Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this great feast of the Epiphany. It’s just one of my favorites. I love, every Christmas season, having the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of this feast because it just keeps generating meaning, I find. [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the fourth Sunday of Advent. We're now coming to the culmination of our preparation for Christmas, and the church has introduced us to a number of Advent figures: Isaiah, John the Baptist, et cetera. But [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, many mythologies and philosophies in the ancient world hold that time is cyclical. What I mean is it just goes round and around, never really getting anywhere, but just the constant repetition. A bit like the change of [...]

Peace be with you, and a very blessed and Merry Christmas to everybody. What is it about babies that’s just so irresistibly charming? Now, I realize some parents might be thinking, «What a typical celibate’s perspective on things»? but you know what [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the third Sunday of Advent. And I want to draw attention to our second reading. It's from Paul to the Philippians. Now again, can I urge you, take out your Bibles, read Paul to the Philippians. You can do [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the second Sunday of Advent and there's a lot of talk about building highways. Now, what is going on there and why is that being used as a spiritual symbol? Well, first of all, remember the importance in [...]

Peace be with you. We come to the first Sunday of Advent, New Year's Day. The new liturgical year commences. And so once again everybody, we get back to basics. We start preparing ourselves for the coming of Christ. Adventus in Latin means just [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the end of the liturgical year, this feast of Christ the King. Think of this now as this great stately procession we've been following all during the year. At the very end of it comes the King. So we close [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, so just one more week in the liturgical year. We're coming toward the end of the year, and as is typical, the church gives us readings of an apocalyptic nature, so [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading is that wonderful, wonderful story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. It's one of my favorites. It's a kind of hidden gem, I think, in the Old Testament. Like so many of the stories in the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I know I say this a lot, but the readings today take us to very holy ground for this 31st Sunday of the year. Reading one is taken from the sixth chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy. I'm going to encourage you, get [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we're at the 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time. The year goes by fast, doesn't it? We're almost at the end of the liturgical year. The readings, it's a rare thing when all three of them do have a golden [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel's taken from the 10th chapter of Mark, and it's such high octane spiritual business here. It just behooves us to attend very carefully to these dynamics because what's being laid out for us is [...]

Peace be with you. Friends for this 28th Sunday of ordinary time. Our first reading is from the marvelous book of Wisdom. If you look in the Bible in the so-called wisdom literature, you have this book, you've got Proverbs, Sirach, and many [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our readings, the first reading from Genesis and the Gospel from Mark are super important, because they have to do with what we call technically Christian anthropology, the Christian or biblical understanding of who we [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the first reading and third reading today are wonderful because they have to do with, I think, a basic problem in the Church, which is the Church at war with itself. You know, mind you, the devil is the scatterer, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, why was the story of Jesus with the little children so vividly remembered by the first Christians? Verses of it appear in the three synoptic gospels and it's our gospel for this weekend. I think somehow they [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I guess, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread". I'm going to go once more into this great issue that has been a dividing Western Christianity since the Reformation: the issue of faith and works. I do [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our gospel for today is one of my favorites, and it's such a evocative scene, and it's one of Jesus' miracles. Now, that He was a wonder worker, I think, is undeniably true. It's one of the most basic [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we turn now from our Johannine hiatus. We were looking at chapter six of John's Gospel for the past several weeks. We return now to our reading of the Gospel of Mark, which we're doing during this liturgical [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the close of this great discourse of Jesus in the sixth chapter of John. The Church has been drawing us through this pivotal text, and we come to the conclusion. I mentioned last week it was, sort of, the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we're reading, of course, these weeks from the sixth chapter of John, this pivotal section of the New Testament where John lays out his Eucharistic theology, and we come today really to the sort of rhetorical high [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we're continuing our reading of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, all about the Eucharist, the source and summit of the Christian life. And we're looking at different dimensions of it. So it's a very [...]

Peace be with you, friends, we continue reading the 6th chapter of the Gospel of John. And we are in the midst of this great Eucharistic awakening in our country. It is important for us to pay attention to these passages from John 6, because each of [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, during the B-cycle of readings for the liturgical year, we always have this section during the summertime. We read, I think it's for five weeks, from the sixth chapter of John's Gospel, which is all about the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the readings for this Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time are very interesting the way they're kind of interwoven with each other. I want to start with Jeremiah. I want to go to the gospel, but then I want to circle [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, it's the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, and our gospel is from the 6th chapter of Mark. Mark the first Gospel, this rather spare, understated Gospel. But gosh, every part of it, precisely for that reason, is worth [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to do something I don't do that often, and that's to talk about the second reading. It's from Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians, and it's [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I mentioned last week that we're in the Gospel of Mark now in this liturgical cycle, and Mark is such a... He's a literary master, really. As I mentioned last time, there's something Hemingway-esque about [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, during this B-cycle of the liturgical readings, we're reading from the Gospel of Mark, and there's something about Mark that's just, I don't know, kind of bracing. It's the first of the Gospels. [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, people of faith just see things differently. People of faith see things differently. I don't mean that they're living in an illusory world. They see the world that's in front of them. They see what the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I’m not sure if you’re like me, but even though I love Lent and Easter and all the great festivities, it’s with a sense of relief that I return with the Church to Ordinary Time. And how wonderful now on this Tenth Sunday, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this great feast of Corpus Christi. So every year, right at the end of the whole Easter season, just before we turn back to ordinary time, we celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi. And of course, this year, as [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come once again to Trinity Sunday, the preacher’s nightmare, which should not be the preacher’s nightmare. Every Sunday is Trinity Sunday. What I want to do (and why not, it’s Trinity Sunday) is commit a little act of [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the Feast of Pentecost along with Christmas and Easter and the greatest feast in the church year. The great celebration of the Holy Spirit. We remember that great day when the Father and the Son sent the Holy [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the wonderful feast today of the Ascension of the Lord, a very important feast and one that has all sorts of interesting theological and spiritual implications. I want to draw your attention first, it's [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the Sixth Sunday of Easter. We're getting very close to Pentecost. So what the Church does, it gives us readings that are kind of hinting at the Holy Spirit, giving us a kind of foretaste of this great [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the fifth Sunday of Easter and, boy, the Gospel is so powerful from the Gospel of John because it speaks this truth, and I've talked about it a lot before, but it's what's distinctive really to [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the fourth Sunday of Easter, known as Good Shepherd Sunday because Jesus says in the gospel, listen, "I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep". Now, here's what I [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, last week we looked at the twentieth chapter of Saint John's Gospel, one of the great Resurrection appearances. And this week, on the Third Sunday of Easter, we have a passage from that magnificent twenty-fourth [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on the second Sunday of Easter, we have this marvelous inexhaustible reading from the 20th chapter of John. It's one of the accounts of the resurrection appearances of Jesus, and I've been preaching on this [...]

Peace be with you, and a very happy, very blessed Easter to everybody. So, we come to the climax of the Church's year, we come to the feast of feasts, we come to the very reason for being of Christianity. St.Paul said, "If the Lord has not [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, it is Palm Sunday and we have the great privilege on Palm Sunday to read every year one of the Passion narratives. And this year we're reading from the Gospel of Mark. So we read Mark's and the extraordinary [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, now on this Fifth Sunday of Lent, things are intensifying as these marvelous, spiritually packed readings come to a kind of climax. We're preparing for Holy Week, and so we're dealing with some of the most [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the Fourth Sunday of Lent, and I mentioned before, the readings are so rich for Lent, they always are. And we're meant to have kind of a heightened attention as we attend to these. And the reading for [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, the Church asks us to look at one of the really great texts in the Old Testament, namely, the Ten Commandments from the book of Exodus. I've said before that Lent's a time of [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the Second Sunday of Lent, and we're on I call it both dangerous and very holy ground because the Church is giving us twenty-second chapter of Genesis. The ancient Israelites referred to it as the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent. I've said this many times before. It's like going back to spiritual basics during Lent, and the readings the Church proposes for this holy season are always remarkably [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we continue reading from the marvelous Gospel of Mark. We're still in chapter 1 as we make our way through it. And this is that marvelous passage about Jesus curing a leper. Listen: "A leper came to Jesus and [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we continue our reading of the magnificent Gospel of Mark, and the scene for today is terrific, but the church gives us as the first reading a passage from Deuteronomy, and it's very important that we get this right [...]