Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

An Icon of the Trinity

The scene of the baptism of Jesus described in the Gospel of Matthew is a theophany, a showing forth of the being of God. The Father crying out from heaven; the Son standing in the water with us sinners; the Spirit hovering.

The Journey of the Magi

The journey of these wise men is a metaphor for the spiritual journeys that all of us must make. Like the magi, we must be attentive; we must be willing to act; we must expect opposition; we must give our best to Christ, and finally, we must be willing to change, "to go back by a different route."

Christmas Surprise

Everything about Luke's familiar Christmas story is surprising. Mary and Joseph, the inn, the child wrapped in swaddling clothes, the manger, the angels and shepherds--all challenge our ordinary conceptions of what is good, right, and powerful. Listen again to this story and hear it as, in the strict sense of the term, "subversive."

Joseph the Just

One of the most popular saints in the Christian tradition is Joseph, the husband of Mary. We see in the Gospel for the fourth Sunday of Advent that Joseph is a man willing to situate the struggles and uncertainties of his life in the context of a divine plan whose contours and purpose he cannot fully grasp. He is willing to think and act "outside the box," and this makes him a model for us Advent people.

Patience, People

St. James reminds us that an essential element of the Christian life is waiting. As the farmer waits for the precious yield of the earth, so the believer waits while Christ does his mysterious work in the world. Thus we must learn the virtue of patient expectation.

The Lord's Holy Mountain

As we commence a new liturgical year, the Church invites us to survey the world from the standpoint of Isaiah's holy mountain, the height to which all the nations stream. This is a beautiful image of ""communio,"" of the many gathered around the one, and it is reflective of the fundamental ""communio"" which is the Trinity, three persons constituting the one God. When we look at things from this perspective, we see them aright.

A Voice in the Desert

John the Baptist is, along with Isaiah and the Virgin Mary, the great figure of Advent. We hear his voice in the desert, summoning us to repentance and readiness. When we have purified our minds and hearts, we are able to receive the one who will baptize us with the Holy Spirit, the fire of God's very life.

An Odd King

Christ is indeed King, but an odd one. For he reigns, not from a throne, but from a cross, and he is crowned, not with laurel leaves, but with a ring of thorns. What this feast teaches us is the meaning of true power. The power that creates the cosmos is not domination, but rather self-forgetting and self-sacrificing love.

Apocalypse Now?

Christians believe that the end of the world has occurred in the death and resurrection of Jesus. This means that the old world dominated by sin, suffering, and death has been undermined. Now we live in the "in-between-times," waiting for the definitive arrival of the new world which Jesus has inaugurated.

What About the Body?

The Christian attitude toward the body lies beyond the extremes of hedonism (taking the body too seriously) and puritanism (taking it not seriously enough). Christians are "eschatologically detached" from their bodies here below, precisely because they expect transfigured bodies in the age to come. We can see this Biblical attitude on display in both the Old Testament and the Gospels.