Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

This week's reading from the Gospel of Luke shows us that our encounter with Christ is an invasion of grace and that we must be ready to welcome that grace and go out into the depths, and ascend to the heights, at its calling.

This week's reading from the book of Nehemiah provides a reflection on the importance of keeping firm our religious identity and finding strength in our religious identity so we can go out into the world with confidence and grace. By keeping our strength in God we can go out into the world and Christify it.

This week’s reading from the book of Nehemiah provides a reflection on the importance of keeping firm our religious identity, and finding strength in that identity, so we can go out into the world with confidence and grace. By keeping our strength in God, we can go out into the world and Christify it.

The communion of humanity and divinity in Christ's divine person can be likened to a marriage. Sin effects a kind of divorce between God and humanity, a break up of the marriage of God and his people. How wonderful, therefore, when the Messiah offers the first sign of his identity and mission that it as at wedding. This is an indication that the relationship of God and humanity will be transformed, reconciled and renewed in Jesus Christ.

The first Sacrament one can receive in the Church, Baptism, defines our relationship with Christ. In it, we are reborn as part of his mystical body, and are gifted the grace of God's love. Baptism lays the foundation for every other Sacrament we are to receive, and inextricably links us with the Trinity.

Lots of people today will tell you what makes a family well-adjusted, functional, and peaceful. But in today's readings for the Feast of the Holy Family, which center on two exemplary women, Hannah and Mary, the Church wants to tell us what makes a family holy.

In today's readings we see the Theo-drama, the great story being told by God, confronting the ego-drama, which is the self-centered play we attempt to write, produce, direct, and star in ourselves. What makes life thrilling is to discover our role in the Theo-drama. This is precisely what has happened to Mary. She found her role—indeed a climactic role—in the Theo-drama, just as King David had several centuries before.

Our Gospel for this third Sunday of Advent is of extraordinary importance, for it speaks to us of the transformation, the transfiguration of the self, which is unique to Christianity. To be baptized in the Holy Spirit is to be immersed in the ocean of the divine love. When we are dipped into this reality, we become capable of something that neither Aristotle nor Plato nor the Founding Fathers nor the prophets themselves dreamed possible: we can love with the very love of God.

Christianity is not a mythic system. It is an historical religion that makes very concrete historical claims, and the first Christians were intensely interested in the historicity of what they were describing and preaching about. We see an example of this in St. Luke's Gospel today. The evangelist tell us that something actually happened in history, something so strange, unexpected, and rare that it changed everything.

Our Gospel for this first Sunday of Advent begins where the readings for the end of last liturgical year left off, namely, with apocalyptic musings. We're encouraged to look for the Son of Man, coming on the clouds of heaven, which signals the end of the world as we know it. But the Son of man is coming on the clouds of heaven even now in the life of the Church. Even now the true king, the successor of David, is in our midst. But we need eyes trained by the liturgy to see him.