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 to be with you.

Friends, for this third Sunday of Advent, the Church asks us to focus on John the Baptist who of course is one of the great

advent figures. I'm going to share this with you before but my mind always goes

back to one of my favorite places on earth, which is the cathedral of

Schart outside of Paris, which I visited many times when I was a student over in France.

And there's a sculpture of John the Baptist on the North porch that is so eloquent in just the

longing in his face is that quality I talked about a couple weeks ago of

oh come oh come Emmanuel waiting for someone to come.

Take a look at it.

But I always think of that when I read about John the Baptist.

And the Gospel for today, taken from John's Gospel,

offers one of the most famous lines in regard to John

and I'll get there. Here's I think what we need to see first of all is that John the Baptist really

caused a ruckus in his time and place. He was the son of a temple

priest and that means that he should have been in the temple. Likely John was

raised in the temple precincts, he was being prepared for that task.

But instead of being in the temple, he's out in the desert.

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