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, this great feast of the baptism of the Lord.

It's as good a time as any to reflect on the significance of the most primordial sacrament

of the church, by which I mean the sacrament of baptism.

Chances are pretty much everybody listening to me right now has been baptized.

So it's a sacrament of enormous importance.

It links all of us together.

One of the earliest descriptions of baptism in our great tradition is

Vite Spiritualis Yanua, which is Latin for the door of the spiritual life.

Baptism is the way in, the foundation,

the condition for the possibility of an authentically spiritual life.

Without baptism, we don't get in.

Now, to grasp the full meaning of this is to understand something

really decisive about Christianity. Christianity is not primarily about becoming a good person,

or doing the right thing, or in Flannery O'Connor's phrase, having a heart of gold.

Because, see, let's face it, anybody, pagan, Muslim, Jew, non-believer, could be any of those things.

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