Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, today we return to ordinary time. So after the long

lenten and Easter season and we had the Trinity Sunday, we had Corpus

Christie now, we come back to ordinary time. And it's my joy today to focus on

the first reading, which is taken from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. We

hear occasionally, but not all that often, from the book of the prophet Jeremiah.

But you know, he's one of the key figures in the Old Testament. Along with

Ezekiel and Isaiah and Daniel, he's one of the so-called major prophets. That

means, first of all, someone that wrote a really long prophetic book as opposed to

the minor prophets, but also someone that really had a major impact on the life of

Israel. So Jeremiah, someone that we should attend to, maybe just do a little bit

about his personal history, born. They think around the year 650 BC. So think of

King David somewhere around 1000 BC. So we're a few centuries after that. He dies,

Jeremiah dies about 570 BC. Now, the important thing to know is he's doing most of

his key work in the years just prior to and just after the Babylonian captivity.

The year 587 BC, that's a key date for people reading the Bible because you could

...