12th Sunday in Ordinary Time
US Catholic Homily — June 21, 2026
Lectionary Year A · Ordinary Time
First Reading: Jeremiah 20:10–13 | Psalm 69 | Second Reading: Romans 5:12–15 | Gospel: Matthew 10:26–33
Sunday Homily A Sunday Homily B Sunday Homily C
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” — Matthew 10:28–31
❖ ✝ ❖
Do Not Be Afraid: God Knows You by Name
Good morning, brothers and sisters in Christ. Last Sunday we heard the Lord Jesus look out over the crowds with a gut-wrenching compassion and say to His disciples: the harvest is abundant, the laborers are few — go. He commissioned twelve ordinary men, gave them His authority, and sent them into a world that would not always welcome them. He asked them to give, without cost, what they had received without cost.
Today, one week later, the Gospel continues that same missionary discourse. And what does Jesus say to the disciples He has just sent into a hard and often hostile world? He does not give them a strategy. He does not promise them success by every worldly measure. He says one thing, three times, in the space of eight verses: Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid.
Three times. In the tradition of Scripture, when something is said three times, it is not accidental. It is the most emphatic form of assertion available. Jesus knows exactly what His disciples are about to face — the whisperings, the denunciations, the social pressure, the moments when it will seem far easier to be quiet about who they are and whose they are. And He meets their anticipated fear not with a plan but with a Person. Not with a guarantee of safety but with a revelation of worth: you are known. You are counted. You are worth more than many sparrows. Your Father does not lose track of you.
Three readings form the architecture of this Sunday’s great theme. Jeremiah stands in the pit of his own fear and persecution, surrounded by former friends turned informants, and proclaims — against all the evidence — that God is with him like a mighty champion. Saint Paul unfolds the cosmic drama: through one man sin and death entered the world, but through one Man — the new Adam — grace and life overflow in a superabundance that dwarfs everything the first fall took away. And Jesus, the new Adam Himself, tells His followers: the world will try to silence you. It cannot reach your soul. Go anyway.
The common thread is courage — not the courage of someone who feels no fear, but the courage of someone who has decided that the God who counts every sparrow is more trustworthy than every threat the world can assemble. This is the courage the American Catholic Church needs in 2026 just as desperately as the twelve apostles needed it on the roads of Galilee.
❖ ✝ ❖
“The Lord Is with Me Like a Mighty Champion” – 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time Homily
First Reading — Jeremiah 20:10–13
Jeremiah 20:10–13
I hear the whisperings of many: “Terror on every side! Denounce! let us denounce him!” All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine. “Perhaps he will be trapped; then we can prevail, and take our vengeance on him.” But the LORD is with me, like a mighty champion: my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph. In their failure they will be put to utter shame, to lasting, unforgettable confusion. O LORD of hosts, you who test the just, who probe mind and heart, let me witness the vengeance you take on them, for to you I have entrusted my cause. Sing to the LORD, praise the LORD, for he has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked!
Jeremiah is not a comfortable prophet. He is not the kind of religious figure that powerful people enjoy having around. He has been called by God to speak the truth to a nation lurching toward catastrophe, and the nation’s response has been exactly what you might expect: ridicule, rejection, physical abuse, and now — most painful of all — betrayal by those he counted as friends. “All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine.”
There is a particular kind of loneliness in being watched for mistakes by people who once called you friend. It is not the loneliness of the stranger, which can be borne with a kind of dignity. It is the loneliness of the person who shared a table, a trust, a life — and who now finds those intimacies turned into weapons. Jeremiah knows this loneliness from the inside. And so does every Catholic who has ever lost a friendship because of a moral conviction, every young adult whose social circle cooled when their faith became visible, every parent whose dinner table turned into a courtroom when they tried to talk about God.
But notice what Jeremiah does with this loneliness: he does not suppress it, and he does not surrender to it. He names it — “terror on every side” — and then he makes a counter-proclamation that takes the breath away with its sheer audacity: “But the LORD is with me, like a mighty champion.” The Hebrew word for champion is *gibbor* — a warrior, a hero, a mighty man of valor. The Lord is not a passive observer of Jeremiah’s suffering. He is in the arena. He is standing at Jeremiah’s side with His sleeves rolled up.
This passage rewards a careful reading of its structure. Jeremiah begins in lament and ends in praise: “Sing to the LORD, praise the LORD, for he has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked.” Notice the tense: rescued. Past tense. The deliverance has already happened in the eyes of faith, before it has happened in the eyes of circumstance. This is one of the great moves of Biblical spirituality — what theologians call “proleptic praise,” praising God for what He has promised before it has been seen. It is not denial. It is the deeper realism of someone who has learned that God’s word is more reliable than the current state of the evidence.
Brothers and sisters, what are the whisperings in your own life right now? What voices — external or internal — are saying “perhaps he will be trapped; perhaps she will fail; perhaps this faith is not enough to sustain you through what is coming”? The First Reading does not tell you those voices are not real. It tells you they are not final. The Lord is with you like a mighty champion. And that changes everything.
❖ ✝ ❖
Responsorial Psalm — Psalm 69:8–10, 14, 17, 33–35
R/ Lord, in your great love, answer me.
For your sake I bear insult, and shame covers my face. I have become an outcast to my brothers, a stranger to my mother’s sons, because zeal for your house consumes me, and the insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me. I pray to you, O LORD, for the time of your favor, O God! In your great kindness answer me with your constant help. Answer me, O LORD, for bounteous is your kindness; in your great mercy turn toward me. See, you lowly ones, and be glad; you who seek God, may your hearts revive! For the LORD hears the poor, and his own who are in bonds he spurns not. Let the heavens and the earth praise him, the seas and whatever moves in them!
Psalm 69 is one of the most intensely personal of all the psalms — a cry from the depths of isolation and misunderstanding. The psalmist has become a stranger to his own family, an outcast among brothers, for one reason: his zeal for God has made him uncomfortable company. “The insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.” He has absorbed the hostility directed at God simply by standing close to God. This is the cost of holy proximity.
Yet the psalm moves inexorably toward praise. “See, you lowly ones, and be glad; you who seek God, may your hearts revive!” The poor, the bound, the marginal — those for whom the world has no use — are precisely the ones God hears. This is not a consolation prize for losing in the world’s competition. It is a revelation of where God actually lives: closest to those the powerful dismiss, most audible in the prayers that come from the very bottom of human experience.
“For the LORD hears the poor.” Five words in English. In the Hebrew, four. This is the heart of the psalm, and in many ways the heart of the entire Old Testament. The God of Israel is not the God of the comfortable and the established. He is the God who bent down into Egyptian slavery to hear the groaning of a people who had no recourse. He is the God who sent Jeremiah to kings and told Jeremiah it was the kings who were wrong. He is the God who counts sparrows.
❖ ✝ ❖
“Where Sin Abounded, Grace Abounded All the More” – 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time Homily
Second Reading — Romans 5:12–15
Romans 5:12–15
Brothers and sisters: Through one man sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all men, inasmuch as all sinned — for up to the time of the law, sin was in the world, though sin is not accounted when there is no law. But death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin after the pattern of the trespass of Adam, who is the type of the one who was to come. But the gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one, the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the many.
Paul is doing something architecturally magnificent in this passage. He is drawing a parallel and then — at the crucial moment — shattering it. Yes, he says, one man’s act shaped the destiny of all who came after him. Adam’s transgression introduced sin and death into a world designed for life and communion with God. This is a real catastrophe, Paul insists. He is not minimizing it. Death reigned — and the word “reigned” is deliberate: it is the language of tyranny, of a usurper on a throne that does not belong to him.
But then Paul pivots. “The gift is not like the transgression.” Whatever symmetry he has set up between Adam and Christ, he now insists the symmetry breaks down — and it breaks down in our favor. If one man’s fall could spread death to all, how much more can one Man’s grace overflow to all? The Greek word Paul uses is *perisseuein* — to overflow, to abound, to exceed all measure. Grace does not merely match what sin took. Grace overwhelms it. Grace is not a restoration to the status quo ante. It is an elevation beyond what we had before the fall.
This matters enormously for how we face the fears that the Gospel raises. Yes, Jesus is sending His disciples into a world where they may face denunciation, betrayal, even death. Yes, the cost of following Christ in a post-Christian culture can be real. Paul is not pretending otherwise. But the reason we go forward without ultimate fear is not that the threats are not real — it is that the gift is real, and the gift is greater. “Where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). The death that entered through Adam has been outrun by the life that pours through Christ. The sparrow that falls has been seen. The hair that is counted does not fall uncounted.
Theologians sometimes speak of the *felix culpa* — the happy fault — sung at the Easter Vigil: “O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” This is not a celebration of sin. It is a proclamation that God’s redemptive grace, when it comes, exceeds everything it finds. The hole left by the fall was filled with more than was lost. This is the God who calls us to courage. Not a God who patches what sin broke, but a God who responds to our worst with His best.
❖ ✝ ❖
“You Are Worth More Than Many Sparrows”
Gospel — Matthew 10:26–33
Matthew 10:26–33
Jesus said to the Twelve: “Fear no one. Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known. What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. Everyone who acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father. But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my heavenly Father.”
Let us begin with a detail from the marketplace that Jesus’ first listeners would have understood immediately. Two sparrows sold for a small coin — *assarion* in the Greek, the smallest Roman copper coin in circulation, worth about one sixteenth of a denarius, roughly a few minutes’ worth of unskilled labor. These sparrows are not pets. They are not beloved companions. They are the cheapest protein available to the very poor — the kind of food that people buy when they cannot afford anything else. And Jesus says: not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.
Then He escalates: “Even all the hairs of your head are counted.” In the ancient world, as in ours, the hairs of the head were the very image of the uncountable, the innumerable, the trivially small. To say that God counts them is not to make a claim about God’s filing system. It is to say something about God’s attentiveness — that nothing about you, however small, however ordinary, however invisible to the world, is beneath the notice of the One who made you. You are not a rounding error in the universe. You are not a face in a crowd that God has to squint to see. You are known. Precisely. Individually. By name.
And from this foundation — the foundation of being known and counted and valued — Jesus builds the logic of courage. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” This is not an invitation to recklessness. It is a calibration of ultimate and penultimate threats. The things that the world holds over us — social disapproval, professional consequences, reputation, comfort, safety — are real concerns. Jesus does not dismiss them. But they belong to a different order than the soul. They can wound the penultimate. They cannot touch the ultimate. And once you have your priorities sorted in that order, the architecture of your fears changes entirely.
“Everyone who acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father.” This verse has sharp edges, and we should not sand them down. Jesus is speaking about public acknowledgment — the open, visible, socially costly act of identifying yourself as His disciple. Not just the private devotion of Sunday morning, but the willingness to let your faith be visible on Tuesday afternoon. To speak up when something is said around the dinner table that contradicts everything you believe about the dignity of human life. To identify yourself as Catholic when the culture has decided that Catholicism is embarrassing. To say, when someone asks why you make certain choices, that you follow Jesus Christ.
This is the acknowledgment Jesus means. And He promises a reciprocal acknowledgment before the Father that makes every earthly cost pale into insignificance. The One who has counted every hair on your head will one day say your name before the throne of heaven. That promise is the bedrock beneath every act of courageous witness.
❖ ✝ ❖
A Story for the 12th Sunday: The Teacher Who Would Not Stay Silent – 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time Homily
There was a man named Marcus who taught high school history at a public school in suburban Ohio. He was a quiet Catholic — daily Mass before work, rosary on his lunch break, faith that was real and deep but that he had always kept carefully private, especially in his professional life. He had learned long ago that teachers who bring up religion in public schools create problems, and he had no appetite for problems.
One spring semester, a unit on twentieth-century history brought his class to the Holocaust. Marcus had taught this unit for eleven years. He knew how to present the facts with historical precision — the numbers, the dates, the mechanisms of the Final Solution — and he knew how to help students feel the weight of it without himself revealing anything that could be called a religious perspective.
But this year, something shifted. A student — a sixteen-year-old named Tyler, one of the sharpest in the class — raised his hand and asked a question Marcus had not been asked before: “Mr. Marcus, if there is a God, how do you explain this?” The room went quiet in the way that rooms go quiet when something real has entered them.
Marcus paused. He thought about his careful policy of professional silence. He thought about the department head who had once warned him about keeping church and state separate. He thought about the evaluation coming up in April. And then he thought about the twelve-year-old boy he had once been, when his own grandmother had sat with him at a kitchen table in Cincinnati and told him that faith was the only thing the world could never take away.
He said: “I believe in God. And I think that question — the question you just asked — is the most important question a human being can ask. I’m not going to preach to you, and I’m not going to give you the answer that satisfies me as if it should satisfy you. But I’ll tell you this: every person in those camps was, to God, worth more than the world. Every single one was known. Every single one was counted. The fact that human beings did this to them is the argument against human beings, not against God.”
The room was still for a moment. Then Tyler nodded slowly and said: “That’s something, at least.” Two weeks later, he stayed after class and asked if Marcus could recommend something to read. Marcus lent him a copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Three months later, Tyler came back and said it had changed his life.
Marcus never got in trouble with the department head. But even if he had, he told a friend afterward, it would have been worth it. He had acknowledged Jesus before others — quietly, carefully, without proselytizing — and something true had entered the room. He had not killed the body of his career. He had simply refused to let fear kill the soul of a teaching moment.
“Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” This is not a verse for martyrs only. It is a verse for the Tuesday afternoon of your ordinary life, when the cost of honesty is small but the pressure to remain silent is real. Marcus’s testimony did not cost him everything. It cost him a moment of discomfort and the risk of a small conflict. And it was exactly enough.
❖ ✝ ❖
A Saint for Courageous Catholics: Blessed Stanley Rother
This Sunday’s readings call for courage — the courage to acknowledge Christ before others even when the cost is real. For the American Catholic community, there is no more recent or more powerful witness to this courage than Blessed Stanley Rother of Oklahoma, the first American-born martyr to be beatified by the Catholic Church.
Stanley Francis Rother was born in 1935 on a farm in Okarche, Oklahoma, the son of a German-American farming family. He was, by his own admission and the assessment of his seminary professors, not a particularly gifted student. He struggled so severely with Latin in his first seminary that he was asked to leave. He transferred to a different seminary, worked harder than he had ever worked in his life, and was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City in 1963.
In 1968, he was assigned to the mission parish of Santiago Atitlán in the highlands of Guatemala — a community of Tz’utujil Mayan people living in grinding poverty under the shadow of an increasingly brutal military government. Father Stanley arrived without knowing the language, the culture, or the terrain. Within a few years, he had learned Tz’utujil so well that he translated the New Testament into it — the first time the people of Santiago Atitlán had ever had the Word of God in their own tongue. He built a hospital. He started an agricultural cooperative. He baptized thousands and buried hundreds, especially during the years of the Guatemalan civil war, when the military’s campaign of terror was claiming lives weekly in the villages around the lake.
By 1980, death squads had begun targeting priests and catechists. Father Stanley’s name appeared on a kill list. His bishop called him back to Oklahoma for his safety. He spent Christmas at home with his family, rested, and then did something that most people in his position would not have done: he went back. He returned to Santiago Atitlán in January 1981, explaining his decision in words that have since become some of the most quoted in American Catholic history: “A shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger. The shepherd stays with his flock.”
On the night of July 28, 1981, masked gunmen broke into the rectory of the parish and shot Father Stanley Rother in his bedroom. He was forty-six years old. His body was brought home to Oklahoma, but his heart — literally, his physical heart — was removed and buried in the altar of the church in Santiago Atitlán, where it remains today. When Pope Francis beatified him on September 23, 2017, in Oklahoma City, he became the first American-born male martyr to be raised to the altar of the Church.
Father Stanley Rother heard the same Gospel we hear today. He knew that the men who came for him could kill the body but could not kill the soul. He had counted the cost and decided that the acknowledgment of Christ before the people of Santiago Atitlán — before the poorest, most abandoned, most marginalized people he could find — was worth everything he had. The sparrow fell. But the Father knew.
“”The shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger. The shepherd stays with his flock.”” — Blessed Stanley Rother, Martyr
❖ ✝ ❖
What “Do Not Be Afraid” Looks Like in American Life Today
Father Stanley’s courage is extraordinary by any measure. Most of us will not be asked for that kind of witness. But “do not be afraid” has a thousand everyday translations, and the Gospel invites us to take them seriously.
The Fear of Social Disapproval
Perhaps the most common form of Catholic silence in America in 2026 is not theological doubt but social discomfort. We know what we believe. We simply do not want the raised eyebrow, the changed subject, the subtle cooling in a friendship that comes when faith becomes visible. Jesus addresses this fear specifically: “Everyone who acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father.” This is not a threat. It is a promise so large that it dwarfs the social risk. The person before whom you hesitate to say the word “prayer” or “Church” or “I believe” will one day be standing, like you, before the same Father. You are not protecting your reputation. You are protecting your comfort. And comfort, as Father Stanley Rother discovered, is a poor substitute for a shepherd’s heart.
The Fear That Your Faith Is Not Enough
There is a quieter fear than social disapproval: the fear that you are not holy enough, not knowledgeable enough, not consistent enough to speak about your faith without being called a hypocrite. This fear is related to the first but is more internal. It whispers: who are you to speak about God when your own life is so imperfect? Romans 5 answers this fear definitively: Christ died for you while you were still a sinner. He did not wait for your consistency before He loved you. He will not wait for your perfection before He uses you. Jeremiah preached the word of God while simultaneously begging God to let him stop. The apostles acknowledged Christ before others while they were still capable of falling asleep in Gethsemane. Imperfection does not disqualify you from witness. It makes you honest company for the imperfect people you are trying to reach.
The Fear of What the Future Holds
Many American Catholics are navigating genuine uncertainty right now — about health, about finances, about the stability of the institutions they have built their lives around, about the world their children will inherit. “Do not be afraid” is not a command to pretend that uncertainty does not exist. It is a reminder of who holds the future. The God who has counted the hairs on your head is the God who knew you before you were born and who will be with you in whatever is coming. This does not mean the future will be painless. Jeremiah’s life was not painless. Father Stanley’s life was not painless. It means the future will be accompanied. And accompanied suffering is a fundamentally different thing from abandoned suffering.
The Fear of Having a Hard Conversation
Sometimes acknowledging Christ before others is less dramatic than martyrdom and more uncomfortable than martyrdom: it is the conversation you have been avoiding with a family member who has left the faith, or the moment you speak a true word in a meeting where the easier thing would be to stay quiet, or the text you send to a friend who is making a destructive choice because you love them enough to risk the awkwardness. These are the tiny martyrdoms of everyday Catholic life — the small deaths of comfort and ease that make a life of faith legible to the world around you. Do not be afraid of them. They are worth more than you think.
❖ ✝ ❖
Scriptures to Carry Into This Week
- Isaiah 41:10 — “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” The single most repeated command in the entire Bible is ‘do not be afraid’ — spoken over 365 times in various forms, once for every day of the year.
- 2 Timothy 1:7 — “For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather of power and love and self-control.” Paul writing from prison to his young disciple Timothy, who is also afraid. Fear is not from God. Power, love, and discipline are.
- Psalm 27:1 — “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom do I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom am I afraid?” The psalm of absolute confidence — worth memorizing and carrying into any situation where fear threatens to silence you.
- John 16:33 — “In the world you will have tribulation. But take courage; I have overcome the world.” Jesus’ final promise to His disciples before Gethsemane. The courage is not in the absence of tribulation. It is in the One who has already overcome it.
- Romans 8:31 — “If God is for us, who can be against us?” The rhetorical question Paul uses to close his great meditation on salvation. The answer, of course, is: no one. No one who matters ultimately. No one whose opinion is more authoritative than God’s.
❖ ✝ ❖
Conclusion: Say the Name
Brothers and sisters, as we move toward the altar this morning, I want to leave you with a single, specific, practical invitation. Not a grand gesture. Not a heroic act. Just this: sometime this week, say the name of Jesus out loud in the hearing of another person. Not in a way that is aggressive or preachy or designed to make anyone uncomfortable. Just name Him — the way you might name someone you love, someone whose presence in your life is real and shaping and non-negotiable.
It might sound like this: “I’ve been praying about that.” Or: “My faith has really helped me through this.” Or: “I went to Mass last Sunday and the reading really spoke to me.” Or simply: “I believe God is with you in this.” Small sentences. Public acknowledgments. The sparrow’s weight of courage.
Jeremiah stood in the pit of his fear and said: “But the LORD is with me, like a mighty champion.” Paul stared at the wreckage of human sin and said: “But grace abounded all the more.” Father Stanley Rother looked at a kill list with his name on it and said: “The shepherd stays with his flock.” And Jesus looked at His frightened disciples — knowing exactly what lay ahead for every one of them — and said: “Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.”
You are worth more than many sparrows. That is not a metaphor. It is not a consolation. It is the theological ground beneath your feet, the bedrock of a life lived without the particular paralysis that comes from needing the approval of people more than the acknowledgment of God.
Go this week. Name Him. Not because you are fearless, but because you are known by the One who is.
Glory and praise for ever. Amen.
❖ ✝ ❖
Reflection Questions for Personal Prayer or Group Discussion
1.. Jeremiah named his fear openly — “terror on every side” — and then countered it with “but the LORD is with me.” What is the fear you need to name honestly before God this week? And what is the counter-proclamation of faith you are being called to make against it?
2.. Paul says grace does not merely match what sin took away — it “overflows” and “abounds all the more.” Is there an area of your life where you have been thinking of God’s grace as barely sufficient, when the Gospel is proclaiming it as superabundant? How might that shift change how you carry yourself?
3.. Jesus says not one sparrow falls without the Father’s knowledge, and that every hair on your head is counted. Do you actually live as though you are that known and valued by God? What would change this week if you did?
4.. Blessed Stanley Rother returned to Guatemala because “the shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger.” What is the situation in your life right now where the easier thing is to run, and the faithful thing is to stay? What would it look like to stay?
5.. Jesus calls us to “acknowledge” Him before others. Without becoming preachy or aggressive, what is one specific, practical way you could make your faith visible to someone in your life this week — a word, a gesture, a choice that lets them see who you belong to?
❖ ✝ ❖
Prayers of the Faithful — 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Presider: Brothers and sisters, known by name to the God who counts every sparrow, let us bring before the Father the needs of His Church and His world, trusting in His great love for all who call upon Him.
- For the Catholic Church throughout the United States: that she may find renewed courage to speak the name of Christ in the public square — not with arrogance or aggression, but with the quiet, grounded confidence of those who know they are worth more than many sparrows. We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.
- For all who face persecution for their faith — in countries where Christianity is illegal, in workplaces where faith is mocked, in families where belief has become a source of division: that they may hear the Lord say to them, “Do not be afraid,” and find in that word the strength to stand. We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.
- For our nation as it navigates an era of deep division and fear: that the God who is “with us like a mighty champion” may raise up leaders, peacemakers, and witnesses of truth who refuse to let fear drive them to cruelty or silence, and who seek justice with the courage of the prophets. We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.
- For all who live in the grip of fear — those who are afraid of illness, of poverty, of loneliness, of death, of the future: that the Father who counts every hair on their heads may make Himself known to them this week in ways that are unmistakable and personal, and that this community may be the instrument of that knowing. We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.
- For catechists, teachers, and parents who bear the responsibility of handing on the faith in a culture of indifference: that they may find the courage of Jeremiah — to proclaim the word even when it is unwelcome, trusting that God is with them like a mighty champion. We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.
- For the sick, the dying, and those who mourn: that the grace of God, which Romans tells us overflows and abounds beyond all that sin and death have taken, may reach them in the very depths of their suffering, and that they may know they do not walk that road alone. We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.
- In thanksgiving for Blessed Stanley Rother and all the martyrs of the Americas, who acknowledged Christ before others at the cost of their lives: that their witness may continue to bear fruit in the Church they loved, and that we who claim their inheritance may prove worthy of it. We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.
Presider: Lord God, You know every sparrow that falls and every hair on every head. You sent Your Son to be the mighty champion of those who have no champion, and You call us to be His witnesses in a world that is often afraid. Receive our prayers, steady our courage, and send us from this altar unafraid to speak Your name. We ask this through Christ our Lord.
All: Amen.
❖ ✝ ❖
✝ ✝ ✝
12th Sunday in Ordinary Time · June 21, 2026 · Lectionary Year A · US Catholic Homily
homilysunday.com · Enriching Your Faith with Weekly Catholic Homilies and Reflections
💬 Share Your Reflection