When I was a kid, my favorite part about going to church was the homily.
While the rest of Mass was a patchwork of Bible stories, songs and the kneeling, standing and sitting calisthenics of a Catholic Sunday morning, the homily was always new. It was different. It had a real message. It spoke to you if you let it.
A priest once brought in a fishing pole and a bucket of trout to drive home a lesson about kindness and expectations. Another was a Pittsburgh sports enthusiast who baptized my sister while he wore a Penguins sweater under his vestments. His homilies often had a message grounded in football metaphors. I think about him a lot when I invoke the Steelers in editorials.
The point of any sermon is to teach and to encourage or exhort. Sometimes the lessons are stern. Sometimes they are gentle. They are always present.
That is why the reaction of President Donald Trump to the Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at Tuesday’s National Prayer Breakfast confuses me.
Budde, who has been Washington’s bishop since 2011, took the opportunity to give a word of kind, gentle advice.
“Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said.
Trump indicated his displeasure later at the White House to reporters, then doubled down on social media, saying Budde “brought her church in to the world of politics” and that she was “nasty in tone.”
If anyone thought the incredibly mild-mannered bishop was in any way harsh, be assured that one spelling class with a 6-foot-tall nun wielding a ruler would kill that person dead.
But the reaction makes me wonder if it was, indeed, the first sermon Trump has ever heard. Does he believe they are all teeth and not hope?
“Give him a cool head and a warm heart,” the Rev. Billy Graham prayed for Richard Nixon in 1969.
“Forgive us for choosing pride over purpose,” Pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell prayed for George W. Bush in 2001.
“Trouble is real, and whether we like it or not, we are in this mess together as a nation,” the Rev. William J. Barber II prayed for Joe Biden in 2021.
Graham was not attacking Nixon, nor Caldwell attacking Bush, nor Barber attacking Biden. Neither was Budde attacking Trump.
Every president wields the potential for unspeakable power. It is critical that anyone with power — whether a politician, teacher, doctor, police officer or someone else in authority — be reminded that power lies not just in using strength but showing compassion. Is there anyone more qualified to give that reminder than a member of the clergy?
The gift of a homily is the way it lingers in the nooks and crannies of the head and the heart. It’s like a melody that comes to you in little snatches of notes when you aren’t thinking about it but when you need it most.
I think I was in third grade when Father Mike brought that bucket of fish into church. I don’t remember the words. I still remember the lesson.
