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 our [...]

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 feast of [...]

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 Christianity. [...]

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 find [...]

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 chapter [...]

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 matter for 38 [...]

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 been [...]

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 thing is [...]

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 sacred texts in [...]

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 getting back to [...]

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 good and [...]

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 I [...]

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 very short book, [...]

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 Samuel, the [...]

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. But it occurred [...]

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 understand [...]

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 fundamental truths [...]

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 texts [...]

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 remember the very first time 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 aren't that [...]

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 could pick out [...]

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 this [...]

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 Protestants [...]

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 of [...]

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 could just focus [...]

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 minds [...]

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 minds of [...]

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 spending some time in [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we're reading during these weeks of summer from the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel, which is just a masterpiece. It contains many of the great parables of Jesus, and these were just a typical form of teaching. Jesus [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading and our Gospel are about the word of God today. I love how Pope Francis recently has called us to a deeper appropriation and appreciation for the word of God. And the dynamics now, both from God's side [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the gospel for this weekend is marvelous, from the 11th chapter of Matthew, and it contains the passage that Père Lagrange, one of the great Catholic biblical scholars of the last century, referred to, as quote, [...]

Peace be with you. You know, friends, something that I find really puzzling: whenever people say, "Old Christianity, ordinary old-fashioned, everyday old Christianity". The one thing Christianity is not is runof-the-mill or ordinary. In [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the readings for today are really magnificent, and they are all about something central to the spiritual life, namely, fear. Now, what do I mean? Well, years ago I was on a retreat and the retreat director said, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, as we resume Ordinary Time, we come to this Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about vocations. Vocations specifically to the priesthood. It's not something I talk about that often in these Sunday [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to this marvelous feast, it happens every June, this feast of Corpus Christi, of the Body of Christ, the Body and Blood of the Lord. It's been on my mind a lot, because as I record these words, we're having a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, today we come to Trinity Sunday. I know, I know, the preacher's nightmare, but as you probably know from previous sermons of mine, I don't agree with that at all. I think every Sunday is Trinity Sunday. The Trinity names [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this great feast of Pentecost, the culmination of the Easter season, the feast that along with Easter and Christmas is the most important in the Church year, and it's sort of par excellence the feast of the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the great Feast of the Ascension of the Lord, now right at the end of the Easter season in anticipation of Pentecost, and I'll explain that connection. I love this feast, and I think we should do a little [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the Sixth Sunday of Easter, which means we're coming toward the end of the Easter season, which means coming close to the great feast of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit. So the Church gives us a kind [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we continue this wonderful journey through the Acts of the Apostles during this Easter season. And the reading for today, the first reading, is from the sixth chapter of Acts. It has to do with the choosing of the first [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we continue our journey through the Easter season. And for this Fourth Sunday of Easter, we have this magnificent first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. It's one of Peter's great kerygmatic speeches. The kerygma [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this Third Sunday of Easter, and our Gospel is what N.T. Wright calls the masterpiece within the masterpiece. He means the whole twenty-fourth chapter of Luke is a masterpiece, but within that, we find this [...]