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 [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we are continuing our celebration of the Easter season on this Second Sunday of Easter, Mercy Sunday. Divine mercy. What's mercy? St. Thomas Aquinas says it's compassion in regard to someone else's suffering. So to speak [...]

Peace be with you. Alleluia. Alleluia. Happy Easter to everybody. Just a few weeks ago, I was in London giving a series of talks, and I had a public conversation with the popular historian Tom Holland. Tom Holland's written a number of books about [...]

Peace be with you. We come, of course, today to Palm Sunday, where the Church reads from one of the great Passion narratives from the synoptic Gospels, this year from St. Matthew. If you look back at my archive of sermons, you'll see I've preached [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the Fifth Sunday of Lent and just this magnificent series of marvelous readings from the Gospel of John. Now as a kind of climax we come to the story of the raising of Lazarus. As I mentioned before in the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the Fourth Sunday of Lent and just one of the most magnificent stories in the Gospel of John. I've said it many times before: John is a theological master, of course, but also a literary master. And these [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, we're again getting back to spiritual basics, and reading one and reading three both focus on this symbol of water. Now, I've talked to you before about water in the Bible as a negative [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on this Second Sunday of Lent, we again, going back to spiritual basics, have some marvelous readings, one from the book of Genesis about the call of Abram and then the marvelous account of the Transfiguration. I had a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent, our preparation for Easter. Lent, I've often said, is a time to get back to basics. It's like when you're starting the football season and you get back to fundamentals. It's when [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we continue our reading of the marvelous Sermon on the Mount. We're in the heart of chapter 5. Can I just recommend to you? Get out your Bibles. Matthew 5, 6, and 7 is the central teaching of Jesus. Probably what he would [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we've had the privilege now of reading from the Sermon on the Mount, and we'll continue for the next couple of weeks. What an extraordinary experience it is, just to hear from Jesus himself as he lays out his basic [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, these weeks we're reading from the marvelous Sermon on the Mount, chapters five, six, and seven of the Gospel of Matthew. For your spiritual reading anytime of the day or night, go to those three chapters, and you see the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we have one of the great passages in the New Testament today for our reading, namely the Beatitudes, taken from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, so the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. I'm going to go [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to one of my favorite feasts of the year, the Feast of Epiphany. Epiphany, from a Greek word meaning "intense appearance". "Phanein" means "to appear" in Greek, and [...]

Peace be with you. Happy New Year's Day, in the secular sense, but also the Feast of Mary, the Mother of God, on this January 1st. There are three words from our Gospel, it's from Luke, I've always loved. These three words I want to reflect on. The [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the Third Sunday of Advent, and it always strikes me as we move through Advent what an Isaian season it is. We hear week after week from the prophet Isaiah during Advent. We heard a couple weeks ago about the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on the Second Sunday of Advent, the Church gives us the great Advent figure of John the Baptist. Can I give you an image now to meditate on during Advent? Go online and look up "Chartres Cathedral north porch statue [...]

Peace be with you, and Happy New Year's Day. We come today to the beginning of the liturgical year, the First Sunday of Advent. What is it about Advent? I've always loved it. To me, it's a very spiritually powerful season. And it might be because [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the great feast of Christ the King, which is always the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Think of the king coming at the end of a long procession into his palace. Well, this is Christ the King at the end of [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, as we come toward the end of the liturgical year, we begin to look at more apocalyptic readings and writings in the Bible. End of the liturgical year, end of the world. As I've said though to you before, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading and our gospel for this weekend have a special resonance for our time I think, because they both speak clearly about life after death. Now I say it has resonance for our time, because there's coming more [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I'd like to begin today by looking at our first reading, from the Book of Wisdom. It makes an extraordinarily important observation that's of both theological and philosophical significance. In light of that, I'm going to [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our second reading this week is from Paul's Second Letter to Timothy. I think a couple weeks ago, I spoke on First Timothy, and I mentioned to you how the scholars are divided. Some say that Paul wrote these letters, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this Sunday is one of my favorites. It's from the book of Exodus, and it's about a battle between Israel and the Amalekites. And you'll say, "Well, that's of maybe mild interest to specialist [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for the Sunday is a little section of the marvelous story of Naaman the Syrian. You can find it in the second Book of Kings in the cycle of stories about Elisha, the prophet. Now it's not really a well [...]