I was through high school and college. I didn't want to be a priest. I was afraid of the priesthood. I didn't want to be very close to the church even in case I was called to the priesthood.
Speaker 3:So I didn't like listening to the homily. I didn't really like I found mass kind of boring. Actually it didn't really animate my soul deeply. But I knew I needed to be there. I knew it was good for me, I knew God was asking me to be there.
Speaker 3:So it wasn't until in college we had a priest come to my parish a new priest and he just was an exceptional preacher and he preached out of his prayer and you could hear in what he was preaching a love of the church and he loved to study theology and make it approachable for us. And it was the first time I remember seeing a priest who I thought was on fire, loved preaching, loved what he was preaching and wanted me to love the same thing. So, starting in college, midway through college, I started to notice the homily actually can lead me to pray better and was calling me to conversion. And so from that point on I changed my stance about the homily and realized it's an important part it's not the most important part of the Mass, but it's a very important part for our own connection with the sacred action.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. So if you were to fill in the blank, catholics would get a lot more out of homilies. If. How would you answer that sentence? Catholics, all of us would get a lot more out of homilies if.
Speaker 3:So let me add a bunch of pieces to an answer, because the first I think the most important thing about writing homilies is the preacher needs to preach out of his prayer. What we bring to you has to come from the Lord and not our creativity or our ideas or our agendas. It's gotta come from prayer from the Lord. So we've gotta have a deep interior life, a prayer life. On the recipient side, the idea would be you know that your preacher is a man of prayer and he's preaching out of his prayer. He's bringing you the fruit of his interior life.
Speaker 3:So if that were the case that every preacher is always praying deeply and he's preaching out of his prayer the best thing Catholics could do who are coming to mass would be to say I believe the Holy Spirit has a word for me and that the instrument for the delivery of that word is the preacher.
Speaker 3:And so I want to be open to the word of God proclaimed by a preacher and I want to pray for that preacher and his prayer life and what he wants to bring to me and I want to receive, even if I don't like his style or I'm not very attentive that day or I'm going through a bad season in life.
Speaker 3:I want to receive a fresh glance into what God is trying to do as I worship him in the mass. So the idea would be we are all praying around the homily, aware that this is the Holy Spirit's moment to speak beyond the prayers of the mass, beyond the lectionary, to speak into the particulars of what's going on in the world, in my life, my pastor's life. So if we could pray for each other in that and we were people of prayer about openness to the word instrumentally delivered through a homily fresh words for me from God, not just the preacher, that would change the way that priests prepare and the way that we in the assembly are willing to be pierced by a fresh word every time we hear the word broken open.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because it seems like, even if my disposition matters, that if I'm ready to receive something, greater likelihood that the Lord can speak, even if it's ineffective or monotone or you know all of these other sort of human or natural factors. That seems a part of what you're kind of pointing to is just, there's something happening on the level of the Spirit, regardless of so-called effectiveness, that we ought to be open to every time the Word is proclaimed and preached.
Speaker 3:Especially at Mass. Like when we're at Mass, the reason for the homily is to help bridge the readings which we walk through in a two and three year cycle, bridge that with our lives and the actual prayers of the mass, the Eucharist, and I don't always have an easy time connecting those. So I want help from God and please God, his preacher. So there's a je ne sais quoi, there's an element of divine activity that, if we really believe it's happening and we pray into it, we're always willing to be caught off guard, surprised, blessed, by what God is trying to bring through this particular mass and this particular homily.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. So could you share something from your you're talking about preaching from a real and authentic prayer life that we're going to receive the fruits of a man, a priest, who's praying, and you're coming in some ways to tell us that word of the Lord through you, to us. Can you share with us maybe something about your own preparation that might surprise us, something you do that's maybe different, or a habit that you began spiritually, as you are preparing to preach, even preparing to celebrate mass, that might surprise us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think maybe the surprise would be that people expect that we, and maybe me in particular people might expect that I have a method and that if you ask me to write a book about how to prepare good homilies or talks, I could do that. I couldn't do that because I don't really have a method in place for writing a talk or writing a homily. I really begin, and this would be the habit that I put in place early on. I begin any talk, preparation for any talk or any homily, by leaning back on the Lord and saying okay, lord, you know who's attending Mass, you know who's attending the talk, you know who's attending this podcast, you know what they're dealing with, what they're going through, you know their stories? I don't. So would you please put onto my heart your own heart or the sentiments of your heart, and would you please inspire in me an interest in the topic or the particular reading or this element of the mass that they need to hear. And now they might be six people at daily mass or a thousand people or 2000 people at Christmas vigil. So that's a wide swath and I can't, as a human being, grab a topic general enough or craft a homily. That's gonna catch everybody.
Speaker 3:But it's very easy for the Lord to knowing the hearts of the people that are gathering for the talk or the homily or the mass or the podcast, to inspire in me a word or an idea or a set of ideas. So I always and I repent of any time I haven't done this, but I always. I begin in prayer and I say God, give me the word that is for them. And what surprises me about that is I might look at the readings or I might look at the talk. If they asked me to give a talk on the father, like Friday, I'm giving a talk on the father. I might look at the prompt, look at the text and I'll have an idea. And then I'll go to prayer and something very different comes to mind. I'll be like no Lord, this idea, look at this, this is a way to preach on this gospel. This is a idea of the Father. Something else happened in my prayer and I'm not always attracted to this idea coming in prayer. I have my own ideas, but when I test it in prayer and the Lord's like, I want you to preach on that.
Speaker 3:There are times where you have to set aside your plan or your ideas what the talk should be, the homily that you don't think is very interesting, but when it came out of prayer, you just have to sit there and be like well, God, I asked you to inspire me. You know who's going to be there. You've given me this word and you get up there and you preach this word and to you it's not that exciting, or maybe it doesn't fit or it's off topic, and every time you do that, there is an experience, a profound experience, of noticing how it affects people. That was not you, and I'd say maybe the best example is like after mass.
Speaker 3:If you're shaking hands with people as they're leaving mass, you'll have like six or eight people I mean most people at the end of mass will say great homily, father. And if you ask them, they can't really tell you exactly what you preached. You know, because they're just complimenting you to be nice. But once in a while I'll say like tell me what you liked about it. And when you do that, six different people will give you six different answers and they'll all say you were speaking right to my heart, what was affecting you this point, father, or when you said this, and you'll be like I'll be like I don't know if I made that point. I don't. I wasn't trying to say that, yeah, but because it came out of prayer and the Lord puts the words together, it reaches the heart of the recipient in just the way they need. And that's when you really just bow down before the sacredness of the task and be like this is not my work, this is not my achievement, this is not my performance. This is an activity of God.
Speaker 2:Wow. So if I follow that idea through, that means you're really not giving the same homily twice.
Speaker 3:I would say I've never preached the same homily twice and I grew up this is a particular thing of mine that I think is a personality flaw I am terrified of repeating myself. I grew up in a situation where we just had a priest who gave the same homily every year on the same feasts and he was a very good preacher. But after a while I was like here's that same idea. And I didn't. I tuned down on the rest of the idea because like it's the same idea every year and it just kind of put me into a place of saying I'll never do that and I had to like renounce any unholy vows there in any way that I bound myself to like never repeating because we need repetition.
Speaker 3:But I I'm really careful not to repeat myself. So I actually keep track in the lectionary, the three-year and the two-year rotations. I keep track of what I preached in the parish on that reading last time. So I don't preach the same idea the next time. And if I have a text that I use, I'll look at that text and make sure I don't use that same text. I'll never pull an old homily off the shelf and deliver it because I'm in a different spot. And if I tried to do that, which I have a couple of times, it's not. It doesn't animate me anymore because that's not the fresh word, that's not where my prayer is, that's not what's happening in my people's lives, so I can't preach the word the same way I did the first time. So I really never. Even if I'm giving a talk at a retreat and I have the same text, the talk comes out differently.
Speaker 2:So you made the point that so often you know, as we're leaving Mass and we're greeting you, and oftentimes great homily Father, great homily Father, what would be helpful? How could we give? How could us give better feedback, or, I should say, appropriate feedback? What would you find helpful as a priest? It's not going to happen every week and you're not going to have 300 people telling you you know in an email, but what kind of feedback would you appreciate.
Speaker 3:So it is. That's a great question. I'm laughing because the story comes to mind. It's a great question because meaningful feedback is helpful. If it's critical feedback like you missed the point or that was offensive or insulting, to deliver that carefully, but feedback on a talk or a homily that helps me get better and where it's clear to me that you actually were paying attention.
Speaker 3:My brother's a priest. This is a great story. This is a story I was laughing about. He's a priest as well and he's three years behind me in ordination and he's like my brother is. He hates me talking about him. My brother's like a saint. He's a really holy priest. He's a beautiful, beautiful man of the Lord, a deep, deep prayer, and he was an associate pastor at a parish where the pastor was near retirement was my brother's very short, he's like five foot eight and the pastor would be about six foot two, maybe six feet tall and probably 240 pounds. And my brother is very skinny, so they look nothing alike.
Speaker 3:It was Christmas Eve. My brother finished the early vigil mass and the other mass at the other church had started 30 minutes after. So he finished mass, gets off his priesty vestments and goes in his suit and stands at the back of the mass to greet everybody at the other mass and a guy comes up to him, shakes his hands, says Father, Merry Christmas, great homily. My brother's, dressed in a suit, was clearly not presiding. The pastor was presiding, who is 40 years older than him and 120 pounds heavier than him and six inches taller than him.
Speaker 3:Whatever the math is, it was clearly not his homily. And my brother's like, oh, my goodness, I may never be able to take great homily, Father, seriously again, because there's no way I preach this homily and that guy's just saying it because he always says it. So we can sometimes tell when it's just like what you say after mass. But to your question, if you add something like here's what I loved about the homily or this point, I never thought of it that way, or I needed to hear that, or I'd love to hear more about that, or that didn't make sense. But if you can explain it to me, I'd love to hear more about that, or that didn't make sense, but if you can explain it to me, I'd love to like go deeper in it. That kind of feedback just shows us that you're paying attention and makes it an actual compliment instead of something that, yeah, clearly you're just saying because you want to be kind to us, but it's not actually very kind when it's clearly not sincere, you know.
Speaker 2:You know, my wife did her master's thesis in education on the power of specific praise. So she was a teacher and she wrote her own thesis on how important it was to be specific in the praise that you give to your students, and it seems like that's exactly what you're describing there. If we could just give one specific thing, do you appreciate that? Do you like to get an email like that?
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, I mean, don't we love to hear we did a good job? So positive emails, positive feedback, is always awesome. Negative feedback is hard to receive and I would say for anybody who speaks or preaches when you're receiving negative feedback, it's worth asking, you know, because I get defensive immediately or I'm like, oh, come on, that's not what I meant to say. Or I intend well, but I have to notice to myself, like when I don't like the feedback someone's giving, what's going on in me, like why do I feel threatened by negative feedback and I need to kind of work through that? Or what is the Holy Spirit really inviting in terms of my own healing? But it's got to be delivered very carefully, because not everybody's willing to like receive that and pray about it. Sometimes it just triggers a fight.
Speaker 2:How important is the relationship of the person outside of this bit of feedback? Or, and also, have you had some constructive criticism that has really helped you as a preacher.
Speaker 3:Yeah, tons. I mean I hate receiving it because I do my best in the talk or the homily and then someone tells me it didn't make sense or it missed or was offensive or whatever. I don't like hearing that. But I want to be for the people better, so I need that. And when it's a friend or someone I know, when I have a relationship with the person giving me feedback, it's easier for me to receive that and be like okay, that hurts, Tell me why you're saying it that way or did I offend you? Like can we talk through that If it's a stranger?
Speaker 3:When the worst thing is the letter that's unsigned, the anonymous letter or the email that is just shot off five minutes after mass on the drive home, when someone's angry, that's not helpful for anybody.
Speaker 3:It's not helpful for the one who sent it or for the one who is receiving it. So, in the context of friendship or relationship prime and maybe like around that, another place we could just always be praying for our priests is like Lord, help my priests, love me, love the people, love the parish, because it's like being a dad of thousands of people who don't know you, yeah, and so you're like trying to love them and give them good things, but they don't have a relationship with you always, and so it hits them wrong. It hits you wrong. It's not always easy to walk with a family like that, so to pray that our priests would be fatherly and loving and open to the cost of fathering, and in that context then the context of friendship and filial or fraternal relationships, it's easier to have a conversation about where the homilies are not going or where they are going well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, does one moment of kind of feedback stick out to you as something that someone said, whether it was a brother, priest, a bishop, one of your formators, a friend. They said something and it really resonated and you've seen a change in your preaching because of that helpful word.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it would be, and this would be an advice maybe to anybody who preaches or teaches or speaks publicly, with a caveat. So the advice first and then the caveat. My second year of priesthood I received feedback from one of the staff and it was a homily I'd preached where I just shared a way that I was struggling with my family and something we were kind of going through and I didn't know what to do and I was kind of naming that in the homily that I like reached a dead end and I had to like submit or surrender to the Lord. And the staff person came back to me and they said, father, that's the first time that you've ever been vulnerable and talked about your personal life. And I was like that's not true, I always. And then I kind of paused, I'm like, oh, maybe I.
Speaker 3:And I realized I think for the first couple of years of preaching I was trying to teach theology well and give a good catechetical homily and make sure the point gets across and maybe not show too much of my heart. Sure, because the here's the caveat, because we can go way too far in that you'll have speakers or preachers who are just working through their own stories constantly in their homily and they're only talking about their personal life, only talking about their struggles, and that's exhausting and not the point of proclaiming the gospel and preaching and teaching. So the caveat is we don't want to go too far here, but the council is like we do need to be human and if we're going to walk with the audience, the people, they need to know we care and that we're grappling too Like we don't have it all figured out. No priest has it all figured out. No preacher or public speaker has figured out the nuts and bolts of how to live the gospel.
Speaker 3:So, to be appropriately honest, when the Lord seems to invite like an opening up of your heart or a sharing of how it's not going great in the pursuit of the gospel, recognizing if you start manifesting your conscience, or sharing about your sin or your struggle with addiction, that's going to go too far and make people you're going to like enter into like the total cringe zone and people are going to really want to run. So you got to find that sweet spot. But it moved me, struck me when she said you've never really shared your heart and from then on I'm like Lord, are you asking me to open up a little more and that changed the direction of my preaching ever since, and I'm grateful, because she and I wouldn't be on the same page. We didn't really get along very well. Who was this person? It was a person on the staff.
Speaker 3:It was like one of the staff people, a lay person, a lay woman, yeah, we had different approach to everything, we would actually disagree about a lot, but she's, I love her, I pray for her so often and we have now have a great friendship. But she brought the feedback in a way that I'm like oh man, I I've got a question whether or not I'm opening my heart as I preach appropriately, and since then I try to say like I want you to have a connection also with the fact that I'm working through how this gospel applies to my life.
Speaker 2:I haven't figured it out, love that what's your favorite season of the year to preach?
Speaker 3:Ooh man, I mean Advent is like the most condensed. It's so short but you have all the themes of conversion and beginning and the nativity and the family and yeah, you have so much in Advent. And the readings are like all of the most classic readings at mass and so when you sit down to preach, I was walking with one of the newly ordained the other day he was we're at a mass together and he was preaching and we're in the sacristy and he's like father, I don't know what to preach because everything in the readings is awesome. I'm like welcome to Advent, like everything in Advent is awesome. So that's my favorite, because you just never know where the Holy Spirit's gonna invite you to go and you can open up the rest of it's the beginning of the liturgical year. You know Advent starts our new year and so you can help people begin again every Advent and, yeah, just invite a reset and a willingness to move into all the Lord has and something new as Christ is born again in our hearts. So, yeah, I would say Advent.
Speaker 2:I love that. Is there a particular feast day or saint day that you look forward to preaching on, also each year?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, it's become the Feast of St John, the Beloved Feast of St John the Beloved St.
Speaker 3:John the Beloved, or John the Evangelist, john the Apostle. I just I've been praying a lot with the fact that St John is at the foot of the cross and Jesus, knowing the church is gonna need our lady, need a mother, entrusts her to St John and the text says he took her into his home from that moment forward. So St John is a priest who learned how to be a priest by living with Mary and learning how to serve Mary and to be around this most beautiful woman, blessed among all what it means to be a man around the gift of the perpetual virgin, the mother of the church. How to live with Mary has been a theme of my prayer. So when it comes to St John, that's my favorite feast right now. It's my name as well, but, like the feast of St John the Beloved or John the Apostle is my favorite because we have got to learn how to live with Mary and let Mary draw our hearts out, which is what she does for St John in the home at Ephesus, I'm sure, I'm convinced.
Speaker 2:How. I'm guessing you have a devotion to our Blessed Mother. How did that first take root in your life and what has been the what is? Could you describe your relationship with her for us?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think watching my mother always had great devotion. She'd always have like a little fresh flower in front of our Marian statue or we'd pray the rosary in the car, which I don't know if you guys growing up, if this was a thing you did, I hated it as a kid. Just being honest, anytime we had a drive that was more than 15 minutes long we would pull out the rosary. So we'd have like we would know we'd be going to like Uncle Mike's or, you know, aunt Colleen's house and if it's a 20 minute plus drive we would all be like trying to make conversation fill the air. So mom wouldn't pull the rosary out because we just did not want to pray the rosary. But it was habitual, we knew it was coming and it taught us to pray and have a relationship with Mary.
Speaker 3:I would say my relationship with Mary at the level of the heart did not come alive until seminary when I realized that I was going to be I was not going to marry. I thought I was going to be married and have a wife and children, but I said it wasn't going to be a woman in my life who I would hold in my arms and share life with materially. But I knew my heart was still made for woman, because I'm a man and we are complimentary and it's not good for the man to be alone. So I just started to look at Mary and say, Mary, there's going to be a bunch of gaps in my heart. If I don't let these places come into the light, I will end up an unhealthy priest. Would you, would you be the woman to my heart? Would you teach me what it is to be a man who's unafraid of being a man, who's also chaste and celibate but is in love? Because I want to be a priest who's in love with a bride, with the church, and Mary puts a face to that.
Speaker 3:So I realized even in seminary, if I'm going to fall in love with the church and serve the church as a bride, as the church wants to be served, I'm going to need Mary to show me how to do that. So I began entrusting my seminary years to her and then my priesthood's. Why I wear a ring. I consecrated my ring to Our Lady and I just said teach me to be a spouse of the church by being, as it were, your spouse or treating you like my bride, so that I'm not a single dad. I'm not a man living alone with a dried up heart that's bitter and resentful. So it's grown over the years and she's taught me how to stay in love and treat the church as a woman, as a bride who I don't hold in my arms the way that a man holds his wife in his arms but I strive to serve the church the way that I would serve her if she were my spouse.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful, father. Wow, when it comes to preaching, what's at stake? What's at stake if we get the message right, if priests and lay people kind of pour their heart into this particular call, how will they believe? We can't believe if we don't hear. And so what's at stake? What do we stand to gain as a church if we get it right? What do we stand to lose if we miss it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, when it comes to preaching, teaching, proclaiming the gospel, I just always go back to what we see at the beginning in the early church, like in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter and when Paul are preaching and the audience, the receivers, are caught to the heart, or thousands that day return or give their lives to the Lord. What's at stake is conversion, properly speaking, like the choice of every heart to be for God or to come out of the ways that they are against God. It's prayer and study and the sacramental life are all going to be instruments of conversion. But in preaching you are taking the fruits of your own prayer and the context of the liturgy and the sacraments and applying it to the heart and often making an invitation to that heart. So what's at stake is the conversion, the desire of God to bring souls into relationship with him, and so to be about the work of preaching and to be about the work of receiving the contents of the preaching. We just have to look at the early church and notice like the early church exploded because the apostles had received the Holy Spirit and were so on fire they couldn't help but talk about the God they'd come to know who was different from all the gods they used to know.
Speaker 3:And the way they talked about God was so attractive that the audience was like, okay, I'm gonna have to change my life, I'm gonna have to give up these other false gods.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna have to live a life that is not as comfortable, maybe, as I wanted before, but I see in you a fire and I want that fire. I want to welcome that. So what's at stake is an opening to the Holy Spirit, is the falling of the Spirit in the preaching, the proclamation of Christ living dead, risen, glorified. I mean everything is at stake the expansion of the church and, again, conversion of souls, the fire of the Spirit that's meant to go out and is not currently going out the way that it's meant to. So everything's at stake because if we preach well and we receive what's preached well, we worship well, we return to the Lord and we receive what God's trying to give us through the sacramental economy, and then nothing can limit what God would do across the face of the earth, because this church is the one church that is for all of humanity and the preacher is the one who's trying to show that to the world and invite the world into that.
Speaker 2:Amen. You know, I was even struck by our gospel yesterday at how the proclamation began with the shepherds and even Mary was preached to, and so there were four or five mentions of a message going out even in those first moments and I don't think I had noticed that before and I think doing this podcast has helped me see things through kind of a preaching lens. I have a great hope that we're in a season of renewal in preaching. Do you carry a similar hope, or what is the possibility that's before us in our church today as it relates to preaching?
Speaker 3:I mean I like to use the image of seeds and the Lord is the sower. He uses the parable of the sower, he's the sower of the good word. The word is sown in our hearts, as Justin Martyr and all these great early church saints talked about. But when you have a seed and you look at just when you take, like an apple seed I don't know if there's fruit in the lunches today, but you look at an apple seed, an orange seed, and you just hold that seed up, you're like, okay, this seed right now is dormant, it's just there, kind of appears to be dead. If I give this seed what it needs, if I plant it in the soil, if I water it, if I protect it from the elements, it is going to grow into a tree or a plant that bears fruit, that feeds the nations and spreads out that fruit in the form of new plants and trees. The word of God is the seed and preaching is like helping the Lord put that seed out there into the hearts of the people and at times even with the Lord watering that seed or pressing it down into the soil of the heart, with the Lord watering that seed or pressing it down into the soil of the heart. So what's at stake again to that other question, but also like what enables or empowers a renewal in preaching is the conviction that it is not about us finding the right framework or the right strategy, or even the right words necessarily. It's about our believing that the word of God is living and true, is alive. When we proclaim it in the scriptures and when we expand upon it in preaching, we are gently pressing that down to the hearts of the believers and the life principle is in that seed. It's not mine to awaken or arouse the life of that seed. It is God's work and as a preacher, to believe that the scripture and its proclamation have an effect in the open hearts, that takes a lot of pressure off. But it's also like Lord, if you're always sowing seeds, if you're always bringing the word out into the hearts of the church, you also always want fruit. 60, 80, and a hundredfold.
Speaker 3:So how can I get to know you in my prayer enough, lord, that I realize every time you invite me to open my mouth to proclaim the scripture or to preach on the scripture, you have a desire that that seed would bear fruit in the hearts of the listeners, the audience, those who go forth, and they would in turn take that seed into the hearts of their families, their communities, their peers.
Speaker 3:This becomes a work of God that we have inhibited or curbed by either getting in the way or being afraid to be bold, or being afraid to trust our prayer, and we've bound our preaching and bound our teaching to strategies and methods and ideas and ideologies and kind of framed the power of the word.
Speaker 3:If we let that frame go, if we pronounce our hold on it and then, out of our prayer, we just actually believe what God says is true, that the word is alive, it's living and true, and we are invited to be proclaimers of that word, then we get to say, okay, now, lord, show me how to wrap that word in the invitation, in the pathos, in the fire, the love, the zeal, the relationship, the follow-up, all the things that need to be the water and the wind and the protection. But the word itself is yours. And if that mindset comes to reign in the hearts of the audience, the listeners, the assembly and the preachers, there is again no limit to what preaching and the proclamation of the word will do, and that's what we see in scripture, in the Acts of the Apostles.
Speaker 2:Amen. Before we close, I want to ask you a couple of questions about something that I know is near and dear to your heart and even in the last few years, has has taken on more of kind of, more of your heart and more of the mission that God has for you in the world and and that's the friends of the bridegroom this desire that you have and others for the healing, the renewal and the expansion of women's religious life here and around the world. I want to hear a little bit about that, but I also think that their life, their particular call, proclaims a powerful, irreplaceable message. What is that message that women's religious uniquely proclaims to the world?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you for that question. This is the deepest thing in my heart. You're asking about it before the podcast and I literally started to choke up because it's such a deep fire in my heart. I am convinced that the church without consecrated women is always sick and atrophied and drying up and curved and is missing something essential that we often, in their absence, don't notice is gone. So in my own journey growing up in the seminary and before that, I didn't really have women religious in my life. I didn't see consecrated women very much in my archdiocese. It just wasn't a part of the story.
Speaker 3:When I went to seminary, my second round, when I went over to theology in Rome and I was around a lot of sisters, I noticed in my heart as a man and as a man preparing for the priesthood, something come to life in me because of these sisters and I realized I wanted to serve them. I wanted to understand what the priesthood is. I wanted to bring them into the lives of my friends, my lay friends, my brother seminarians, my brother priests, and I realized that had not been a part of my life, my whole story. So I've been watching the church in places where we don't have consecrated women and noticing without them something's missing and I can feel the ache and I think the church we all know like the church is being renewed and is missing something really important. We can feel like something's off and that the language that's come to me lately is like the church without consecrated women is like a family without a mother. It's the way one of our lay supporters put it recently when you don't have a mother and a family, everything just feels like it's missing and the priesthood is the father. Right In the parish we're spiritual fathers. You call me father for that reason. Ideally, please got to be a good father. But father is father best when they're able to love the children because they love their spouse, their men in love, and marriage is drawing their hearts into the life of service and education and rearing that fatherhood requires.
Speaker 3:When you take the spiritual mother out of the local church, the idea of that becomes very abstract and I think the church has been living in an abstracted idea of spiritual motherhood, of Mary, of Our Lady, for a long time. Even Mary, like we're talking about Mary before, without the image of Mary, we end up with an image of Our Lady or the kind of stuck in stone and paint. We have icons of Our Lady in our churches, but the consecrated woman is a living icon and she preaches to your question. By her existence, by her consecration and by the way she ministers. She proclaims Mary and the church as bride in the midst of the local church. And the local church is not going to understand that on her own. She needs to see that live in the way that God has intended that it would be lived, and that's a compliment to the Dastan priesthood and to the religious priesthood.
Speaker 3:Men and women consecrated are a supernatural fulfillment of men and women, lay men and women who are called to live together. And so we've been lately the Friends of the Bridegroom. The language we're using is restoring the family of God. The church is a family Marriage and family shows us that in an imminent fashion. The priesthood shows us that in an eschatological, we point out the heavenly marriage. But religious and consecrated women do the other half of that, pointing out. They show us the bride, they show us our lady, they do the other half of that, pointing out. They show us the bride, they show us our lady, they show us the wedding feast in a feminine way. And if you don't have the feminine way alongside the masculine. That's all abstract theology. And then we become a mechanistic, functional church and priests become functionaries and are kind of reduced to their functionaries and duties and they fall out of love.
Speaker 3:So the renewal of religious life, helping communities to heal, helping them to grow, helping families to talk about vocations again for young women, even if they maybe haven't seen sisters, that's like at the baseline of what Friends of the Bridegroom is trying to do.
Speaker 3:But through that it's also to heal the priesthood, so that priests can be men in love with the church and can be unafraid of asking for help and can see an icon of the bride, an icon of Mary. So through serving religious and consecrated women they can understand better what it means to serve the parish and the church in a spousal mode which helps them want to be good fathers because they're in love with the bride. So it's a high level theoretical and theological endeavor. But I believe it's a renewal that we've not seen and I think it's tied to JP2's theology the body. It's tied to our biology and our theology and our eschatology especially. And if we don't take that to mind, all the best models of renewal and all the best programs and the videos and the books. They're going to take us so far, but there's still going to be strategies that are absent robust theology and especially like a horizon-oriented desire to bring heaven here and help us, in the midst of the earth, long for the heaven that is there.
Speaker 2:Amen, amen. Thank you so much for being here, father, and telling us about the. I don't think I've heard it spoken how crucial it is that a priest be in love, a priest on fire, a priest in love. You exemplify that. You point us in that direction. I think it's Friday. Is it Friday? You're giving a talk, an impact session here. Could you give us just a quick direction? I think it's Friday. Is it Friday? You're giving a talk, an impact session here. Could you give us just a quick preview? I think it's 3.30, january 3rd, 2.55, room 2.55,. If people want to check it out, you tell us a little bit about that talk.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm going to speak on the father because I'm learning about the fathers, I'm trying to be a good father and I'm going to speak. Bishop Muggenberg, this morning in the homily, talked about this too, but about the fact that we listen to a lot of voices today, the voice of the world, the voice of the enemy, and it's hard to hear the first voice, which is the voice of our father speaking over us in the womb, in the womb of our mothers, in the womb of the church, in baptism, and telling us what's actually true. And because we fail to notice that's there as a foundation. We listen to lots of other voices, the voices of our peers, our friends, even our loved ones, our enemies, and we let those voices define us and we take our identity from the world, which is a confusing voice, and in that trap we're not free.
Speaker 3:Jesus says the truth will set you free. When we don't have the truth, we're not free. If we're not living according to the truth, we're bound. So it's about the truth of the Father and what it means to come out of the bondage of untruth and really let the Father speak over. So I'm going to lead a guided meditation into just receiving the voice of the Father and really try to guide a prayer experience so that in real time we can welcome that voice and the beautiful gift of a father who's been trying to speak to us from the beginning of our existence. But we've let that voice be crowded out by the distractions and the agitations of the world and the enemy.
Speaker 2:Amen. So that's Friday, January 3rd, 3.30 pm, room 255. I hope folks will check it out. Where can people connect with you online? And also the Friends of the Bridegroom.
Speaker 3:Yes, our website renewreligiousorg.
Speaker 2:Renewreligiousorg.
Speaker 3:That's where Friends of the Bridegroom is, where we're inviting lay people and priests, ancestors, to connect and just do something about the need to renew the church through the renewal of religious life in their communities, in their parishes, in their families, in their diocese. And then I'm on Instagram, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter at Father John Burns. I would say I'm like a passive user of social media. I'm there but I don't do too much active posting. But, yeah, find us at RenewReligiousorg, especially Sounds great Sounds great.
Speaker 2:Father, thanks so much for being here. It's been a joy and an honor.
Speaker 3:Yeah, ryan, everybody, it's great to be with you. Thanks so much, blessings and joy.
Speaker 1:Awesome to be with you. Thanks so much Blessings and joy. Awesome Thanks, father. Thanks for listening to this episode recorded live at SEEK. Miss the conference or want to relive your favorite moments? Seek Replay has you covered Access, powerful keynotes, inspiring talks and exclusive content to take your faith deeper, anytime, anywhere. Head to seekfocusorg backslash replay to download now and don't forget to join us for Seek 26. Check out seekfocusorg for more information and to register.
