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 of us. Peace be with you.

Friends, I love how the readings for this second Sunday of Lent awaken a sense of wonder, a sense of a world beyond our own.

If I can put it this way, a mystical consciousness.

So in the first reading, dramatic, beautiful, memorable, strange,

Abraham enacts the ritual by which the Lord establishes a covenant with him.

How important, of course, that theme is.

But this covenant is accompanied by all sorts of mystical symbols.

First of all, the mountain, the deep, terrifying darkness,

the flaming torch, the voice from heaven.

Those are all mystical symbols.

And see, they're signaling something that Abraham is not making just a regular old contract,

the way he would with a fellow human being. He's making a covenant with this strange and

beguiling and amazing and overwhelming figure of God. He's dealing with something that he cannot control and he knows it, something from a realm

that's beyond this world. And then in the second reading, St. Paul talks about our citizenship

in heaven. It's interesting, isn't it? Because Paul, as a Jew, but was also a Roman citizen.

So he was aware of a kind of, if you want, dual citizenship.

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