Friends, we return now to Ordinary Time, and this Sunday, we hear the marvelous story of the wedding feast at Cana from the Gospel of John. It's as though, as we commence the ordinary liturgical year, we're meant to see everything through the lens of this reading. The Church sets it up with our first reading from the prophet Isaiah, who speaks of God’s desire to marry his people. Jesus, in his own person, is the marriage of divinity and humanity, and therefore it’s appropriate symbolically that the first of his signs would take place at a wedding.

Friends, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is exceptionally important. All four Gospels talk about it, and John the Baptist is a kind of door we have to go through to understand Jesus properly. What was John the Baptist doing in the desert? Why did the Messiah, the Lord, go to him for a baptism of repentance? And why do we still spend time with this strange, puzzling, and even embarrassing event?

Friends, we’re all familiar with the story of the three wise men, which has been depicted in thousands of Christmas cards. And there is something romantic and charming about it. But on this great Feast of the Epiphany, I want to develop an important angle of the story very much on the minds of many people today—namely, the whole problem of religion and science.

Friends, I always love preaching on the Feast of the Holy Family because I think the biblical message here is very surprising. We say the Bible is associated with family values, and indeed it is, but they're probably not the ones we would automatically think of. We see this in the two stories that the Church brings to our attention today: the story of Hannah leaving Samuel at the temple in Shiloh, and the story of Mary and Joseph finding Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem.

Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, we come to the Advent figure par excellence: the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. What I want to do in this homily is to look at some of the Church’s classical titles of Mary. These are not simply pious exclamations, but rather very substantive insights into her role in bringing Christ to birth—both in history and in us today.

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Advent, called Gaudete Sunday, I want to draw attention to our second reading, which is from St. Paul to the Philippians. These lines about joy, anxiety, prayer, and peace can run right through our minds, but they’re actually breathtaking, and they open up something at the very heart of the spiritual life.

Friends, in our readings for the Second Sunday of Advent, there is a lot of talk about building highways. In the Bible, both Old Testament and New, we find the theme of exile. Very often, Israel finds itself sent away from its own Promised Land, and a great hope is that one day, the exiles will return home on a highway that God has built. This is a symbol of spiritual exile—and to meet the highway that God has prepared, we have to do some preparation ourselves.

Friends, we come to the First Sunday of Advent, which is the commencement of the new liturgical year. “Adventus” in Latin means arrival or coming, and one way to look at Advent is to see three comings of Christ. There is the coming of Christ in history in Bethlehem, the coming of Christ now as he approaches our hearts, and the coming of Christ someday in the future. All three of these dimensions belong to our Advent preparation.

Friends, we come to the end of the liturgical year with the Feast of Christ the King, where we meditate upon the kingly reign or rule of Christ. Now, we in the modern liberal West have a hard time with kings; we like democratic polities. The United States emerged out of a great rebellion against the king. But we should get over this modern hang-up, because kingship—from Adam all the way up to Christ—is a basic biblical idea. And the importance of today’s feast is that it forces a decision about which king we follow.

Friends, we're coming toward the end of the liturgical year, and as is typical, the Church gives us readings of an apocalyptic nature dealing with the end times. “Apocalypse” means “unveiling,” and what’s being unveiled in our readings is the emergence of a new world—not so much in the literal, cosmic sense as in the sense of how we navigate and understand the world. Something has fallen apart; the old world has given way. 

Friends, our first reading is that wonderful story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, which is a kind of hidden gem in the Old Testament. Like so many of the stories in the Bible, it is very understated, but chock full of spiritual meaning. And it has to do with how we respond—and the strange and surprising ways God might respond to us— when things are toughest.