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, with this Sunday we return to ordinary time and I

want to return to my consideration especially of the first readings from the

Old Testament and so brings us today to the book of the prophet Ezekiel which

is one of the strangest, most fascinating and difficult to interpret books in

the Old Testament. There was a saying in ancient Israel that one should not even

try to read Ezekiel until one is 50. And there's a lot of truth to that because

there's so much packed into it, so much of Israelite spirituality and history

and theology that you do need to have a bit of a background to get it. The

trouble is we're going to read it today and our first reading is a little tiny

snippet from it that probably makes absolutely no sense to anyone today. So I

want to spend a little time with that. What you've got to do, get out your

Bibles. Go to Ezekiel chapter 17. Do you have any sense of what this reading

for today is about? You've got to look at chapter 17. Chapter 17, well first of all

I should tell you this, that Ezekiel was a temple priest who was carried off

in the first wave of the Babylonian exile. So around the year 597 BC,

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