In defense of chewing in public
Nobody has ever accused me of being a great preacher. That’s fine. I’m not writing about preaching. I’m writing about what preaching replaced.
The word we now use for the short sermon—homily—did not originally mean a polished talk delivered from altitude to a silent crowd below. The Greek homilia meant conversation. Discourse. Company. Fellowship. It comes from homilein: to be with, to keep company with, to talk among. A homily was not a performance. It was a meal with talking in it. It was people chewing on something together—a text, a question, a trouble, a wonder—each mouth working the same bone until it gave up its marrow or honestly admitted it wouldn’t.
Somewhere along the centuries, the homily lost its table. It got moved to the pulpit, the pulpit got turned to face a congregation instead of a company, and the congregation’s mouth was reassigned: for eating, not speaking. One licensed voice, at the approved hour, in the approved cadence, delivers meaning to the laypeople rather than making meaning with them.
I want to argue that this little liturgical demotion was not a small thing. I think it was a load-bearing wall in a much larger architecture—and I think the church is the clearest case of a pattern that runs through nearly every institution we have.
The License to Make Meaning
Here is the pattern: every system that wants to endure must control change. And the cheapest way to control change is not to forbid it—forbidding it makes martyrs—but to license it. Change may enter the room, but only through the approved door, in the approved voice, wearing the approved collar.
The pulpit homily is exactly this. Meaning-making was not abolished; it was professionalized. The laity were not forbidden to think—heavens, no, thinking was praised from the pulpit every Sunday. They were forbidden to think aloud, together, in church. The one place and hour where the community made its meaning was captured, and a single speaker was installed at the choke point.
Look at the structure of the traditional sermon and you’ll notice it does three things at once, and the three are really one:
It locates authority in one voice.
It defines disagreement as unfaithfulness.
It presents every question as already answered—the sermon’s job is application, not exploration.
Notice what is structurally absent: the possibility that the speaker might be wrong and the congregation might correct them. It is not absent as a doctrine—even popes have admitted error, in principle, on paper, later—but it is absent as a format. The liturgical form itself has no slot for it. You cannot have a homily in the original sense—real conversation, real company—in a room where one man’s mouth does all the chewing.
Chewing as a Discipline
I have a private word for what the original homily was. I call it chewing.
Chewing is what you do with something that resists. You don’t swallow a text whole—that’s not reading, that’s gavage. You don’t spit it out at the first tough gristle—that’s not discernment, that’s appetite. You put it in your mouth, and you work it, honestly, patiently, until one of two things happens: it yields meaning, or it honestly yields nothing, and you say so out loud and spit it out with your dignity intact.
Two things about chewing matter here.
First: chewing cannot be done alone. Well—it can, the way rumination can, but solitary chewing goes in circles. It takes a second set of teeth to break what one set can’t, and—more importantly—a second tongue to tell you when what you’re tasting isn’t what you think it is. A person who only ever chews alone eventually can’t tell marrow from their jaw ache. The community isn’t the audience of chewing. The community is one of the jaws.
Second: meaning is not in the thing being chewed. It emerges from the chewing. This is, I admit, a theological claim, and I’ll make it plainly: I do not believe meaning is a substance hidden in the world, waiting to be extracted like a splinter. I believe meaning is made—made in company, made in the collision of honest attention, made the way broth is made: nothing but time, heat, and things rubbing against each other until what wasn’t there before is. If that’s true, then the polished monologue is not just a boring format. It is a category error. It presents the finished product as if the process were optional. It hands you pre-chewed meaning and calls that a meal.
The Pollution Reflex
Now the harder part.
When the chewing format is restored—when meaning-making is unlicensed and the laity’s mouths come back to the table—something predictable happens in the room, and it is not argument. It is a flinch.
The people who are uncomfortable do not rise with refutations. They experience a feeling—a shudder, a tightness, a strong intuition that something improper is happening and ought to be stopped. They reach for words like “irreverent,” “unsersious,” or, as we might say today, cringe. And the feeling arrives so fast, so whole, so pre-loaded with certainty, that they reasonably mistake it for a judgment. It isn’t. It’s older than any judgment they own.
We know this reflex well from history, because it used to wear a costume: the witch. The witch of the medieval imagination was not, on inspection, a wicked person. She was a counter-priest—an inverted mass, a covenant run backwards, magic without a license. The crime was never the magical act; the priests did magic at the altar every morning with full approval. The crime was doing it outside the license. And the people who burned her were not answering her argument, because she wasn’t making one. They were defending a boundary—the boundary that says meaning and transformation flow from the center to the edge, and never the other way.
Here is the uncomfortable observation: modernity killed the theology and kept the reflex. Nobody in your life says “witch.” But watch what happens when someone makes meaning outside the license—revises a liturgy, rewrites a tradition, loves across a boundary nobody approved, and claims the wrong kind of authority over their life. It is the same shudder. Only the vocabulary has been dry-cleaned. “Cringe” is what ritual impurity feels like in a people with no rituals left.
You also can’t dispute the flinch. Since there is no evidence to support it, it cannot be disproved. Habituation, or prolonged, non-threatening exposure to the anomaly until it becomes furniture, is the only known treatment. Every boundary-crossing love that a culture has ever absorbed was first witchcraft and then a Tuesday. The feeling doesn’t get refuted. It simply fades away.
The Table, Restored
So what do we do with the flinch?
Not evangelism. The flinch cannot be preached to, and preaching at the unflinched mostly just proves their point—force, even rhetorical force, confirms that the boundary needed defending. Not argument, which feeds the reflex by giving it the combat it was built for.
The oldest method, and the slowest, and the only one that works: witness. Set the table in full view. Chew in public. Let the process be observed, including the bones that failed, the positions that were changed, and the times when it was just “huh, tougher than I thought.” The chewing itself is a meal, not the polished outcome, which is an exhibit. The exhibit is either praised or criticized. People ask if there is space at the table after the meal.
That is what this space is. Not a new departure—a continuation. For a long time, Opthē has been chewing in public behind more articles than I can remember. This table is just positioned a bit closer to the street so that onlookers can observe the meal being prepared. I am not your licensed mouth, and I have been wrong here in daylight, regularly, on the record, for years. Some posts crack a bone and find marrow. Some just gnaw and admit it. They’re both published. The comments are the second set of teeth, not a question box at the bottom of a stage, and that’s how I plan to use them—chewing back, receiving corrections, and making revisions.
Since a people who chew together cannot be told what to swallow, I think the original homily—conversation, company, meaning made together rather than delivered apart—is one of the oldest human disciplines. The institutions purposefully forgot it.
Take a seat. Bring your teeth.