This series originally appeared on Pray Tell: Worship, Wit & Wisdom, sponsored by the Obsculta Preaching Initiative at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary (Collegeville, MN).
Used with permission.

The ritual of the Christian east is a constellation of sensory cues designed to communicate meaning to the community assembled for worship. If contemporary eastern Christianity is unique in this, it is not in kind, but in degree. So it is, when one enters a typical church, she is surrounded by shimmering gold leaf and vivid color coalescing into the forms of angelic powers, saints, Mary, Jesus Christ, in portrait and narrative. The phenomena of light and shadow, central and liminal spaces. Smell and sound envelop the worshipper. Chant and movement surround her. All this together communicates the presence of heavenly worship not at a remove, neither memorialized nor anticipated, but here and now. This multisensory marvel weaves its entrancing tapestry from opening blessing, through psalms and procession, to intoned scripture lessons, then the Gospel is replaced on the altar—

—and it comes to a screeching halt.

Father is going to say a few words.

Gone is the impressionistic, multimedia, synaesthetic communication of the sacred arts; now for something completely different. A theological lecture, perhaps? Maybe an extended Bible study? How about a moralizing exhortation touching on the day’s readings or the week’s news? Whatever the genre, all too commonly we find the homily to be, at best, a pause; at worst, an interruption of the liturgy. (In the Orthodox Christian tradition, there is no distinction between the terms sermon and homily; preacher and homilist: we use them interchangeably, and I will do so in this series.) There are technical and theoretical symptoms rising from this incongruence, many of which can benefit from the interventions of the New Homiletic. For this series, however, I would like to explore what the liturgical arts accomplish, so we may understand the root difference between them and the kind of preaching that rudely cuts them off. To do that, it is helpful to consider the theology behind sacred visual art.

Iconoclasm was initially an eastern problem. Despite early Christians’ sometimes ambivalent attitudes toward portraiture (they seem to have been almost universally fine with narrative imagery), there was no serious or systematic call for image destruction until the eighth century. At that time, John of Damascus wrote a defense of the use and veneration of images, imperial policy changed, the matter ebbed. The issue then rose again in the ninth century, and this time Theodore, abbot of the urban “Stoudion” monastery in then-Constantinople, expanded on John’s writings. Their apologetics contained a crucial argument: the image offers a real encounter with the one depicted. One way this is described is through the likeness. The likeness of the subject is impressed in the mind of the artist like a seal in wax. Every human has a likeness, and that likeness can be conveyed through an image. The image could be composed in any kind of medium, but it is the likeness within the image that is significant. The artist, in turn, impresses the seal of the likeness into the image. When someone then sees that image, it is that likeness contained in the image that bears the mind of the viewer to the prototype. Thus, for Theodore, when someone venerates an image, he is not venerating the medium but, because of the likeness in the image, he venerates the prototype. This is why he can say that he does not honor paint and wood, but Jesus Christ, whose likeness is conveyed via paint and wood.

The point of the image is encounter. This sacred art is meant not merely to instruct the faithful (pace Gregory the Great), but it facilitates communion. This is true of all the liturgical arts—they are all forming an encompassing, diachronic and synchronic image of heavenly worship. Through that image, these arts convey the likeness of this timeless worship to the assembly who experience it as something true and participable here, now. It may not surprise us to learn that homilies preached in the premodern world that gave us this tapestry could also function iconographically, which is the subject of the next part.

Preachers in the East Roman world (so-called “Byzantines,” a term they never used of themselves) inherited a rhetorical practice rooted in the classical tradition. Among the engaging techniques developed in this tradition was ekphrasis. For those familiar with this term who are not students of historical rhetoric, the word likely evokes the empirical description of an art object’s appearance. For the pre-modern rhetor, however, ekphrasis was less a way of describing than a way of communicating his or her experience of what was described. This included description of the sensory experience of an artwork or building, certainly. But it also incorporated sensory detail evoked by, but not physically present in, the object. It also expressed the affective dimension of the rhetor’s experience—awe, joy, sorrow. The more vivid, clear detail, the better. The goal was to create in the hearer a secondary experience of the speaker’s own.

The earliest ekphrasis of art in this lineage was the description of Achilles’s shield in the Illiad of Homer. In the midst of an epic poem about war’s all-pervasive harm, Homer gives us a lengthy ekphrasis of an artwork that could never have existed as described. The ekphrasis is full of sight, of course, but also sound, emotion, and all the complexity of life in this world of stars, celebrations, fields, and oceans depicted on the shield. There is war, just as is foregrounded throughout his poem, but it is a small part of the whole of human life and the cosmos. This catastrophe, all-encompassing for the poem’s characters, is contextualized by divine artwork. It is not the whole story of the human experience; justice and harmony reign elsewhere.

Another example comes from Philostratus’s third century CE Images, which describes a series of paintings in a private gallery. He provides vivid detail, filling in the compositions, including sound and smell alongside the visual. The point of ekphrasis is not to provide “objective” information about an appearance. In fact, in another example, a city might bring an orator to portray that city to its own citizens. Amidst the very buildings being described, the speaker would help the denizens to view their own environment anew, with fresh import accomplished by that sense of defamiliarization an outsider’s interpretation gives to the ordinary.

But, it would be a mistake to think that ekphrasis was limited to physical objects. Historical events were a common subject of ekphrasis, and the rhetor was expected to transport his or her hearers to the actions described, to witness them unfolding before their very eyes. All these antique techniques were present in the homilies of East Roman preachers educated in classical rhetorical performance, enlivening images, sacred spaces, and biblical narratives.

Remarkable for our purposes is the theory of memory described in rhetorical instruction. A rhetor’s memory was described as a wax tablet, and the experience as a seal impressed in that wax. Capable rhetors would use ekphrasis to impress the same seal into the wax tablet of the hearers’ minds. The effectiveness was dependent on the vivid clarity of the description. While neither iconologists nor rhetoricians expressed an awareness of the identical language in the East Roman world, we can see the same mechanics present in the media of both image and speech. If the likeness of a prototype could inhere in the medium of paint, for rhetoricians it could inhere in the spoken description. This means that preaching itself could mediate the same encounter with the prototype as the image did, by conveying the likeness of the prototype to the hearer. In pre-modern homilies that use ekphrasis, such an encounter was indeed the goal.

In the final post I will present a homily that exemplifies this iconographic preaching. This is but one demonstration of the homily’s capacity to bring the hearer into a real encounter with the time, place, and people of the commemorated events. It works naturally with the other liturgical arts because it is acting as liturgical art. It is not an interruption of the liturgy but is woven into the sensory and affective tapestry of worship: one that reveals an icon of Jesus Christ, and facilitates a real encounter with him.

Preaching as Real Encounter: Part III

What does iconographic preaching look like? If physical images can bear a person’s likeness, which brings the viewer to that prototype; and if ekphrasis can do precisely the same thing, how is this accomplished? Certainly, there are techniques of description, narrative, affective modeling–all of which were present in pre-modern preaching, and which feature in the New Homiletic. Rather than tell, however, it seems appropriate to this theme that I instead show with an example. For this purpose, I have selected a homily that reveals a seventh century community at Sinai to be, in fact, present with the disciples on Mt. Tabor, overawed by Jesus Christ’s transfigured glory.

Anastasios, a monk of the monastic community at Sinai, preached a homily for the monks and pilgrims present on the feast of the transfiguration. Since the 1960s there has been debate on where this homily was delivered–Sinai, or the traditional location of the transfiguration, Tabor? Much of the argument centered on how Anastasios talks about where he and his hearers are, but it quickly becomes confusing as he contradicts himself throughout. He refers to a mountain peak above, but later claims to be on top of the mountain peak. In one passage he describes their location with rich detail as Sinai; in another, he vividly places them on Tabor. For anyone trying to figure out where they were when celebrating this feast, it is highly confusing! That is, until we realize that Anastasios’s homily was doing with words what the Sinai mural immediately above him was doing with color.

The apse mosaics in the basilica at Sinai include an upper zone with images of the prophet Moses at the burning bush untying his sandals, and another with him in the cleft of the rock while also receiving the tablets of the Torah. This is all to be expected as the locations of these scenes are nearby. But what may seem at first out of place is the composition in the semidome of the apse–it is a scene of the transfiguration of Jesus Christ. Christ himself is centered, in dazzling white, flanked by the prophets Moses and Elijah. The three disciples who accompanied Christ, Peter, James, and John, have fallen to the ground. There is no mountain visible, only a verdant band, because the viewer in the basilica is understood to be on top of the mountain with the disciples. The mosaics fold together the place of Tabor and the place of Sinai, and the homily Anastasios preaches works symphonically with them. He calls all present at Sinai to ascend Tabor, to enter the bright cloud, to witness the light of Christ and be transfigured with him.

Preaching in concert with this mural, Anastasios identifies the community’s ritual location. He does not say to them in didactic, lecturing tones, “We are anamnetically situated both at Sinai and Tabor, because both participate in the same divine reality.” Rather, Anastasios has vividly depicted this trans-geographical place; he has revealed the real location of their festival to those present by showing it to them in brilliant color. They are on Sinai, they are on Tabor, in fact they are on every mountain which figured in divine revelation (he provides a lengthy catalogue!). They have, through icon and homily and ritual celebration, come to a real encounter with the transfigured Christ.

Anastasios and other homilists of this time dramatically paint with their homilies in language more poetic than analytic. They bring the minds of their hearers to the events commemorated: to the very place and time. And their concrete language leaves no doubt that these are not simply pious meditations. For these preachers, the liturgical celebration with its ritual of anamnesis has, in fact, made them participants in the vision of Christ’s divine light. Our ritual even today, with its art, movement, and hymnody brings us into the same real participation. If we will, our own preaching can poetically integrate with the rest of our liturgical arts. We can preach verbal iconography that brings us and our hearers into a true encounter with Jesus Christ.

FEBRUARY 2025

Lucas Lynn Christensen is a doctoral candidate in Theology at the University of Notre Dame with a concentration in Liturgical Studies specializing in sacred arts: homiletics, architecture, and iconography. He is graduate research fellow on the Templeton Religion Trust project: “Assessing the Impact of Sacred Art on Individual Experience, Memory, and Spiritual Understanding;” he also serves as Assistant Director of the Compelling Preaching Initiative program at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. His publications include, “The Deifying Sacrifice: Thysia in the Eucharistic Prayers of Byzantine Basil,” and the forthcoming, “The Church as Type and Image: Maximos the Confessor’s Ecclesiastical Mystagogy in Light of Carthaginian Church Architectunre.” Lucas is a priest of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (Ecumenical Patriarchate) and lives in South Bend, Indiana with his wife and children.