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I or most priests and deacons can read the Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom (or St. John's homily included in the Trebnik for Holy Thursday) aloud to the congregation in less than 20 minutes. I am not sure of your point; my homiletics teacher was excellent (and an excellent homilist as a parish priest himself), and there is nothing wrong with getting prospective homilists to work within a reasonable timeframe.

Diak,

Some of St. John's homilies run to twenty or more densely written pages. Whether he delivered them as written is debatable, but in fact all the sources indicate that homilies in the patristic era tended to be much longer than we today would think appropriate. Understand, in late antiquity, rhetoric was a form of entertainment, and people would flock to hear the great rhetors speak. Chrysostom was no exception--not only did his congregations pack the church to hear him, they would constantly interrupt him with cheers and applause. He wrote a stern homily against such a lack of decorum in church--it was so good, the congregation gave him a standing ovation/

This was always a good conversation among the other men in homiletics class: we look at the homily today and then think of the content, length, and theological style of the homilies of St. Augustine or St. John Chrysostom which can be found in our Ordinary Form breviary.

Part of the art of homiletics, I'm discovering, is taking the timeless and orthodox teaching of the Church and giving it to the people of and in 2009. I cannot do what John Chrysostom did: I am not John Chrysostom nor is the congregation made up of fourth century Constantinopolitans.

In going back to old newspaper accounts of the nineteenth century, one could read how halls were packed to hear a lecture of some subject, which would last for hours on end. This simply doesn't happen anymore. As our rector constantly says, "Gentlemen, would the days today be as such, but alas they are not."

Jon makes some excellent points, and as those entrusted with the care of souls we need to take to heed of what is the best for imparting the faith to our flocks rather than a need for standing ovations every sermon and subjective interpretations of the patristic corpus. We indeed are not Chrysostoms, nor are we in the fourth century nor do we enjoy the cultural Christianity of patristic times.

With all due respect for StuartK's personal interpretation, like it or not those are the form we have many of St. John's sermons currently. Again, the form of the Paschal Homily, the Holy Thursday Holy as well as others (such as the Nativity Homily) as we have them to be used liturgically can indeed all be read in twenty minutes or less. These are included in various Trebnyky and Euchalogia which have been around for centuries. For example the particular one I use for Holy Thursday is about a page and a quarter, came from a book originally printed at the Monastery of the Caves, and I do not realistically think the original monastic editors had any concern about length of homily when producing that volume and including the homily, nor knowing Eastern monastics would have tampered much with the words of St. John.

In any case I will respectfully take the counsel of ones who have spent their lives in the care and fostering of souls such as Metropolitan Ilarion (and my homiletics teacher, for that matter) regarding the proprieties of preaching to the flock. I remember a talk from Archbishop Kallistos (Ware) where he noted that he was grateful that as an Orthodox priest (later bishop) he was able to preach "for less time and with more meaning" then the extended Anglican sermons of his upbringing.

Festal homilies, delivered in the course of a long night of liturgical services (remember, in Chrysostom's time, it would not be unusual to spend eight continuous hours in church for Pascha) were usually short and pithy. Everything that needed to be said had already been said in the course of the liturgies themselves.

Chrysostom's ordinary homilies are of a very different nature. Take, for instance, Homily 19 on 1 Corinthians 7: it runs to 20 pages (single spaced, small print) in the SVS collection called "St. John Chrysostom on Marriage and the Family". Homily 20 on Ephesians 5:22-33 in the same collection runs 21 pages. Homily 21 on Ephesians 6:1-4 is a relatively brief 8 pages. We could probably go through the full collection of Chrysostom homilies and average them out, but I would say he tended to run more than 15-20 minutes as a rule--except on festal days.