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 [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I never want to pass up the opportunity to preach on the book of the prophet Jonah. I know I've done it before, you've heard me on it. But there's something inexhaustible about Jonah, and though it's a [...]

Peace be with you. Well, friends, we've come through the Christmas season, and we commence now with the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. And our first reading is just one of my favorites in the Old Testament. It's from the First Book of [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this wonderful Feast of the Epiphany, and that great accountant in the Gospel of Matthew, of the journey of the Magi, of the three kings. What is it about that story that's so beguiled the poets, and the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to Holy Family Sunday today, wonderful feast day. And over the years, I've certainly preached on the dynamics of the Holy Family. I've preached on Mary. I've talked a lot about the Lord, of course. [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, falling this year on the very day before Christmas, and the Church invites us to think a lot today about David. Now, as I've said many times to you, you can't [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this Third Sunday of Advent, the Church asks us to focus on John the Baptist, who of course is one of the great Advent figures. I might've shared this with you before, but my mind always goes back to one of my [...]

Peace be with you. "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York". The famous opening line of "Richard III", the Duke of Gloucester expressing his disappointment over his situation. That line in [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this first Sunday of Advent to the liturgical New Year. And I've said this before, but advent's a time to get back to basics, like an athlete returning to the basic training. Some of the most [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is taken from the marvelous book of Proverbs. You can find that in your Bibles right after the book of Psalms. It's part of the so-called "wisdom literature," so these [...]

Peace, be with you. Friends, what is it about mountains that's just so compelling to us? Now, maybe it's because I'm from Chicago, where everything is flat, but whenever I've seen mountains, I'm just drawn to them. I [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, if you've been following these sermons of mine the past couple of months, you know I've been focusing very much on the first readings coming up out of the Old Testament, because I think we Catholics especially [...]

Peace be with you. The parable that's at the heart of our Gospel today from Matthew 20 is one that I love, because based on thirty-seven years of preaching, it's one of those passages in the New Testament that really bothers people. I [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, last week I spoke about Paul to the Romans, this great text, this marvelous text by the first great theologian of the Church. And today we're reading from the very end of Romans, Romans 14. I wonder if you could put [...]

Peace be with you. They say, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread". Well, I'm going to rush in today to some stormy waters by looking at what really was the central issue of the Protestant Reformation, the divide between [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, whenever I have the chance, I love to preach on the prophet Jeremiah. And our first reading for this weekend is from the twentieth chapter of Jeremiah. There's obviously, in Jeremiah, so much spiritual wisdom and all [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, today I want to do something I don't usually do, which is to preach on the second reading. During these last several weeks, we've been reading from Paul's Letter to the Romans. And maybe in another year I [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel today is from Matthew chapter 15, the famous story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman. Now, I've found in my years of preaching, this is one of those Gospels that bothers people. They come up to you [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for today is from the wonderful fourteenth chapter of Matthew, and it's his account of the calming of the storm and the walking on the water. This is an event that reached very deeply into the hearts and [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, it's a wonderful grace that the Feast of the Transfiguration this year falls on Sunday. So we're going to, as our Sunday readings, examine this marvelous event from the life of Jesus that has so captivated the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading is from the First Book of Kings, and it's one of my favorite passages in the entire Old Testament. And it's one that I think, if you're going on a retreat anytime soon, you're even [...]