Podcasts · Religion & Spirituality
Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies
Bishop Robert Barron
300 episodes
A weekly homily podcast from Bishop Robert Barron, produced by Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.
Episodes page 2 of 6
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The Old World Has Been Shaken
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…
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The Place of Right Praise
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…
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Why We Pray for All Souls
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…
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Are You Revolving Around God—Or God Around You?
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…
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The Power of Prayer
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…
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The Gospel Is Jesus Christ
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…
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Trust in God’s Plan
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…
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Love for the Poor
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…
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The Use—and Abuse—of Power
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…
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Christ, and Him Crucified
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…
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Are You Ready for Serious Discipleship?
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…
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Don’t Play the Pride Game
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…
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Does God Punish Us?
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…
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Christ Came to Cast Fire Upon the Earth
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…
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What Is Faith?
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…
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All Things Must Pass
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…
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Lord, Teach Us to Pray
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…
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Are You Anxious and Worried About Many Things?
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,…
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The Natural Law
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…
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The Church’s Marching Orders
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.…
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The Church Is Built on the Rock
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…
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Join Your Life to Christ’s Sacrifice
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…
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The Theology of the Trinity
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…
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The Fruit of the Spirit
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…
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Seated at the Right Hand of the Father
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:…
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The Holy Spirit Will Teach You Everything
Friends, we come to the Sixth Sunday of Easter, and as the Church readies us for Pentecost, the readings begin to talk about the Holy Spirit. In today’s Gospel, Jesus, speaking to his disciples the night before he…
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The Love That Jesus Commands
Friends on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, we have an extraordinary Gospel that is at the heart of the Christian thing. Jesus, at the beginning of a lengthy and incredibly rich monologue he gives the night before he dies,…
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The Voice in the Depths of Your Soul
Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Easter, we have this marvelous, short but very punchy reading from the Gospel of John: Jesus referring to himself as the good shepherd. This is a remarkably apt metaphor for how God…
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Becoming a Disciple of Jesus
Friends, on this Third Sunday of Easter, we have the magnificent Gospel from the very end of the Gospel of John, chapter twenty-one, which is so rich theologically. We see here, on full display, what it means for…
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Everything Has Changed
Friends, we enter now into the Easter season, and here is the thing I want you to know: We misunderstand Easter dramatically when we think primarily of spring festival time, the weather getting nicer, and Easter…
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Something Happened on Easter!
Friends, happy Easter! Many of you probably know that I’ve spent much of my life reading philosophers and spiritual writers—Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Anselm, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel. What all…
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The Forgiveness of Sinners
Friends, we come to Palm Sunday, which is also called Passion Sunday because we always read at Mass the Passion narrative from one of the synoptic Gospels. This year, we hear from Saint Luke, and I want to look at two…
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The Conversion of Saint Paul
Friends, we come to the Fifth Sunday of Lent, and I want to reflect today on our second reading from the Letter of Paul to the Philippians. It is a passage of both literary genius and spiritual power, one that uses the…
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The Heavenly Banquet
Friends, this Fourth Sunday of Lent gives us marvelous readings: the First Reading from the book of Joshua, the Second Reading from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, and the Gospel reading, which is the…
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You Can’t Grasp—or Hide From—God
Friends, we come to the Third Sunday of Lent, and we have the extraordinary privilege during Cycle C of reading this account, in the third chapter of the book of Exodus, of Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. It’s…
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When the Eternal Breaks Through
Friends our Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent this year is Luke’s account of the Transfiguration. And it opens up something that is marvelous and confounding; there is sort of an aching and a longing associated with…
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Three Questions to Ask Yourself During Lent
Friends, we come to the holy season of Lent. Pascal said that most of us go through life diverting and distracting ourselves so that we don’t come to terms with the big questions: God, meaning, purpose, eternal life.…
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The Revolution of the Resurrection
Friends, for this Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Church gives us the opportunity, in our second reading from 1 Corinthians 15, to reflect on the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It was the Resurrection that…
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Give Expecting Nothing Back
Friends, our Gospel for today is from the Sermon on the Plain, which is Luke's version of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, and it’s not only saying something about the moral life; it’s also saying something very profound…
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Place Your Heart in God
Friends, on this Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we have the first reading from the prophet Jeremiah in tandem with the Gospel from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. And both readings draw out a basic feature of biblical…
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Graced Sinners on Mission
Friends, for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Church gives us a wonderful pairing of readings: the first reading from the sixth chapter of Isaiah and the Gospel from the fifth chapter of Luke. They both speak to…
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God Returns to His Temple
Friends, it’s easy enough to sentimentalize the Feast of the Presentation. But we oughtn’t to, because this story is getting at, if I can put it this way, a hard truth. And the clue is given to us in the first reading,…
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You Can’t Give What You Don’t Have
Friends, on this Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about walls and bridges. There is a tendency today to be simplistic and one-sided about walls and bridges: walls are bad and keep people out, while…
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The Marriage of Divinity and Humanity
Friends, we return now to Ordinary Time, and this Sunday, we hear the marvelous story of the wedding feast at Cana from the Gospel of John. It's as though, as we commence the ordinary liturgical year, we're meant to…
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Why Was Jesus Baptized?
Friends, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is exceptionally important. All four Gospels talk about it, and John the Baptist is a kind of door we have to go through to understand Jesus properly. What was John the…
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Science Points to God
Friends, we’re all familiar with the story of the three wise men, which has been depicted in thousands of Christmas cards. And there is something romantic and charming about it. But on this great Feast of the Epiphany,…
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Freeing Your Family for God
Friends, I always love preaching on the Feast of the Holy Family because I think the biblical message here is very surprising. We say the Bible is associated with family values, and indeed it is, but they're probably…
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Why Mary Matters
Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, we come to the Advent figure par excellence: the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. What I want to do in this homily is to look at some of the Church’s classical titles of…
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The Peace that the World Can’t Give
Friends, on this Third Sunday of Advent, called Gaudete Sunday, I want to draw attention to our second reading, which is from St. Paul to the Philippians. These lines about joy, anxiety, prayer, and peace can run right…
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Have You Wandered Away from God?
Friends, in our readings for the Second Sunday of Advent, there is a lot of talk about building highways. In the Bible, both Old Testament and New, we find the theme of exile. Very often, Israel finds itself sent away…
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