Homilies
Homilies
November 30, 2025
November 30, 2025
First Sunday of Advent (Year A)
Bishop Robert Barron
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
2001 ၊၊||၊ Podcast
The Lord’s Holy Mountain
As we commence a new liturgical year, the Church invites us to survey the world from the standpoint of Isaiah’s holy mountain, the height to which all the nations stream. This is a beautiful image of “”communio,”” of the many gathered around the one, and it is reflective of the fundamental “”communio”” which is the Trinity, three persons constituting the one God. When we look at things from this perspective, we see them aright.
2007 ၊၊||၊ Podcast
Incoming!
Advent is from the latin word adventus, which means coming or arrival. Some arrivals are positive; others are downright threatening. The Gospel for today paints a somewhat dark picture of the coming of the Son of Man, likening it to the flood of Noah. When Christ comes, we have to change, and that’s often wrenching.
2019 ၊၊||၊ Podcast
Getting the House in Order
We come once again to Advent, the beginning of the liturgical year and the great season of waiting. Christian life has a permanent Advent quality, for we are always expecting the coming of the Lord. Now, Jesus came, he will definitively come, and he is coming even now—for the risen Lord wants to take up residence in us today. So Advent is, perhaps most immediately, a preparation for that coming; we are getting ourselves ready to receive the Christ who wants, even now, to be born in us. Well, how do we do this? Our readings for this first Sunday of Advent give us some wonderful instruction.
An Advent Challenge
Happy New Year’s Day! We come today to the beginning of a new liturgical year—the First Sunday of Advent. There is a sort of a permanent Advent quality, a vigil quality, to the Christian life. We are waiting, watching; we want something we don’t fully have. And as we prepare for the coming of the Lord, our Advent challenge is this: What is our “highest mountain”? Where do we offer worship? If it is not the mountain of the Lord—if we have fallen into a spiritual sleep—now is the time to wake up and stay awake, to get our lives in order, to stop making excuses.
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Deacon Greg’s blog has garnered some 20 million readers from around the world since its inception in 2007.
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
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I once preached a homily in which I bemoaned the tendency to merge Advent and Christmas into one vaguely wintery holiday blur we might as well call “Chradvent.” It’s all the same, isn’t it? Might as well start early, right? Well, no.
These weeks before Christmas are intended to make that singular holiday — and singular holy day — matter. Advent sets the stage, calling us to “prepare the way,” building in our hearts a sense of yearning, anticipation and joyful hope.
— originally preached in 2019
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Deacon Peter McCulloch
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
RAEGAN KELLY (03:10)
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Waiting is not the useless in-between time we often think it is. We may find it challenging, but that’s only because God is using it to weave blessing, beauty and wisdom into our lives. If we resist these things, we are the ones who miss out. Today we begin the season of Advent, and Advent is essentially all about waiting – waiting for the coming of Christ into our lives at Christmas. In these four weeks we are all encouraged to take time out to reflect on our lives, to pray and seek the sacraments, and to think about all the suffering in the world around us.
Neo in the Matrix Wakes Up Scene (02:56)
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This is the Advent invitation for us all: to let the Holy Spirit wake us up from our sleep of selfishness, distraction and routine – to see life anew in the light of Jesus Christ.
There’s a similar message in a very different story – The Matrix. At the start of this movie, Neo lives in a comfortable illusion. Everything seems normal, but it’s all a lie. Everyone is living in a simulated reality created by intelligent machines. Then a message arrives on his computer screen: ‘Wake up, Neo.’ He’s intrigued and starts following the clues to find out what’s really going on.
When Neo does finally wake up, he discovers that the world he thought was real was just an elaborate dream. And he’s forced to choose between comfort and truth, between staying asleep or waking up to reality.
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1st Sunday of Advent (A)
Not Just for Christmas
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First Sunday of Advent. Fr Toby Lees encourages us to make Advent the time when we finally emerge into the light.
‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas’ sings Perry Como/Bing Crosby/Michael Bublé . . . pick your favourite, or perhaps least ghastly. I’m not a fan . . . of the song . . . I like Christmas a lot! But by the First Sunday Advent it’s been looking a lot like Christmas for quite some time, and though the readings warn of being caught unawares by the Second Coming, you’d have to be living in a bunker with no Wi-Fi or TV to get caught out by the coming of Christmas. Now, at this point, I could go into one of those grumbling homilies about how we’ve lost any sense of anticipation, how we no longer take time to prepare to celebrate, and that when the celebration arrives we’re jaded and it ends far too soon. I’ve given that homily before, it didn’t inspire me much, and I’ve already repeated enough of it here.
First Sunday of Advent. Fr John Farrell reminds us that Advent is for adults.
In this season of Christ coming to us, we celebrate three advents. The first is in history, and here John the Baptist looms large in the second and third Sundays of Advent with his call for acknowledgement of sin and repentance. The fourth Sunday, and the last seven days before Christmas, have gospel readings from Matthew and Luke on the events leading up to the birth of Christ. The second coming of Christ at the end of time is the theme of the Gospel of this first Sunday.
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Dicastery for the Clergy
Pope Leo XIV
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Fr. Joe Jagodensky, SDS
Fr. Joe Jagodensky, SDS
Priest of the
MIlwaukee Archdiocese
A Roman Catholic priest since 1980 and a member of the Society of the Divine Savior (Salvatorians). His six books on the Catholic church and U.S. culture are available on Amazon.com.
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
Advent
Growth is rarely is welcomed and easy and change frightens the heebie-jeebies within is. Similar to a caterpillar on its way to becoming a butterfly, it can be troubling and distressing. A chrysalis needs sympathetic understanding, so we should be gentle and patient with ourselves as much as we are with others.
This too long season can be hard to live through, this cold winter of the spirit. When you know yourself to be sterile, helpless, unable to deal creatively with your situation or change your own heart, you regonize your need for a Savior. Now you know what Advent is all about.
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Fr. Austin Fleming
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
Advent is a season to prepare for,
to rehearse for meeting Jesus.
In a crèche in our living room or at church?
Yes, there too.
But more importantly to prepare ourselves to meet Jesus
day in and day out so that when he comes,
on that day, at that hour unknown to us,
we will be ready to meet him and his judgment.
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Fr. Carmen Mele, O.P.
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
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Downton Abbey, the hugely successful television drama, tells of an aristocratic family living in an old English monastery with many servants. In the first episode, a middle-class man is having coffee with his mother. This man is passed a letter with the news that he is the heir to the abbey. His mother asks him what the letter says. He replies, “Our lives are going to change.” It is true because henceforth they are going to live in luxury. In the gospel today Jesus says that the lives of his disciples will change as suddenly and completely as this man’s.
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Fr. Charles E. Irvin
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
Heightened Awareness
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We often speak of Advent as being a season of time in which we prepare for the Lord’s coming into our lives. Perhaps we should see it as a season of heightened awareness, for the truth is that we should be looking for God already at work in our lives every day. God is always offering Himself to us. We, however, are not always responding because we’re not paying attention. Advent is a time to conscientiously, deliberately, and with awareness respond to His offer of Himself to us. We have to “see the Light,” so to speak.
Fr. George Smiga
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
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2004 HOMILY – There is a saying in architecture, “First we shape the building and then the building shapes us.” This insight points to an interplay–a give and take–between ourselves and the spaces we inhabit. Buildings don’t just happen, someone shapes them, someone designs them, someone decides how many rooms there will be, how many windows, how much open space. But, once those decisions are made and we live in the buildings, the buildings then shape us. They influence our lives either for good or for ill. What is true about buildings is also true about traditions. We shape our traditions. But then our traditions shape us. Our decisions about what we are going to do or not do, how we’re going to gather with other people are decisions we make. But once we put them into practice they influence us and help shape who we are as people. As in architecture, there is a give and take; an interplay between ourselves and our traditions.
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Father Kevin Rettig
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
A young clerk’s kindness to an elderly couple in a stormy Philadelphia hotel led to an unexpected reward: management of the magnificent Waldorf Astoria. This story illustrates that while rigid expectations lead to disappointment, an open heart leads to joy. By viewing every moment as a mysterious gift rather than a specific demand, we awaken to life’s greatest surprise: the realization that through it all, we have been outrageously and relentlessly loved by God.
The Sin of Not Noticing
Fr. Ruttig’s homily explores sacrificial love through the Cross. It confronts our tendency to feel that God is distant in our pain and reveals the Cross as God’s defin
Monsignor Peter Hahn
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
The Grace of Waiting
Modern culture often views waiting as an agitation, yet Advent invites us to transform it into an opportunity for grace. While we prepare for Christmas, Msgr. Hahn speaks of the season’s deeper purpose which is to train us for the “profound waiting” for Christ’s Second Coming. St. Paul warns us, Msgr. Hahn says, against the distractions of consumerism, urging us instead to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Through prayer and the sacraments, we must actively prepare our hearts, anticipating His return with the focused joy of a bride and groom.
The Shadow vs. the Reality
While we spend days meticulously planning Thanksgiving dinners, Advent calls us to an even greater work: preparing for the “Greatest Love,” the return of Christ. Thanksgiving and other earthly celebrations are merely “shadows” or partial glimpses of the eternal joy found in God’s presence. The homily warns against spiritual ambivalence, urging us to heed Jesus’ command to “Stay Awake.” We must “put on the Lord Jesus” and make no provision for the flesh, treating every day—and especially the Eucharist—as a rehearsal for the ultimate event of our lives: meeting Christ in glory.
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Msgr. Joseph Pellegrino
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
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This provocative homily argues that institutions like the UN are destined to struggle because lasting peace is impossible without the “King of Peace.” Msgr. Pelligrino challenges us to stop sleepwalking through life like the people of Noah’s day—who weren’t necessarily evil, just too busy and “unconcerned” to notice the flood coming. From the battlefields of history to the awkward moment when a visitor takes “your” seat at Christmas Mass, discover why your small acts of kindness are actually frontline maneuvers in the ultimate battle for the Kingdom of God.
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1st Sunday of Advent (A)
The first weeks of Advent focus more on the Lord’s second coming in glory than on His first coming at Bethlehem. The gospel clearly states that we must always be prepared, for at an hour we do not expect, the Son of Man will come. “Ready” is the key word, but how should we be ready?
The second reading from today’s Mass (Romans 13:11-14) gives us a basic recipe for readiness. We can distinguish five fundamental instructions in Paul’s recipe.
I. Wake up
II. Clean up
III. Sober up
IV. Lighten up
V. Dress up
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Fr. Michael Chua
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
The world in which we live is in a time of anticipation. A world where we are still searching and anticipating a cure to cancer, an antidote to war, a solution to the problem of evil and suffering. Despite years of technological advancement and research, social, economic and political experiments, successes and failures, we are nowhere near to finding a perfect solution to everything. Yes, our world is incomplete and it waits with eagerness for that completion, for that perfection, for that great closure to all the open ended issues we are still facing.
For us Christians, we believe our human history did not begin with the Big Bang or the first spark of evolution, and neither will it end in global annihilation with every life snuffed out, either by nuclear holocaust or destruction wreaked by catastrophic climate change. No, we Christians, believe that both our beginning and ending is to be found in God.
What does it mean to be ready and watchful? It means, we look beyond the present to the future coming of Christ and His kingdom. It means, the present should be understood in the light of the coming Kingdom. It means, that all aspects of the Church’s life, our personal life, should be oriented towards the coming of Christ and the coming of His Kingdom.
Christ will return in glory at the end of time to judge the living and the dead. There will be a resurrection of the body, and God’s justice and mercy will be fully revealed. This is the true meaning of the end of the world—not fear of cosmic disaster but confident hope in the ultimate triumph of our Lord Jesus Christ. Rather than becoming preoccupied with signs and speculations, Catholics are called to live in a state of grace, anchored in the sacraments, guided by Sacred Scripture, and sustained by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. We do not need to fear the end. We belong to a Church that already knows how the story ends: Christ is victorious as He was “in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”
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Fr. Jude Thaddeus Langeh, CMF
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
Father Geoffrey Plant
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
Stay Awake!
During the liturgical season of Advent we’re looking in two directions. We look back two thousand years, to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. And we look forward to the final coming of Christ at the end of time. Today’s Gospel is looking forward to the final coming of Christ. We are reminded that “As it was in Noah’s day, so will be the coming of the Son of man.” We must therefore “Stay awake!”
Additional Sunday Homilies & Resources
1st Sunday of Advent (A)
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