Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Friends, for this Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to focus on the first and second readings. When read together, they give us a very good sense of Catholic social teaching in regard to the question of power. The Church’s position here is a subtle one. It doesn’t demonize political and economic power; after all, God is described as all-powerful, so power can’t, in itself, be a problem. But it is very much concerned with...

Friends, this year, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross falls on a Sunday, so we have the great privilege of reflecting a bit more deeply on this marvelous and, frankly, disconcerting and odd feast. The Roman cross was a horrific, terrifying symbol of tyrannical power. And yet the first Christians emerge exalting the cross of Jesus. They don’t hide it or pretend he died some other way; on the contrary, Saint Paul says, “I...

Friends, for this Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, we’re reading from the fourteenth chapter of Luke—and it is very serious spiritual business. A lot of us sinners are satisfied with a low-level spirituality of following the commandments. But in this extraordinary Gospel, Jesus challenges us to move into the upper levels of the spiritual life: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brot...

Friends, for this Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about a very important theme—namely, pride and its antidote. I don’t know a spiritual teacher who doesn’t say that the fundamental problem we have is pride; it is the most deadly of the deadly sins. The opposite of pride is humility—and whereas the proud person is caved in around himself, the humble person leaves the black hole of self-regard and enters ...

Friends, I want to focus this week on the second reading, which is from the marvelous Letter to the Hebrews. It addresses a very important and very controversial topic—namely, the divine punishment. You would be hard-pressed to say that this is not a motif in the Bible. That’s simply not the case; in fact, it’s a rather major motif. How do we make sense of this theme of divine punishment without falling back into a terrible view of...

Friends, the title of my ministry, Word on Fire, came from our Gospel for today. Jesus says to his disciples, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” This is not the lighting of a cozy campfire. This is closer to, if you want, Sodom and Gomorrah—to fire and brimstone. It is a dangerous and divisive fire. Christ is the light of the world, the divine luminosity—but to the degree that we are sti...

Friends, on this Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews offers us a great biblical description of faith. I stand with Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, who said that faith is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary. Critics of religious say that faith is accepting things on the basis of no evidence; it’s believing any old nonsense; it’s naïveté; it’s superstition...

Friends, George Harrison once sang, “All things must pass; all things must pass away.” Almost every major religious figure and philosopher the world over has intuited this great truth about our world. It’s good, and there are good things in it—a beautiful sunset, an enjoyable meal, a great conversation—but they don’t last. With that in mind, let’s turn to our readings for this Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, which are about the...

Friends, on this Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our Gospel is the Martha and Mary story, and in my years of preaching, I’ve found that it tends to bother people a lot. With the first reading about Abraham in mind, we can better understand what this passage means—and doesn’t mean. Rather than playing one sister off the other, we should read Martha and Mary together: When we focus on the “unum necessarium,” the one thing necessar...

Friends, in our first reading from the book of Deuteronomy this week, Moses says to the people, “For this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you. . . . No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.” This is a master text for what we call in the Catholic tradition “the natural law.” It means that there is within us a kind of deep m...

Friends, as we resume Ordinary Time, it’s appropriate that we’re looking at a portrait of the Church, because we’re coming back, if you want, to the ordinary work of the Church up and down the ages to the present day. Our Gospel from the tenth chapter of Luke gives us our marching orders—from going on mission together and staying rooted in prayer, to trusting in providence and supporting the work of the Church, to curing the sick a...

Friends, this year, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul falls on a Sunday, and I want to spend some time reflecting especially on Saint Peter. Around the year 64, Shimon Bar Yonah, a fisherman from Galilee, was put to death brutally in the Circus of Nero. But while the Roman Empire is long gone and the successor of Nero doesn’t exist, the empire of this fisherman, Peter the Apostle, is everywhere, and in May, his 266th successor wal...

Friends, this is the great feast of Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. In the First Reading, the Spirit manifests himself as a strong driving wind, and while you can’t see the wind directly, you can see its effects. The text I want to reflect on today is not in the readings but is one of my favorites: Galatians 5:22–26, when St. Paul talks about “the fruit of the Spirit.” And it’s precisely to this same point: What are the si...

Friends, getting the Ascension of the Lord right is very important for understanding many aspects of the Church’s life. So I want to dwell on that a little bit with you today, and I want to do so under two headings: the first I’m going to call more political, and the second more liturgical. They are both hinted at in the great statement in the Creed that we recite week after week: “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right...