Bishop Robert Barron’s Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

On Pentecost, the disciples heard a strong driving wind, saw tongues of flames, and then received amazing gifts of the Spirit, enabling them to proclaim and witness. The Church, throughout the centuries, has received spectacular charisms of miracle-working, healing, and the speaking in tongues. As with all manifestations of the Holy Spirit, they are given for one reason: the building up of the Body of Christ.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul specifies some of the great charismatic offices, including prophets who boldly speak the word, apostles who establish churches, evangelists who draw others to Christ, and pastors who order and manage the community of the faithful. Which office is yours?

As Pentecost approaches, the Church invites us to meditate upon the Holy Spirit, the person who is the love between the Father and the Son. To be in the spirit is to be gifted with what Paul called "charismata," powers enabling us to build up the church of God.

Jesus tells us that he is preparing a place for us in his Father's house. The house or household is a wonderful image for heaven, for it is a place of action, energy, inter-dependence and mutual support. There is nothing bland or passive about life with God and the saints. Rather it is like living in an endlessly interesting and bustling city.

Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles provides an account of St. Peter's great sermon on Pentecost morning. His proclamation--bold, unapologetic, evangelical, deeply challenging--is the model of all Christian preaching and public witness.

In Matthew's version of the Easter story, symbols of novelty and transformation abound: it is the first day of the week, light is dawning, a stone has been rolled back, the very earth shakes, and an angel, a bearer of light, comes and speaks a word of hope. Easter is the day when everything changed, when God's mercy turned the world as we know it upside-down. We Christians are the proclaimers of this reversal.

On Palm Sunday, we are privileged to listen to one of the great passion narratives. In Matthew's account, we see Jesus as a still-point in the maelstrom, as God's fidelity amidst a cocaphony of sin. In the course of the passion, Jesus confronts betrayal, laziness, violence, untruth, abuse of power, self-destruction, and wanton cruelty--the whole panoply of human dysfunction. And he takes away this sin precisely by his obedience and his mercy.

Blindness is a great Biblical symbol of spiritual blindness, the darkening and distortion of our vision. Jesus salves and washes the blind man in John's Gospel in order to restore his sight. In the same way, he washes us (in Baptism) and salves us (in the other sacraments) so that we might see with his eyes.

On the mount of Transfiguration, Jesus becomes brilliantly illumined. This light signals the radiance and beauty of a world beyond this one, a dimension from which Jesus has come and to which he is luring us.

Just after his baptism, Jesus retires to the wilderness and there he faces the tempter. We enter into this experience with him, facing the same struggle. Like the Lord himself, we wrestle with the temptations to make sensual pleasure, the ego, and power the center of our lives. In resisting all three, we make the acceptance of God's will and mission possible.

During the great season of Lent, the Church recommends three very concrete acts: prayer, fasting, and the giving of alms. These are actions that involve the body as much as the mind; and they are things that we "do." Lent is not so much a time to fuss about one's "interiority" as a time to get going!"

At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, we hear the eight beatitudes. These are a summons to be liberated from the various addictions--to material things, to power, to good feeling, to the esteem of others--that keep us from following the will of God.

When Jesus calls his first disciples, he stirs the "imago Dei," the image of God, in them. They realize that they will find themselves only in surrendering to the one who will make them fishers of men. We hear the same call from the same Christ.

John hesitates before baptizing the Lord, saying, "It is I who should be baptized by you." The great surprise--that we have been wrestling with for two millenia--is that God's greatness is a function of his humility, his willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder in the muck of sin with the likes of us. That we have such a God, a friend of sinners, is the reason for our hope.

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.