Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies
Religion og åndelighetA weekly homily podcast from Bishop Robert Barron, produced by Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.
Siste episoder av Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies podcast
- The Old World Has Been Shaken (00:14:50)
Friends, we come to the Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, which means that next Sunday is the final Sunday of the liturgical year. During this time, the Church always gives us apocalyptic readings, and our Gospel today is from “the little apocalypse” in the Gospel of Luke. Apokalypsis in Greek does not mean “end of the world”; it means “unveiling”—taking away the kalyptra, the veil. This is why, when apokalypsis is rendered in Latin, we get revelatio, revelation—taking the velum, the veil, away. So apocalyptic literature is all about the showing forth of a new world. But that has to be preceded by a sort of shaking of the old world.
- The Place of Right Praise (00:14:06)
Friends, this Sunday we’re celebrating, with the whole Church, the dedication of the great cathedral of Rome: the Lateran Basilica. You could argue very persuasively that this see church of the pope is the most important of the four major basilicas in Rome; it is the great temple of Catholicism worldwide. This is why the readings for today are all about the temple, this place of right praise where God and his people meet—and find union.
- Why We Pray for All Souls (00:14:35)
Friends, All Souls Day, November 2, falls on a Sunday this year, so we can really spend some time reflecting on this wonderful feast, which means so much to Catholic people. Why do we pray for the souls in purgatory? I wonder if I could begin by reflecting on why we speak of the “soul”—this higher principle breathed into us by God that survives the death of the body.
- Are You Revolving Around God—Or God Around You? (00:14:03)
Friends, for this Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, we are treated to the wonderful and deeply challenging parable of the Pharisee and the publican from Luke 18. We are meant to see in this deceptively simple story a basic and clarifying principle in the spiritual order—namely, that the ego is meant to revolve around God, not God around the ego. And this might not be immediately clear: Sometimes the people that look the most religious actually aren’t very religious, and the people that look a million miles from God are actually in the right spiritual space.
- The Power of Prayer (00:14:54)
Friends, when something tragic happens and people offer their prayers, you’ll often hear now, “I've had it with thoughts and prayers. We have to act.” In some extreme cases, people of prayer are mocked, as though prayer is just something completely ineffectual that we should leave behind in favor of action. We’re the first generation in recorded human history ever to feel this way. Human beings, across cultures, have always believed in the power and efficacy of prayer. Our first reading this week from Exodus 17 beautifully displays this power—and the fact that prayer, far from undermining action, sustains and supports it.
- The Gospel Is Jesus Christ (00:14:55)
Friends, in our second reading this Sunday, Paul writes to Timothy, “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David: such is my gospel.” The Gospel is not the ethical teachings of Jesus or the doctrinal teachings of Saint Paul; the Gospel is Jesus himself. And Christianity is not a noble spiritual path or a set of ideas; it’s a relationship to Jesus. All those other things are great and follow from him—but it’s about him!
- Trust in God’s Plan (00:14:55)
Friends, this Sunday, I want to talk to you once again about faith. As I’ve said before, faith is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary. And both the first reading and the Gospel today shed very interesting light on the nature of faith, which is not a kind of superstition—believing in any old nonsense—but rather an attitude of humble trust in the ways of the Lord.
- Love for the Poor (00:14:50)
Friends, Pope Benedict XVI memorably told us that the Church does three essential things: It worships God, it evangelizes, and it serves the poor. This week, the first reading from the prophet Amos and the Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus bring that third task vividly to mind—and they are meant to bother us. Are you indifferent to the sufferings of the poor? What are you doing, concretely, to help them?
- The Use—and Abuse—of Power (00:14:50)
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 how we use that power.
- Christ, and Him Crucified (00:15:39)
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 resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” How do we begin to explain this?
- Are You Ready for Serious Discipleship? (00:14:49)
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, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” This is meant to be a kind of shock therapy—a deeply challenging message about what serious discipleship entails.
- Don’t Play the Pride Game (00:14:59)
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 into reality. In our Gospel for today, Jesus tells us a great story that’s right to this point.
- Does God Punish Us? (00:15:14)
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 God as an arbitrary, capricious tyrant? This little passage from Hebrews gives us the interpretive key.
- Christ Came to Cast Fire Upon the Earth (00:14:48)
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 still in darkness, we will experience that light as something difficult, off-putting, even torturous.
- What Is Faith? (00:15:00)
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. But this has nothing to do with what the Bible means by faith.
- All Things Must Pass (00:15:03)
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 theme of detachment.
- Lord, Teach Us to Pray (00:15:18)
Friends, we have the great privilege this week of reading, in our Gospel, Luke’s account of the Lord’s Prayer. This is a very sacred moment: Jesus himself—not just a spiritual guru or someone we admire, but the very Son of God—teaches us how to pray. And we become so familiar with the Our Father that we forget its spiritual power.
- Are You Anxious and Worried About Many Things? (00:14:48)
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 necessary, all the many things that preoccupy us find their proper place.
- The Natural Law (00:15:16)
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 moral intuition by which we know the right thing to do; there are intuitions of value that give us a sense of meaning, purpose, and direction in life.
- The Church’s Marching Orders (00:14:57)
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 and proclaiming the kingdom of God.
- The Church Is Built on the Rock (00:14:42)
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 walked out onto the loggia of Saint Peter’s Basilica, built over the very spot where he was buried.
- Join Your Life to Christ’s Sacrifice (00:14:34)
Friends, every year we have Trinity Sunday followed by today’s wonderful Solemnity of Corpus Christi—two of the highest theological mysteries of our faith, the Trinity and the Eucharist, back to back. As we reflect today on the Body and Blood of Jesus, I want to explore the deep connection between temple sacrifice, the altar of the cross, and the Mass.
- The Theology of the Trinity (00:14:54)
Friends, today is Trinity Sunday—one of my favorite feast days of the year because I can put my old theologian’s cap on. Looking first at one of the greatest of the medieval theologians, Saint Bonaventure, and then at maybe the greatest figure in Western theology, Saint Augustine, I’d like to reflect with you on the dynamics of the Trinitarian life—the very matrix into which we’re inserted through baptism.
- The Fruit of the Spirit (00:16:34)
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 signs that the Holy Spirit is operative in us?
- Seated at the Right Hand of the Father (00:14:40)
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 hand of the Father.”