Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

We should never seek our final security in the things that worldly rulers and kings can provide. It is only through the shepherding of Christ that we find our way to good pasture.

If you walk the path of the prophet, you will abandon your own "career" and learn to follow the promptings of the Spirit. Also, you will be opposed. Once you accept and internalize those two lessons, you are ready to be a bearer of God's word.

The Eucharist is the holy meal that God wants to share with his people. It is also the sacrifice that makes that meal possible in the midst of a fallen world. To understand the eucharist, we have to keep these two dimensions in mind.

The Trinity is not simply a theological connundrum for scholars to fuss about. It stands at the very heart of our faith, since it expresses the fact that God is love. Our whole salvation depends on this great truth.

The Ascension of the Lord empowers the Church to fulfill its messianic mission: to gather the nations of the world into a relationship with the God of Israel.

The image of the vine and the branches indicates that our relationship with Christ is greater than that of merely a teacher to his students. Instead, we are related to him on all levels of our existence because Christ is the eternal Logos through whom all things are made.

The readings for today effect a correlation between the resurrection of Jesus and conversion. The biblical word for conversion is "metanoia" which has the sense of "going beyond the mind that you have." What would it be like to move from a death-haunted consciousness to resurrection-haunted one? It would involve a conversion.

From the time of Marx, Feuerbach and Freud, we've heard the critique that religion is a wish-fulfilling fantasy, a game of "pie in the sky when you die." The readings for this second Sunday of Easter give the lie to this criticism, for they show how those who were convinced of Jesus' resurrection were also deeply commited to a more just society.

There are some debunkers of religion around today who want us to believe that the story of the resurrection is just another iteration of the myth of the dying and rising god that can be found in many ancient cultures. Nothing could be further from the truth. A careful reading of the Easter accounts shows that they have to do with a very particular, historical individual and with a very particular,...

Life is grim. It is marked by conflict, division, inextricably difficult situations. And brooding over all of it is the fact of death. How do we deal with this mess? We can't, but God can. In Christ, he takes on the dysfunction and sin of the world and takes it away through the divine mercy. Walk through the Passion narrative with this idea in mind.

Jeremiah 31:31contains the great prophecy that the Lord will one day place his law within our hearts. In the Old Testament, God's law was written on stone and often appreciated as an imposition, a burden. But Jesus is the Law incarnate, the Torah made flesh. Therefore, when we eat his body and drink his blood, we take the law into our hearts, and thus we realize the prophecy of Jeremiah.

How do we know what's going on? How do we read the signs of the times? We could do so politically, sociologically, culturally, or economically. But the Bible insists that the world should be read theologically. What precisely is God doing and why? This sermon is about how to do this.

Scott Hahn refers to these famous laws as 'our declaration of dependence.' They teach us how to center our lives radically around God and his demands. They signal our total dependence upon the Lord. How wonderful that we meditate on them in the midst of Lent.

The story of the Aqedah, the Binding of Isaac, haunted the Israelite religious imagination. In it is contained one of the most important spiritual lessons in the Bible: everything we are and everything we have belongs, finally, to God. Knowing this is our liberation.

As Lent commences, we are given the great image of Noah's Ark. This story is not just a charming tale that we tell to the kids; in it is contained the whole message of salvation, if we but know how to decipher the symbolism.

Paul tells us that with Jesus Christ it was never yes and no, but only yes. This means that in Jesus all the promises made to Israel have come true. I will tell you why this great Yes of Jesus still matters for us.

In our Gospel for today, a leper comes to Jesus and asks to be healed. He is suffering, not only from a physical malady, but from ritual uncleanness, rendering him incapable of worship. Jesus the Messiah has come to gather the scattered tribes of Israel to the worship of the true God and so he reaches out to the leper. That same Christ seeks to gather so many of us who have wandered away from the...

Moses promised that a prophet like himself would one day arise among the Israelites and that he would have the very authority of God. It is precisely this authority that Jesus claims. And this is why, in his regard, we have to make a choice.

We hear in today's Gospel Jesus' inaugural address. He tells us that the time of fulfillment is now. This means that the whole of Israelite history is summed up in his person. He is the new Temple, the true prophet, the everlasting covenant, and the definitive Torah. And this means that all people must make a decision about him.

The feast of Epiphany gives us the occasion to reflect on a distinction that is much in vogue today between spirituality on the one hand and faith on the other. The Magi represent all that is good and true and beautiful in religious seeking. But they come to the tradition of Israel to find the right focus for their spiritual quest.

The Bible is not particularly sentimental about families. What makes a family holy, as far as the biblical writers are concerned, is its willingness to surrender to the purpose of God. We see this in a number of key figures, including Joseph, Anna, and Simeon.

The church fathers saw so clearly that we will never understand the New Testament without understanding the Old Testament. Our readings for this weekend show how the angel's words to Mary at the annunciation are intelligible only in light of God's promise made, ten centuries before, to David.

In our second reading from Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, we hear the strange recommendation to pray always, rejoice in every circumstance, and give thanks at all times. How is this possible? Only when our lives have been radically reconfigured around Jesus Christ.

The theme of preparing a highway for the Lord emerges from the time of the exile. When the Babylonian captivity was coming to a close, the prophet Isaiah envisioned God making a highway in the desert to facilitate the return of his people to Jerusalem. From what captivity of ours is God leading us this Advent?

Our first reading for this first Sunday of Advent gives us the master image of God as the potter and we, his creatures, as clay. St. Irenaeus said that God's provident direction of our lives is easy as long as the clay of our hearts remains supple and moist. Trouble comes only when we allow the clay to harden.