Bishop Robert Barron Word on Fire
September 13, 2026
24th Sunday of Year A
Follow along using the infographics and transcripts below.
Click Graphic to Enlarge
Belonging to the Lord: The Heart of Revelation
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. Today we are reading from the very end of Romans, Romans 14. I wonder if you could put this statement up wherever you would see it—on your refrigerator, on your computer screen? Listen: “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.”
I think, in many ways, the whole Bible—the whole of revelation—is summed up in this statement: “None of us lives for oneself.” When I spoke about justification last week, I referred to that line from Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” It is not the old self that lived for itself. That is gone; Paul considers that rubbish. It is Christ who lives in me. I belong to somebody else. It is not my mind and its prerogatives, my will and its desires, my inclinations that matter. It is what Christ is thinking, willing, and acting in me. I am not my own, and Paul says that too: “You have been bought at a price.” You do not belong to yourself.
Click Graphic to Enlarge
The Cultural Myth of Self-Ownership and the Call to Metanoia
Now, the reason I say this is so important for us is: can you see how everything in our culture militates against this? I think that is why Christianity is struggling in our world today. We say the opposite: “No, no, it is your life. You decide; you choose. It is all about finding your voice, asserting your prerogatives.” Everywhere you listen and everywhere you look in the culture, you find the same message: you belong to yourself, and you have had it with other people telling you what to do.
The Bible, however, is calling for a revolution, a conversion, a metanoia. That is the word we find in the New Testament, metanoeo—going beyond the mind you have. The mind we have now in our culture is clearly: “I belong to myself. I am my own project.” No, you belong to another.
Click Graphic to Enlarge
Rites of Passage: Stripping the Child of Self-Regard
I might have referenced this before with you, but Richard Rohr has done work on the initiation rituals of primal peoples, and I find it very illuminating. Across cultures and around the world, there is a similarity in the way young men especially are initiated into manhood and adulthood. It always involves a kind of stripping away of the self-regarding child and moving that child into the far greater space of powers that transcend him.
Typically, a young man is ripped away from his home—perhaps in the middle of the night, taken out of his sleep. He is scarified in some way: a tooth is knocked out, or his face is scarred. He is physically marked. He is initiated into the lore and history of the tribe. Then, in a culminating moment, he is brought out into nature—whether it is the tundra or the jungle, depending on the geography—and told to survive. He has to make his way. Only having survived this natural challenge, coming into contact with the power of God, is he to return to the tribe and function as an adult.
Rohr sums this up—and I want to juxtapose it to Paul’s observation—in these principles: “The initiation ritual is meant to tell the young man, first, life is hard. Secondly, you are not that important. Thirdly, you are not in control. Fourthly, you are going to die. And finally, your life is not about you.” Each one of those, even as I say them—and I have said them before—strikes a chord of resistance in me, and I bet you have the same experience.
Click Graphic to Enlarge
The Trap of Permanent Adolescence
Think of this now in comparison to the attitude of a child. “Life is hard.” Well, not for a child; life is easy. He is being taken care of. People are bringing him food, sheltering him, and keeping him warm or cool. “You are not that important.” A child thinks he is very important; he is the center of his parents’ attention, and the world seems to revolve around him and his needs. “You are not in control.” A child can cry, make a funny face, or smile, and parents bring him what he wants; he seems very much in control. “You are going to die.” A little child is probably not even aware of the fact of death. “Your life is not about you.” Tell that to a child! His life is all about him, meeting his needs and desires.
The very point of initiation rituals is to shake us out of that consciousness. As long as you live in that little world, you will not be fully alive; you will be permanently a child, or at best an adolescent. You will never enter into the adventure of being a true human being because you will remain in the small, well-lighted space of your own self-regard. How dull that is for an adult. That is why the initiation ritual performs this painful work. The scarification or the knocking out of a tooth serves as a permanent, bodily reminder that life is hard, you are going to die, and your life is not about you. Rather, it is about the family and tribe to which you belong, the natural world of which you are a small part, and ultimately about God and God’s great purpose for you.
Our culture right now is stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence: excessive self-regard, self-justification, safe spaces, protecting the ego, asserting “don’t tell me what to think or do,” and disaffiliating from the churches. I know everyone is full of righteous indignation about corruption in the Church, and God knows that has existed from the beginning. But spiritually speaking, it is very dangerous to disaffiliate from this transcendent source of meaning. Nothing will lock you into place more disastrously than a disaffiliation from God.
Click Graphic to Enlarge
The Heroic Path of Self-Transcendence
One way to look at this is as the treasure buried in the field that Paul speaks of: discovering that you do not belong to yourself. When you discover your moral purpose—that you are here to serve something way beyond your little ego and its needs—that is when you come to life. That is why you sell everything you have to buy that field. That is the pearl of great price. You think you will find fulfillment in the worldly goods that serve the ego—wealth, pleasure, honor, and power—but pursuing only those keeps you an advanced adolescent serving adolescent ends.
Think of all the hero stories we love in popular culture. Setting aside the special effects and computer graphics, what do those stories hinge upon? They are about a self-regarding person living in a small spiritual space who breaks free precisely through love and service to higher goods and powers. Only when you break out of self-regard to serve your family, community, wider society, or the purposes of God do you become a hero who can truly help others.
The permanent adolescence of our society is causing immense breakdown because people caught in an ego-driven feedback loop fail to accomplish the mission they were given. Safe spaces represent a childish desire for comfort. While basic psychological safety is necessary, a religion that places before our eyes Someone nailed to a cross does not put a premium on mere safety. We place a premium on spiritual adventure: following God’s will, embracing the inherent danger, requiring real courage, enduring hardship, and accepting that life is not about ourselves.
Click Graphic to Enlarge
The Christian Alternative to Autonomous Culture
I will close with this. When I was out in California during a debate over euthanasia, I saw a large billboard along the highway that read: “My life. My death. My choice.” That captures our modern culture.
Consider how tiny that spiritual space is, and how repugnant it is to what we hear in Romans 14: “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.”
What is the Christian answer to that billboard? It is not my life. It is not my death. It is not my choice. I have been bought at a price, and I belong to a higher power: Jesus Christ living His life in me. That is the true invitation to spiritual maturity and spiritual adventure.
God bless you.
YouTube transcript edited for readability by removing fillers, stumbles, and false starts while strictly preserving the homily’s original cadence and theological accuracy. Infographics and discussion questions are independently produced by TWTW and have no affiliation with Word on Fire.