Fr. Brian Soliven Sermons

There is in every human heart an empty chamber which echoes. We attempt to furnish it with wealth, romances, fancy job titles, and little private kingdoms of our own making; yet the echo remains blaring. We are rather like children who, having been promised the sea, are content to paddle in rain-filled ditches. The tragedy is not that our desires are too strong, but that they are too easily satisfied with the fragility of the world's delights. We flee from God; maybe not always with clenched fists, but often with busy hands. We build, we acquire, we admire ourselves in mirrors held up by other people we so eagerly try to impress. And all the while there is a thirst—persistent, unembarrassed, and immune to flattery. We name it ambition, or love, or freedom. But it returns in the quiet hours as a dryness of soul.Consider the woman at the well in the Gospel of John. At high noon, the Gospel tells us, an hour when respectable company is kept indoors, she comes alone to draw water. She has sought her portion of fulfillment in the arms of five husbands and now in a sixth relationship not sanctified by God. One can almost hear the echo in her heart sloshing louder than the water in her empty jar.Yet there, seated wearily upon the stones of Jacob’s well, is Jesus. He does not wait for her to ascend into moral respectability. He does not send her away to tidy her history. He asks her simply for a drink. It is a curious God who makes Himself thirsty for us.He speaks to her of “living water”—a spring that does not depend upon the depth of our wells nor the sturdiness of our ropes. She has come for something to carry home; instead, she is offered something that will carry her. And when He gently unveils the catalogue of her broken loves, it is not to shame her but to show her that He has traced every path she has taken to avoid Him—and has arrived there first.We are all, in some fashion, that woman. We lower our buckets into relationships, achievements, and earthly pleasures, hoping at last to hear the satisfying splash. But the water drawn from such wells must be drawn again tomorrow. Only the water Christ gives becomes in us a refreshing spring.The marvel is not merely that we seek substitutes; that is the oldest of human habits. The marvel is that Christ continues to cross Samaria for us. He passes deliberately through the territories respectable people avoid. He sits beside the wells of our compromise and waits for us in the heat of our own making.And when at last we are startled into recognition, when we perceive that the Stranger who knows us entirely is not scandalized by our sins, our worldly water jars fall forgotten at our feet. We run, as she did, not to hide our shame but to proclaim our discovery: that God loves us still and he has not abandoned us. The heart’s chamber ceases to echo when it is inhabited. For the One we have been attempting to replace is the only One who refuses to be replaced—and who, in holy persistence, seeks us still. --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

Jealously can be a fierce emotion, causing us to dastardly, unimaginable things -- just look at the readings in today's Mass. Our precious Lord shows us the antidote.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

For the first time Jesus in the Gospel passage predicts his torture and death. The response of his disciples is disappointing.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

When you look at Jesus, what do you see?It is a question that refuses to sit quietly in the corner of the mind. It presses forward. For to look at Jesus is not merely to observe a figure in history, nor to admire a moral teacher whose sayings decorate greeting cards. It is to stand before a Person who demands to be reckoned with.Some see only a carpenter’s son: a man of dusty roads and rough hands, who spoke kindly to children and sternly to hypocrites. They see compassion, certainly; courage, perhaps; even genius. But nothing more. He becomes, in their sight, an admirable chap, someone nice and maybe wise.But if you look longer, if you allow the Gospels to speak without interruption, you begin to notice something unsettling. The authority in His voice is not borrowed. He does not argue as though piecing together secondhand truths; He speaks as though Truth were His native tongue. He forgives sins as though they were committed against Himself. He commands storms as one might quiet a restless dog. He speaks of God not merely as Father, but as His Father, in a manner that places Him on the very side of the throne.And then there is His humility.Here lies the great stumbling block and the great splendor. For if He were merely divine in the sense of distant and untouchable, we might admire Him from afar and remain unchanged. But this is a divinity wrapped in swaddling clothes, kneeling to wash feet, sweating blood in a garden. It is a majesty that stoops. A glory that bleeds. If this is not God, it is blasphemy of the highest order. If it is God, then we are looking at the very heart of reality.Can you see His divinity?It is not always visible in the way lightning is visible. Often it is more like the sun behind a veil of clouds, perceived not by staring at it directly, but by the way everything else is illuminated. Stand near Him long enough and you begin to see yourself more clearly: your pride, your hunger, your longing for a love you cannot manufacture. His presence exposes and heals in the same breath.To see His divinity is not merely to conclude that He is God. Even the demons, we are told, reached that conclusion. It is to behold in Him the startling claim that the Author of all things has written Himself into the story. That the Maker of the stars allowed nails to fasten Him to wood He Himself designed.When you look at Jesus, you are not simply looking at an example. You are looking at an invasion—heaven breaking into earth, mercy interrupting rebellion, love refusing to remain abstract.And here is the quiet wonder: the more clearly you see His divinity, the less crushed you feel by it. For this is not a cold omnipotence, but a wounded one. Not a tyrant’s power, but a shepherd’s. His divinity does not diminish His tenderness; it guarantees it.So I ask again: when you look at Jesus, what do you see?If you see only a teacher, you may admire Him. If you see only a martyr, you may pity Him. But if you see God—God with scars—then you will do something far more dangerous and far more glorious. You will worship.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

Jesus today in the Gospel talks about one of the most mysterious and misunderstood Christian doctrines -- hell.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

Jesus tells us simply -- never stop praying!   --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

You can sum up all of Salvation History as God's attempt to prove to humanity one simple fact -- that He is good.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

When Our Lord was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, it was not merely to endure hunger or solitude, as though sanctity were a matter of stoic self-denial. No, He went as a gladiator going into the Coliseum. The encounter with the devil was not an unfortunate interruption of His ministry; it was its opening engagement of hand-to-hand combat. Before He preached to crowds or healed the sick, He faced our ancient enemy on ground chosen by Divine Providence.We are much mistaken if we imagine the temptation in the desert to have been a private moral struggle, like a man wrestling with a troublesome habit. It was, rather, the clash of two kingdoms. The devil, that parasite of God’s good creation, could offer nothing truly his own – only distortions of what the Father already delights to give. Bread without obedience. Power without suffering. Glory without the Cross. In each temptation there lies the same hissed suggestion: “Take the crown, and leave the thorns.”Here, then, is the great comfort and the great terror of Lent: we are not fighting alone, but we are truly fighting. The same enemy who dared to whisper to Christ will not scruple to whisper to us. The spiritual battle of Lent is not fought with grand gestures, but with small obediences. We fast, and discover how much of our supposed “need” is but appetite masquerading as necessity. We pray, and find how quickly our minds stray. We give alms, and feel the resistance of self-love. In each act we stand, in our measure, beside Christ in the desert, answering the tempter not with cleverness, but with trust.The devil’s stratagem has always been to persuade us that God is withholding something essential, that obedience will diminish us, that surrender will impoverish us. Yet in the desert we see the opposite. It is precisely in refusing the shortcut that Christ prepares the true victory. What seems like deprivation becomes preparation; what feels like hunger becomes strength.And so Lent is no mere annual exercise in religious gloom. It is training for joy. We strip away the lesser loves, not because they are evil in themselves, but because they so easily become rivals to the Greatest Love. We learn that man does not live by bread alone, and that the Kingdom cannot be seized but must be received.Thus Lent is the Church’s campaign season. We march not toward despair, but toward Easter. The wilderness is not our destination; it is our battleground. And because He has fought there before us—and triumphed—we may take courage. The devil’s promises glitter; Christ’s promises endure. In the end, it is not the tempter who has the last word, but the One who answered him and overcame.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

When you look at the eyes of Our Lord, what do you see?  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

Lent is the holy season by which we willingly choose weakness over strength, pain over comfort, and the love of Jesus over my own will.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

Lent is upon us! In this holy season, the Church asks us to purposely become weak.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

With the approach of Ash Wednesday on February 18th, the Church once again does something both startling and merciful: she reminds us that we shall die.There is about this reminder a bracing honesty which our modern age sorely needs. We are encouraged, most days, to behave as though we were permanent fixtures in a very temporary world. We speak of plans and prospects, of improvements and entertainments, and seldom of endings. Yet on Ash Wednesday the priest marks our foreheads with ashes and speaks the plain truth: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It is not cruelty. It is clarity. And clarity, in the hands of God, is always a form of kindness.Lent, then, is not a season for religious theatrics, but for reality. The Church calls us to consider the Four Last Things—Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell—not because she delights in severity, but because she desires our joy.Death is the great appointment we all keep. It is not an interruption of the story, but its turning page. For the Christian, death is not the collapse of meaning but its unveiling. The One we have trusted in shadows we shall meet face to face. To remember death is not to become morbid; it is to become wise. Only when we grasp that our days are numbered do we begin to truly live.Judgment, too, has been misunderstood. We imagine a cold tribunal and forget that judgment is the setting right of what has gone wrong. Every time we cry out against injustice, every time we long for truth to prevail, we are secretly longing for judgment. And the Judge is not a stranger but the very Christ who bore our sins. To stand before Him will be to stand before Love itself; it’s a love that burns away falsehood and heals what we have surrendered to Him.Heaven and Hell stand as the two great possibilities before every human soul. Heaven is not a sentimental cloud, but the solid, blazing reality for which we were made. It is the fulfillment of every pure desire, the answer to every homesick ache we have ever felt in this world. Hell, on the other hand, is not so much a torture devised by God as the final monument to human refusal, the tragic end of a will that persistently says, “I will have my own way.” In the end, we are given what we have chosen.Lent is the season in which we are invited to choose again.Through prayer, we learn to desire God above lesser things. Through fasting, we discover how tightly we cling to what cannot save us. Through repentance, we unlock doors we have long kept barred. The ashes on our foreheads are not a sign of despair but of hope, hope that even dust may be raised to glory. As February 18th draws near, we would do well not to rush past it. Let us receive the ashes. Let us ponder the Last Things. Let us allow eternity to cast its searching and saving light upon our present lives.For it is only in remembering that we shall die that we truly learn how to live. Only in facing judgment that we begin, at last, to desire Heaven.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

When an exorcist meets with a person allegedly possessed by a demon, one of the first questions the priest must ascertain is how the demon gained access to the soul.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

Hardwired in the soul of a man is to fight and serve. It's by divine design.   --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

It is a curious mistake of the modern world to imagine that Christians best serve society by becoming bland and tame, like toothless lions. Our Lord did not tell His followers, “be like everyone else” but salt and light. He wanted them to change the world around them.Salt, after all, does not exist for its own sake. It preserves, sharpens, and reveals flavor. A society may have abundance, efficiency, and cleverness, and yet still taste oddly thin. When Christians live their Catholic faith honestly – praying when prayer is unfashionable, forgiving when resentment would be easier, welcoming life where it is inconvenient – they restore depth to the human experience. They remind the world that truth is not invented, that goodness is not a private hobby, and that love is more than sentiment. Remove the salt, and decay is not dramatic at first; it is simply inevitable.Light works differently. It does not argue with the darkness; it exposes it by being present. A single lamp does not abolish the night, but it makes orientation possible. In the same way, Catholics who live their faith publicly through works of mercy, fidelity in marriage, care for the poor, reverence for the weak,do not claim moral superiority. They simply make visible a way of living that assumes God is real and that human beings are made for more than comfort or consumption.The great contribution, then, is not power or prestige, but witness. The Christian adds to society a stubborn hope that refuses to believe evil is final, a patience grounded in eternity, and a joy that does not depend on circumstances behaving themselves. Such people are often inconvenient. Salt stings in open wounds; light reveals what some would rather keep hidden. Yet without them, society may grow cleverer and louder, but not wiser.When Catholics live as salt and light, they do not escape the world. They help save it from spoiling, and from forgetting what it is for. Remember, dear parishioner, you are called to be lions.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

The martyrs teach us a very valuable lesson.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

The humility of Mary sends vitriolic shivers down the spines of demons.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

The world likes to mock Christians as silly for constantly calling upon God. It's a curious paradox at the heart of the Christian life which makes the believer appear faintly ridiculous to the sensible world: he dares to admit that he cannot heal himself. He stakes everything on Another, and does so with a cheerfulness that looks like folly. Yet it is precisely here that his courage is born. For when a man stops pretending he is whole and instead places his brokenness gladly in the hands of Christ, he discovers that reliance is not the enemy of boldness but its source. The one who knows he is being healed is freed from the exhausting labor of self-salvation, and may therefore stand upright, unashamed, and oddly fearless.  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

Consider the scene upon that Galilean hillside, dear reader. There ascends a Man—not with tablets of stone borne heavily in His hands, as once did Moses upon Sinai amid thunder and smoke—but with words that burn more fiercely than any fire, words destined to be written not upon rock but upon the living tablets of human hearts.In the old story, Moses climbed the mountain alone, veiled in cloud and terror, to receive the Law that would set a people apart. The Ten Words thundered forth, carving boundaries around conduct, marking what was holy from what was profane. They were good, those commandments; they were the very breath of God restraining the chaos of fallen man. Yet they stood external, like a fence around a garden we could not enter without stumbling.Now behold a greater ascent. Jesus of Nazareth goes up into the mountain, and the crowds follow, not in fear, but drawn by a strange authority that mingles majesty with meekness. He sits (as teachers do), yet speaks as One who needs no intermediary. Where Moses mediated between God and man, this Man is the mediation. Where Moses brought down stone inscribed by the finger of God, this Man brings down Himself – the living Word, the very finger of God made flesh.He does not abolish the ancient Law; no, He fulfills it to its utmost depth. “You have heard that it was said... but I say to you.” With each repetition, the old commandment is not merely repeated but plunged into the hidden springs of the soul. Murder becomes anger unchecked; adultery becomes lust entertained; oaths become the simple honesty of “yes” and “no.” The Law, once a boundary line drawn upon the ground, is now revealed as a mountain peak we are called to scale but this, it's not by our own strength, but by the power of the One who has already reached the summit and beckons us upward.And yet, who among us can hear these words without a secret shrinking? The Beatitudes pronounce blessing upon poverty of spirit, upon mourning, upon meekness; these qualities we possess only in fragments, if at all. The command to love enemies, to turn the other cheek, to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect strikes like a sledgehammer upon our self-sufficiency. We are not flattered; we are exposed. The mountain does not flatter the climber; it humbles him.So let no one suppose the Sermon on the Mount is a counsel of despair. It is, rather, the map of joy. It is the narrow path that leads to life. In Christ, the old commandments find their fulfillment, and the new commandment of love becomes not a burden but a liberation. Ascend, then, with Him; listen to His voice upon the mountain; and find that the Lawgiver has become the Law fulfilled, the Teacher the Truth incarnate, the Moses greater than Moses, leading us home.   --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give

Pray that the Lord may bless our upcoming Parish Crab Feed fundraiser!  --- Help Spread the Good News --- Father Brian’s homilies are shared freely thanks to generous listeners like you. If his words have blessed you, consider supporting this volunteer effort. Every gift helps us continue recording and sharing the hope of Jesus—one homily at a time. Give Here: https://frbriansoliven.org/give