Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Corpus Christi

The Eucharist is the holy meal that God wants to share with his people. It is also the sacrifice that makes that meal possible in the midst of a fallen world. To understand the eucharist, we have to keep these two dimensions in mind.

The Center of Our Faith

The Trinity is not simply a theological connundrum for scholars to fuss about. It stands at the very heart of our faith, since it expresses the fact that God is love. Our whole salvation depends on this great truth.

Feast of the Ascension

The Ascension of the Lord empowers the Church to fulfill its messianic mission: to gather the nations of the world into a relationship with the God of Israel.

The Vine and the Branches

The image of the vine and the branches indicates that our relationship with Christ is greater than that of merely a teacher to his students. Instead, we are related to him on all levels of our existence because Christ is the eternal Logos through whom all things are made.

Resurrection and Metanoia

The readings for today effect a correlation between the resurrection of Jesus and conversion. The biblical word for conversion is "metanoia" which has the sense of "going beyond the mind that you have." What would it be like to move from a death-haunted consciousness to resurrection-haunted one? It would involve a conversion.

Resurrection and the Love of This World

From the time of Marx, Feuerbach and Freud, we've heard the critique that religion is a wish-fulfilling fantasy, a game of "pie in the sky when you die." The readings for this second Sunday of Easter give the lie to this criticism, for they show how those who were convinced of Jesus' resurrection were also deeply commited to a more just society.

The Resurrection of Jesus is Not a Myth

There are some debunkers of religion around today who want us to believe that the story of the resurrection is just another iteration of the myth of the dying and rising god that can be found in many ancient cultures. Nothing could be further from the truth. A careful reading of the Easter accounts shows that they have to do with a very particular, historical individual and with a very particular, unrepeatable event.

Dealing With the Mess

Life is grim. It is marked by conflict, division, inextricably difficult situations. And brooding over all of it is the fact of death. How do we deal with this mess? We can't, but God can. In Christ, he takes on the dysfunction and sin of the world and takes it away through the divine mercy. Walk through the Passion narrative with this idea in mind.

Planting the Law Within Us

Jeremiah 31:31contains the great prophecy that the Lord will one day place his law within our hearts. In the Old Testament, God's law was written on stone and often appreciated as an imposition, a burden. But Jesus is the Law incarnate, the Torah made flesh. Therefore, when we eat his body and drink his blood, we take the law into our hearts, and thus we realize the prophecy of Jeremiah.

Reading the Signs of the Times

How do we know what's going on? How do we read the signs of the times? We could do so politically, sociologically, culturally, or economically. But the Bible insists that the world should be read theologically. What precisely is God doing and why? This sermon is about how to do this.