Fr. Brendan McGuire - Podcasts that Break open the Word of God

The challenge is that we often do not want to listen to the Holy Spirit. We want our own opinion, and we want to what we want to do. What makes us as a church and institution different is that we promise that we are going to listen to the Holy Spirit. But this institution is more than just an institution. This church we do, we live. It is we, the body of Christ. We, the people of God, are the church. We are all called to listen to this Holy Spirit, to unify us together in all that we do in every day living. (Read more…)Here is my homily email from the Sixth Sunday of Easter. Please feel free to share this email with others.

Jesus is talking about how they will know us by who we are. They will know that you are followers if you love one another, or if you see this constant behavior in your life. They will recognize in your behavior that you are a follower and a believer in me. You see, it is not enough just to believe in Jesus Christ. We have to become followers of Jesus Christ, and that requires action, and those actions need to be consistent with who we claim to follow, Christ. And the question is then, how do we do this? What does this look like? (Read more…)Here is my homily email from the Fifth Sunday of Easter. Please feel free to share this email with others.

We all just know our mother's voice. It is not that we are not unfamiliar with it. It is just that we may not always be paying attention to it. In the same way, we all know God's voice in our own life. We may just not be paying attention to it. We may not be hearing what we are called to hear. And here is the interesting thing, we can be busy about many good things in this world and still miss still miss the voice of the Lord, because we are not attuned to it. We are busy with lots of good things. (Read more…) Here is my homily email from the Fourth Sunday of Easter. This week I am away at our diocesan Clergy Study Week. Please keep me and all of the priests in your prayers. Please feel free to share this email with others.

The reality is in all of our lives, we sometimes wander from the trail of life, in this journey of life, we do miss a sign or two. We get thrown off, and we follow a path that takes us to a place where we may sometimes take us a little time to figure out that we were down the wrong path. But then all we have to do is work our way back to that sign, the sign that points to God's love, and that sign is Jesus Christ in the world. (Read more…)Here is my homily email from the Third Sunday of Easter. This was the First Communion Mass for our children, so I was preaching to the children directly in the first part of the homily. Please keep these children in your prayers and please feel free to share it with others.

No matter what, it is always better to be a person of the truth, and if you make mistakes, to tell the truth, to hold yourself accountable to that. It is not always easy to tell the truth or be a person of the truth because there is a certain amount of shame. But believe me, there is greater shame that comes from a lie when you do not tell the truth. (Read more…)Here is my homily email from the Second Sunday of Easter. Please feel free to share it with others.

Pope Francis called the whole church with that sense of calling us back to the roots of who we are. He kept on bringing us back to Jesus. He kept on calling us back to primarily God's mercy, his love, and his joy. I always remember his first letter to us, the Gospel of Joy. He talked about how important it is to be men and women of joy. And he has lived that in his papacy over these long years. He brought us back to the heart of Jesus. (Read more…)On Monday we learned of the passing of Pope Francis and we held a memorial Mass for him here at St. Simon. So here is a special edition of my homily email from that Mass. Please feel free to share it with others. And stay tuned for more events as we move this this transition of our Church.

We are called to let the light of Christ shine not only on us and within us, but from us, so that others can see that they have the grace, the gem of grace within them. These luminous minerals that we have in rocks are like the luminous grace of God within us. We are called to shine the light of Christ on others. It is not enough that we just celebrate here together with all of us who believe, we have to become the light in the world. (Read more…)Alleluia! He is risen! - Here is my Homily from the Easter Vigil. Please feel free to share it with others!

To watch a hopeless death is one to be avoided at all costs. But Christianity has a response. It may not be the answer we want, but it does have a response. Let me offer it to you because it is about what happens today. This is the response: it says first of all that not only God recognizes the suffering and the pain, and he does not remain at a distance. He enters into the suffering and the pain. He becomes one of us, and he accompanies us. He becomes one of us to the point of death on a cross. (Read more…)

My friends, tonight is about service. Can we find a way to serve some other person in our community who feel completely left out? Some neighbor who feels estranged, maybe have lost a spouse, there is nowhere else to go. Can we love them where they are and get down low and serve them and realize that this is a new perspective for us. (Read more…)Here is my homily for Holy Thursday - Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper. Please feel free to share this with others.Join us tonight at 7:00pm here at St. Simon for the Living Stations of the Cross and Communion Service.

The scriptures are a collection of defining moments for the Jewish and the Christian people. They have been put together for the most defining moments of our history. The Gospels are collection of defining moments of Jesus' life. And today's Gospel is a bevy of collective and of defining moments. We have multitude of them, not only just for Jesus, but for others. (Read more…) Here is my homily for Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion. Please feel free to share this with others. Many prayers for all of us as we enter the holiest week of our church year.God Bless, Fr. Brendan

Today, more than ever, we need to be people who are willing to show up, to show up and not save people, not to rescue them, but to be present to them in the midst their suffering. Whether it be from a divorce or whether it be from a rejection of their family, or whether they are immigrants and they feel no longer welcomed, or whether they feel left out on the sides of society. Our job is to show up, to show the loving presence of God to them. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Please feel free to share this with others.

All of us have made mistakes. We have all done something that was wrong, whether a little thing when we were a child or something older. We will always remember how we were treated in that moment of shame, that moment of being caught. That moment can shame us and maim us, or it can transform us into something much better, something more profound. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Please feel free to share this with others.

Our lives have become so busy and even about the good things, we can be so busy, we miss God speaking to us at these liminal moments where God is trying to say something different than what we want to hear. It might be saying something challenging that we do not want to hear. It is those moments when we are called to pause like Moses and approach it and take courage to lean in and to move closer to this space. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the third Sunday of Lent. Please feel free to share this with others.

Sometimes the darkness in our lives can be in fact our friend, because it allows us to focus only on what we need to focus on.Today we have this reading, this classic reading of the man born blind in his blindness. Here is the irony. Here is a man who is born blind, who cannot see, and yet he sees Jesus for who he really is and calls him the son of God. The Pharisees and the scribes can see, but they do not see Jesus for who he really is. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent for the Second Scrutiny. Due to the Scrutinies, this is a bonus homily for this week. Please feel free to share this with others.

Sometimes we find it hard to accept that God would forgive us for our mistakes. Sometimes when we hurt somebody who we really love and we know we have hurt them and we ask for forgiveness from the Lord, we ask in a sense why did I do that? And we want almost to be punished a little bit because we know we were wrong. So we find it hard to sometime accept. But hopefully we will finally accept God's forgiveness for us. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent. Please feel free to share this with others.

We are called to take the living waters, take the bread of life that we receive from here, and to share it with those who so desperately need that fresh living water. You and I might be the only person this week who offers it to them. If you get an inkling to be kind and gentle and not judgmental to someone in any of those categories, then this is your moment.  (Read more…)Here is my homily for the third Sunday of Lent. This homily was given at the First Scrutiny for our OCIA candidates for this year. Please feel free to share this with others.

“Who do people say that I am?” The apostles first say, you are Elijah or John the Baptist, or one of the other prophets. But then he asks them, he says, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter, the one who confesses says, “You are the son of the living God. You are the Messiah.” Jesus must say, yes, finally he gets it. He must be delighted after all these three years. So he takes him up a mountain with his two closest apostles, James and John, and reveals himself to them. He assures them that he is the son of God. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Second Sunday of Lent. Our own Lenten journey has begun and our Parish Lenten Retreat is now available for replay on Livestream (watch videos).

How we refocus ourselves this Lent is not about our will. It is not us trying to will ourselves back and pushing away the devil in some dramatic fashion. Just come back to who we are. Come back to the fact that we are children of God and that God is our father. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the First Sunday of Lent. Our own Lenten journey has begun. I hope you can join us this year. Please feel free to share with others.

What we do today is put ashes on our forehead. Not to have a badge of honor that says, “Look at me. I am one of the Catholic ones.” We put ashes on our forehead to remind us to say, “I am a sinner. I am a hypocrite.”But we do not stay there. We do this at the beginning of this Lenten journey. Then the rest of this Lenten journey, we focus on turning back to the Lord, (Read more…) Here is my homily for Ash Wednesday. Our own Lenten jpurney has begun. I hope you can join us this year. Please feel free to share with others.

Jesus reorders life. He quotes the golden rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That was in the Book of Deuteronomy as one of the laws of the Lord. But he takes it a step further. He deepens it and calls his disciples, the ones who call themselves Christian, to have a higher standard, a deeper reality. He says it is not enough, to love just your family. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.

Pope Francis has declared 2025 a Jubilee Year of Hope, a timely reminder that even in the face of immense suffering in our world, we are not abandoned, Jesus always accompanies us and most especially in our times of suffering. The cross stands at the center of our faith, not as a symbol of defeat, but as a sign of ultimate hope.  (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time. I apologize for the lateness of this which I delivered while on a pilgrimage to Rome. I hope you can still enjoy it and please feel free to share with others.

You can hear a sense of frustration in today's gospel with Peter. Peter has been working hard all night with his friends, he says they were up all night and caught absolutely nothing. Then here comes Jesus. Remember, Jesus is a carpenter and he is telling the fishermen what to do. You can see how outrageous this sounds. So you can imagine what Peter is feeling, “Like really ? Put out again? Really! I have been working hard and I know my job. I know this Sea of Galilee pretty well and I have been doing this fishing thing a while.” (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time. This weekend we launche the Annual diocesan Appeal as well a Baptism. Please feel free to share with others.

Mary watched her son suffer greatly. This prediction by the prophet Simeon is very real. The climax of that suffering for her was at the foot of the cross. We have to examine this because it is very important how Mary suffered. It was not just that she suffered but how she suffered and gave witness to us. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Presentation of the Lord. I am sorry this is later than usual as I was away giving a retreat at Sts. Peter and Paul in Rocklin, CA on From Here to Eternity: How to Live and Die Well.   Please feel free to share with others.

Jesus is the fulfillment of the scripture. Jesus is the bright light that leads us to see all other lights. He is the one who enables us to see what God is fulfilling in our lives. So Jesus, in a sense, God becomes our north star, if you would, that we look to seek in this sky of lights.  (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Third Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to share with others.

In today's Gospel, Jesus turns everything around. He takes six stone jars fills them with water and turns that water into wine. These jars would have held 20 to 30 gallons each. Just to give you an understanding of how much wine we are talking about. He produced 600 to 800 bottles of wine! That is a lot of joy! (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Second Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to share with others.

We need to hear this message of delight because we hear all the other messages, all the other negative messages, the competitive ones on online, how good everyone else is and not how good we are. Let's combat it with a message of love. Let's say to one another “You are my beloved one, with whom I am well pleased, with whom I am delighted.” (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Baptism of the Lord. Please feel free to share with others. Happy 2025 to all of you!

There are layers of irony here that Matthew is trying to communicate to his Jewish audience, kind of waking them up. “Hey, hello. It is the Messiah. The Messiah was born. You need to go to Jerusalem. You need to leave Jerusalem and go to Bethlehem.” But they missed the point. Why did they miss the point? It is because they are so rooted in their own belief, their own perspective. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Epiphany of the Lord. Please feel free to share with others.Happy 2025 to all of you!

With the passing of time we certainly grow in age, but we do not always necessarily grow in wisdom. There are no guarantees that wisdom comes with age! It is one of those things that is an opportunity for us, but we have to apply the lessons that happen in our life in order for us to gain the wisdom from those moments. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Feast of the Holy Family. Please feel free to share with others. I hope you are enjoying this time with family and friends!

Today , we stop and we share what we believe is the greatest story ever told. The story of Jesus Christ being born among us. And right from the very beginning, there is a twist. And the twist is that God, the Author of life, the author of the Book of Life, enters into the story himself. He becomes one of the twists. (Read More)Here is my homily for the Nativity of The Lord. Please feel free to share with others. Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Mary believed! She just did not just hear, she heard and believed. And so we too must be willing to hear and then to believe what we hear. We will need to hear and believe that we are a beloved child of God. And we are called to go share that love with others today. Not in some future year, not in some future time, but today. (Read more…)Here is my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Please feel free to share with others.

Stuff comes in life and stuff happens! It is hard to, in a sense, frolic and enjoy life. Joy is not about circumstances. Joy is not about what happens to us. Joy is about what we choose when stuff is happening to us. Joy is a response that we have regardless of what is happening to us. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Third Sunday of Advent. Please feel free to pass it on.God bless,Fr. Brendan

Our parish theme for the whole year is “Be still and know that I am God.” But during the advent period it is to be still and be joyful with the Lord. In the current secular climate today, we have the craziness and the busyness of Christmas. We cannot stop all the shops doing what they need to do and to try to get us ramped up and amped up on all the purchasing. But we can take a rest from it and to be still with the Lord. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Second Sunday of Advent. Please feel free to pass it on.

We are called in a more profound way to not try to change all the circumstances outside. We are not going to change the secular world, we are not going to change the stores. If they have goods to sell and they are going to start selling it. But we can change our attitude. See the difference between heaven and earth is not about altitude. It is about attitude. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the First Sunday of Advent. Please feel free to pass it on.

Here is a photo taken by the James Webb telescope. Now, where are we in this universe? We are a tiny little point in the middle of that tiny place, we are so far away that you can not even see it. What is illustrated here is that the universe is massive! There are over 200 billion galaxies in the universe, and each of those galaxies has billions of stars and trillions of planets. We are in the Milky Way galaxy and we are one planet of trillions of planets. Yikes! We are just a dot in the cosmos! (Read More)Here is my homily from the The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. Please feel free to pass it on.

Life is transient. One minute you are driving along, next minute, boom, the car flies off the road and you are taken out and your life could be gone. Never take life for granted. And we do. What today's reading is trying to do is to wake us up. It says, ‘Listen, look, stop, take it. Pay attention.” Jesus is saying, “Wake up, wake up. I am always here. But pay attention to me. Pay attention now. I am here. Do not wait till the end times. I am here now.” (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Thirty-Third Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to pass it on.

May God take all our loved ones to himself for all eternity. And one day, we will join him as well. Together we will be one in heaven. Until then, we will ask those clouds of witnesses to witness to us their love and help us to carry our grief and each other's grief. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to pass it on.

Every time we come to the Eucharist God says that he loves us completely. So much so that he gives us Jesus Christ in his person. I want to quote Thomas Merton. Let me explain first. When the sun is shining bright, you can take a magnifying glass, focus the sun and you can set a piece of paper even on fire. Thomas Merton says that Jesus Christ is the magnifying lens which God gives us so that he can focus his love onto our hearts and set our hearts on fire with his love. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Thirty-First Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to pass it on._____________________________________________________________PS - for some awesome time of prayer and reflection, take a look at the streaming sessions of our 2024 Seeds of Contemplation Retreat.Click here

We should understand the context of today's reading. This is Mark's gospel, the very first gospel to be written. And remember it is a continuation from last week's gospel, where the rich young man comes up to Jesus and asks, “What must I do to inherit kingdom of of heaven?” And he says to him, “Give away everything.”Then James and John come along. They have given up everything. So they are thinking, I got it. We have given up everything. We are following you.” And so John asks, “Can you give us a place one at your right and the other on your left, key places of honor?” (Read More…)Here is my homily from the Twenty-Ninth Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to pass it on.

We should understand the context of today's reading. This is Mark's gospel, the very first gospel to be written. And remember it is a continuation from last week's gospel, where the rich young man comes up to Jesus and asks, “What must I do to inherit kingdom of of heaven?” And he says to him, “Give away everything.”Then James and John come along. They have given up everything. So they are thinking, I got it. We have given up everything. We are following you.” And so John asks, “Can you give us a place one at your right and the other on your left, key places of honor?” (Read More…)Here is my homily from the Twenty-Ninth Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to pass it on.

Today there are so many things that draw our attention, distract us from even our own goodwill. We may not even want to be a certain way, but because we send so much time with those things. The question is what do we treasure the most? If somebody were to take away something, we would go, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Not that.” (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Twenty-Eighth Sunday of Ordinary time. Please feel free to pass it on.

I just returned last night from our pilgrimage and I had a long trip home. I finished the pilgrimage in Greece and Turkey and then I flew to Vienna for a Stanford class reunion. Then I flew from Vienna to San Francisco last night.One of the things I love to see while traveling is how children and parents interact. God bless the parents; it is a lot of work! You guys know when you are traveling with kids, they push all your buttons. (Read more..)Here is my homily from the Twenty- Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.

You are not going to win every hand in your plan, in your life. That is just the way it is. You get some really doozy hands sometimes when you are sick and when you are suffering and you have gotten a bad hand, you still have to play the hand. Pick up your cross and come and follow me. You can not just fold the hand every single time. And that is what the Lord is trying to tell us, that he is in every single hand. He will help us play the every single hand. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Twenty- Third Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.

In today's gospel, Jesus moves in close with this deaf and mute man. He moves in real close. And Jesus just does not say be healed or be opened in this case, he sticks his fingers in his ears. He puts his spittle on his tongue. I mean, that is moving in pretty close. He is intimately engaged. It is ultimately what Jesus did in becoming human. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Twenty- Third Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.

Henry Nouwen, the great Catholic priest and theologian of modern times, explains this reconnection concept using four words: taken, blest, broken and given. These connects us back to God as his beloved. When we truly discover that we are the beloved of God, that changes everything.  (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Twenty- Second Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.

We come to church not just for ourselves. We come for the sake of others. If there was only one person here, it would not be a celebration. It is a celebration because so many of us have made the decision to come here. That is what makes church.  (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Twenty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.

I want us to understand what we need to do because the whole world needs this nourishment so desperately. We are the remnant few who come to church. We need to be the bread of life for the world. If we do not do it, then who is going to  do it? There is no one else out here. It is just us guys. It is up to us to live what Christ gave to us and to become that in the world. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others..

Watching the Olympics was such a wonderful counterpoint to so much we listen to in the news. It is such a relief for the human spirit. Because all we ever seem to see or hear is all bad news. But it is such a relief to watch this, the best of humanity. And it is such a relief and joy to watch. I cannot help but think of that phrase from St. Ireneus. “The glory of God is man, fully alive.” (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.

What we can do is share the nourishment we receive from here. And what does that mean? It is exactly what Paul says in the letter to the Ephesians. He said, “We shed the old self and we put on new self.” We need to become different when we come back from here. We need in some way to be nourishment for the world. We need to be the bread of life for the world. That is what will convince people, it is the deeds that we do.  (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.Thank you for the prayers as I rested and relaxed during my vacation. I had a wonderful time but am very glad to be home.

Jesus sent out the apostles, the twelve. In Mark's gospel, it depicts as just the twelve. But in the other gospels he sends out all his disciples. He sends all of us out to share the good news of the gospel with others. How we do that is incredibly important, but more important is that we do something to spread the good news. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others. Finally, I will be on vacation for the next two weekends, so there will not be any homily emails during that time. Thank you for the prayers as I rest and relax.

Let us open our eyes and see what is among us and see if we can participate. At least recognize them for the gifts that are here, that are the ordinary being turned into extraordinary. That we can be grateful for the gift among us and be part of it, maybe to be willing to step in  and to help in some way. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.

What does it mean then for us to be faith-filled? And what does it mean for us to be humble as disciples? The lesson of the woman with the hemorrhages gives us is to reach out and touch his garments, if I could just reach out and touch God. Our constant sort of mode is to always be looking to touch God in our lives. (Read more…)Here is my homily from the Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.