Fr. Brendan McGuire - Podcasts that Break open the Word of God

“Who do people say that I am?” The apostles first say, you are Elijah or John the Baptist, or one of the other prophets. But then he asks them, he says, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter, the one who confesses says, “You are the son of the living God. You are the Messiah.” Jesus must say, yes, finally he gets it. He must be delighted after all these three years. So he takes him up a mountain w...

How we refocus ourselves this Lent is not about our will. It is not us trying to will ourselves back and pushing away the devil in some dramatic fashion. Just come back to who we are. Come back to the fact that we are children of God and that God is our father. (Read more…) Here is my homily for the First Sunday of Lent. Our own Lenten journey has begun. I hope you can join us this year. Please fe...

What we do today is put ashes on our forehead. Not to have a badge of honor that says, “Look at me. I am one of the Catholic ones.” We put ashes on our forehead to remind us to say, “I am a sinner. I am a hypocrite.”But we do not stay there. We do this at the beginning of this Lenten journey. Then the rest of this Lenten journey, we focus on turning back to the Lord, (Read more…)   Here is my homi...

Jesus reorders life. He quotes the golden rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That was in the Book of Deuteronomy as one of the laws of the Lord. But he takes it a step further. He deepens it and calls his disciples, the ones who call themselves Christian, to have a higher standard, a deeper reality. He says it is not enough, to love just your family. (Read more…) Here is my...

Pope Francis has declared 2025 a Jubilee Year of Hope, a timely reminder that even in the face of immense suffering in our world, we are not abandoned, Jesus always accompanies us and most especially in our times of suffering. The cross stands at the center of our faith, not as a symbol of defeat, but as a sign of ultimate hope.  (Read more…) Here is my homily for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time...

You can hear a sense of frustration in today’s gospel with Peter. Peter has been working hard all night with his friends, he says they were up all night and caught absolutely nothing. Then here comes Jesus. Remember, Jesus is a carpenter and he is telling the fishermen what to do. You can see how outrageous this sounds. So you can imagine what Peter is feeling, “Like really ? Put out again? Really...

Mary watched her son suffer greatly. This prediction by the prophet Simeon is very real. The climax of that suffering for her was at the foot of the cross. We have to examine this because it is very important how Mary suffered. It was not just that she suffered but how she suffered and gave witness to us. (Read more…) Here is my homily for the Presentation of the Lord. I am sorry this is later tha...

Jesus is the fulfillment of the scripture. Jesus is the bright light that leads us to see all other lights. He is the one who enables us to see what God is fulfilling in our lives. So Jesus, in a sense, God becomes our north star, if you would, that we look to seek in this sky of lights.  (Read more…) Here is my homily for the Third Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to share with others.

In today's Gospel, Jesus turns everything around. He takes six stone jars fills them with water and turns that water into wine. These jars would have held 20 to 30 gallons each. Just to give you an understanding of how much wine we are talking about. He produced 600 to 800 bottles of wine! That is a lot of joy! (Read more…) Here is my homily for the Second Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel...

We need to hear this message of delight because we hear all the other messages, all the other negative messages, the competitive ones on online, how good everyone else is and not how good we are. Let’s combat it with a message of love. Let’s say to one another “You are my beloved one, with whom I am well pleased, with whom I am delighted.” (Read more…) Here is my homily for the Baptism of the Lord...

There are layers of irony here that Matthew is trying to communicate to his Jewish audience, kind of waking them up. “Hey, hello. It is the Messiah. The Messiah was born. You need to go to Jerusalem. You need to leave Jerusalem and go to Bethlehem.” But they missed the point. Why did they miss the point? It is because they are so rooted in their own belief, their own perspective. (Read more…) Here...

With the passing of time we certainly grow in age, but we do not always necessarily grow in wisdom. There are no guarantees that wisdom comes with age! It is one of those things that is an opportunity for us, but we have to apply the lessons that happen in our life in order for us to gain the wisdom from those moments. (Read more…) Here is my homily for the Feast of the Holy Family. Please feel fr...

Today , we stop and we share what we believe is the greatest story ever told. The story of Jesus Christ being born among us. And right from the very beginning, there is a twist. And the twist is that God, the Author of life, the author of the Book of Life, enters into the story himself. He becomes one of the twists. (Read More) Here is my homily for the Nativity of The Lord. Please feel free to sh...

Mary believed! She just did not just hear, she heard and believed. And so we too must be willing to hear and then to believe what we hear. We will need to hear and believe that we are a beloved child of God. And we are called to go share that love with others today. Not in some future year, not in some future time, but today. (Read more…) Here is my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Please f...

Stuff comes in life and stuff happens! It is hard to, in a sense, frolic and enjoy life. Joy is not about circumstances. Joy is not about what happens to us. Joy is about what we choose when stuff is happening to us. Joy is a response that we have regardless of what is happening to us. (Read more…) Here is my homily from the Third Sunday of Advent. Please feel free to pass it on. God bless, Fr. Br...

Our parish theme for the whole year is “Be still and know that I am God.” But during the advent period it is to be still and be joyful with the Lord. In the current secular climate today, we have the craziness and the busyness of Christmas. We cannot stop all the shops doing what they need to do and to try to get us ramped up and amped up on all the purchasing. But we can take a rest from it and t...

We are called in a more profound way to not try to change all the circumstances outside. We are not going to change the secular world, we are not going to change the stores. If they have goods to sell and they are going to start selling it. But we can change our attitude. See the difference between heaven and earth is not about altitude. It is about attitude. (Read more…) Here is my homily from th...

Here is a photo taken by the James Webb telescope. Now, where are we in this universe? We are a tiny little point in the middle of that tiny place, we are so far away that you can not even see it. What is illustrated here is that the universe is massive! There are over 200 billion galaxies in the universe, and each of those galaxies has billions of stars and trillions of planets. We are in the Mil...

Life is transient. One minute you are driving along, next minute, boom, the car flies off the road and you are taken out and your life could be gone. Never take life for granted. And we do.  What today’s reading is trying to do is to wake us up. It says, ‘Listen, look, stop, take it. Pay attention.” Jesus is saying, “Wake up, wake up. I am always here. But pay attention to me. Pay attention now. I...

May God take all our loved ones to himself for all eternity. And one day, we will join him as well. Together we will be one in heaven. Until then, we will ask those clouds of witnesses to witness to us their love and help us to carry our grief and each other’s grief. (Read more…) Here is my homily from the Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to pass it on.

Every time we come to the Eucharist God says that he loves us completely. So much so that he gives us Jesus Christ in his person. I want to quote Thomas Merton. Let me explain first. When the sun is shining bright, you can take a magnifying glass, focus the sun and you can set a piece of paper even on fire. Thomas Merton says that Jesus Christ is the magnifying lens which God gives us so that he c...

We should understand the context of today’s reading. This is Mark’s gospel, the very first gospel to be written. And remember it is a continuation from last week’s gospel, where the rich young man comes up to Jesus and asks, “What must I do to inherit kingdom of of heaven?” And he says to him, “Give away everything.” Then James and John come along. They have given up everything. So they are thinki...

We should understand the context of today’s reading. This is Mark’s gospel, the very first gospel to be written. And remember it is a continuation from last week’s gospel, where the rich young man comes up to Jesus and asks, “What must I do to inherit kingdom of of heaven?” And he says to him, “Give away everything.” Then James and John come along. They have given up everything. So they are thinki...

Today there are so many things that draw our attention, distract us from even our own goodwill. We may not even want to be a certain way, but because we send so much time with those things. The question is what do we treasure the most? If somebody were to take away something, we would go, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Not that.” (Read more…) Here is my homily from the Twenty-Eighth Sunday of Ordinary time....

I just returned last night from our pilgrimage and I had a long trip home. I finished the pilgrimage in Greece and Turkey and then I flew to Vienna for a Stanford class reunion. Then I flew from Vienna to San Francisco last night. One of the things I love to see while traveling is how children and parents interact. God bless the parents; it is a lot of work! You guys know when you are traveling wi...