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 3 of 6
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Three Dimensions of Advent
Friends, we come to the First Sunday of Advent, which is the commencement of the new liturgical year. “Adventus” in Latin means arrival or coming, and one way to look at Advent is to see three comings of Christ. There…
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Which Kingdom Are You In?
Friends, we come to the end of the liturgical year with the Feast of Christ the King, where we meditate upon the kingly reign or rule of Christ. Now, we in the modern liberal West have a hard time with kings; we like…
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A New World Unveiled
Friends, we're coming toward the end of the liturgical year, and as is typical, the Church gives us readings of an apocalyptic nature dealing with the end times. “Apocalypse” means “unveiling,” and what’s being…
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Trusting God in Dire Straits
Friends, our first reading is that wonderful story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, which is a kind of hidden gem in the Old Testament. Like so many of the stories in the Bible, it is very understated, but chock…
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The Highest Good Is God Alone
Friends, the readings for this Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time take us to very holy ground. In the first reading, taken from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, we hear the “shema,” a prayer fundamental to Jewish…
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Answering God’s Call
Friends, all three readings for this Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time have a golden thread running through them, which is the idea of the call—of the primacy of God’s action in the life of salvation. Whenever we start…
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What Real Power Looks Like
Friends, our Gospel this Sunday is taken from the tenth chapter of Mark, and it is high-octane spiritual business. Something pivotal is being laid out for us in this passage, and it has to do with power, suffering, and…
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What Do You Ask God For?
Friends, for this Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our first reading from the marvelous book of Wisdom presents an old biblical trope: If you were to ask God for something, or if God were to come to you and say…
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The Biblical Vision of the Family
Friends, the first reading from Genesis and the Gospel from Mark this week are of great importance. They have to do with what we call Christian anthropology—the biblical understanding of who we are—and most…
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Whoever Is Not Against Us Is For Us
Friends, the first reading and Gospel this Sunday have to do with the Church at war with itself. The devil is the scatterer, the divider, and one of his favorite tricks is to take the Church—which is meant to be an…
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The Ladder Doesn’t Matter
Friends, why was the story of Jesus with the little children, versions of which appear in the three synoptic Gospels, so vividly remembered by the first Christians? I think they intuited that it got very close to the…
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Faith Without Works Is Dead
Friends, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread”—and this week, I am going to go once more into the issue of faith and works, which has been dividing Western Christianity since the Reformation. Our second reading…
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Be Opened!
Friends, our Gospel for today is the evocative scene of Jesus healing a man who cannot hear and cannot speak. This man is beautifully symbolic of many in our culture today: we don’t listen to God, and therefore we…
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The Goodness—and Dangers—of the Law
Friends, as Americans, we have a very ambiguous relationship to law. On the one hand, we are a nation of independently minded people; we don’t like the law imposing itself on us. At the same time—let’s face it—we are a…
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Do You Accept This Teaching?
Friends, we come now to the close of this great discourse of Jesus in the sixth chapter of John, where we see the aftereffects of his teaching on the Real Presence. The Eucharist is a standing or falling point of…
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Really, Truly, and Substantially Present
Friends, we continue reading from the sixth chapter of John, this pivotal section of the New Testament where John lays out his Eucharistic theology. And we come today to the rhetorical high point of this discourse,…
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Strength for the Journey
Friends, we’re continuing our reading of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, which is all about the Eucharist. And here’s my take on our reading for today: A long trip by car or plane can be uncomfortable, even…
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Everything in This World Passes Away
Friends, in the midst of our country’s great Eucharistic Revival, we continue our reading of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. And this week, I want to reflect on a line that names something so spiritually…
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Where Heaven and Earth Meet
Friends, this Sunday we begin five weeks of Gospel readings from the sixth chapter of John, which is all about the Eucharist. Jesus will get into a lengthy discourse about the Eucharist, but it commences narratively…
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The Shepherd Has Arrived
Friends the readings for this Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time are interwoven with each other in a very interesting way. I want to start with the first reading from Jeremiah, then look at the Gospel from Mark, and…
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The Earliest Moments of the Church
Friends, on this Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, our Gospel from the sixth chapter of Mark is Jesus sending the Twelve out on mission. These are the very earliest moments of the Church—in a way, the “pre-Church”—so…
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A Thorn in the Flesh
Friends, on this Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our second reading is from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. The focus of the reading is “a thorn in the flesh” that was given to Paul “to beat me, to keep me…
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Reach Out in Faith
Friends, there’s something Hemingway-esque about Mark’s Gospel—something very direct and uncomplicated. But in another sense, he shows great literary sophistication, and you see it especially in this famous passage for…
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Peace in the Storm
Friends, our Gospel for today is Mark’s account of the stilling of the sea. We know the basic structure of the story: Jesus is in the boat with the disciples; when a storm kicks up, he’s asleep in the stern. The…
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See Things Differently
Friends, people of faith just see things differently. They see what the nonbeliever sees—they read history and watch the news and see what’s going on in the world—but they see more than that. They see the world…
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What Is Sin?
Friends, we return now to Ordinary Time, and this Sunday, the Church gives us such a fundamentally important reading from the third chapter of the book of Genesis, which is about the fall. To return to this…
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The Power of Eucharistic Adoration
Friends, we come to the great Feast of Corpus Christi—the Body and Blood of Christ. This year, as the Church in the US is going through a lengthy Eucharistic Revival, it’s good for us once again to turn to this…
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Three Ways of Approaching the Trinity
Friends, we come once again to Trinity Sunday. The Church has reflected very deeply on who God is, and this great doctrine of the Trinity has emerged from that speculation. What I want to do is give you, appropriately…
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Fruits of the Spirit, Works of the Flesh
Friends, we come to the Feast of Pentecost, the great celebration of the Holy Spirit. I want to focus on our second reading from the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, which I’ve used for years in…
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Get to Work!
Friends, today we come to the wonderful Feast of the Ascension of the Lord. Like the disciples in our first reading, we often want to ask the Lord, “When is all of this going to come to fruition? What’s it all about?…
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Hints of the Holy Spirit
Friends, we’re getting very close to Pentecost, the great feast of the descent of the Spirit. And on this Sixth Sunday of Easter, the Church gives us three readings that are hinting at the Holy Spirit—a kind of…
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It’s Time for Some Pruning
Friends, the Lord Jesus Christ is not a teacher from a distant age, not someone from long ago we remember fondly, not a moral exemplar; rather, he is a field of force. We don’t just listen to him or imitate him; we…
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Three Qualities of a Good Shepherd
Friends, we come to the Fourth Sunday of Easter, known as Good Shepherd Sunday. Jesus says in the Gospel, “I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” What is it about that image that…
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What Happens After We Die?
Friends, this week, on the Third Sunday of Easter, we have a passage from that magnificent twenty-fourth chapter of Luke—one of the appearances of the risen Christ to the Apostles. When we’re talking about the…
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Do You Struggle to Believe?
Friends, on the Second Sunday of Easter, we have the inexhaustible reading from the twentieth chapter of John—one of the accounts of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus. These are in many ways the core texts of our…
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Evidence of the Resurrection
Friends, a very happy and blessed Easter! We come to the climax of the Church’s year, the feast of feasts, the very reason for being of Christianity. Everything in Christian life centers around the Resurrection. And…
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Put Yourself in the Passion Narrative
Friends, we have the great privilege on Palm Sunday of reading from one of the Passion narratives, and this year, we read from the Gospel of Mark—the very first one written. But what I want to do today is something a…
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Drinking the Blood of Christ
Friends, on this Fifth Sunday of Lent, we hear one of the most pivotal passages in the Old Testament: Jeremiah 31:31. Jeremiah knew the long Israelite history of covenant and blood sacrifice, but he prophesies, “The…
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Face Your Fears
Friends, the Gospel on this Fourth Sunday of Lent includes one of the most famous verses in the Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but…
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A Tour of the Ten Commandments
Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, the Church asks us to look at one of the great texts in the Old Testament—namely, the Ten Commandments from the book of Exodus. Lent is a time of getting back to basics…
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When Your Faith Is Put to the Test
Friends, we come now to the Second Sunday of Lent, and we’re on both dangerous and very holy ground with the first reading from the twenty-second chapter of Genesis. The ancient Israelites referred to it as the…
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Are Your Soul and Body at War?
Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent. The Gospel for this First Sunday of Lent is Mark’s laconic version of the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Mark does not give us the details we find in Matthew and…
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Reaching Out to the Lepers
Friends, this week, our Gospel is the marvelous passage from Mark about Jesus curing a leper. These moments of healing stayed so deeply in the imaginations of the first Christians. What do we make of this particular…
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Pray, Serve, Evangelize
Friends, the Gospel of Mark is a fascinating literary work. St. Mark seems to write in a breathless, staccato, even primitive manner, but the deeper you look, the more his Gospel appears iconic. He presents scene after…
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Surrender to the Holy One
Friends, the first reading from Deuteronomy today is of signal importance. Moses, speaking to the people before they enter the Promised Land, says, “A prophet like me will the LORD, your God, raise up for you from…
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Listen to the Voice of God!
Friends, though the book of Jonah is only a few pages long, there is something inexhaustible about it. It’s a biblical commonplace that God speaks to certain people and gives them missions, as he does with Jonah in our…
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The Voice of Conscience
Friends, we commence now with the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, and our first reading is one of my favorites in the Old Testament: the account, in the First Book of Samuel, of the call of Samuel, who as a young man…
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The King of All the World
Friends, we come to the wonderful Feast of the Epiphany and the great account in the Gospel of Matthew of the journey of the three magi. This marvelous, puzzling story, which has so beguiled the poets, artists, and…
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Go to Joseph
Friends, we come to the wonderful Feast of the Holy Family. Over the years on this feast day, I’ve certainly preached on the dynamics of the Holy Family, on Mary, and of course on the Lord, but I don't think I’ve ever…
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He Will Rule Forever
Friends, we come to the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, falling this year on the very day before Christmas. And today, the Church invites us in our readings to think about David. Jesus is the fulfillment of the…
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