Homily - Sunday Mass - 2014/07/20 - Matthew 13:24-43 - Weeds and Grass

Homily – Sunday Mass

2014/07/20

Matthew 13:24-43
Deacon David Lewis
Saint Charles Catholic Church, Imperial Beach/San Diego, CA

This spring I dug trenches in my front yard and installed sprinklers. I removed the dried out dead grass that hadn’t been watered in quite some time, I tilled the soil and mixed in some bags of new soil, spread some seed, set the sprinklers and waited for my hard work to bear the fruit of a beautiful lush green lawn.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, Father Jim and I were talking in the Sacristy and I mentioned this to him, and how unfortunately it seemed to be more weed than grass. I mentioned how today’s Gospel about weeds being scattered into the wheat would be the next Gospel that I would be preaching on, and how the time I was spending clearing the weeds was offering me a lot of time to reflect on the homily.

 I began explaining to Father Jim how I had started clearing out the weeds by removing the big weeds first, and as I pulled them it only revealed more smaller weeds under them. It was a never ending weed garden. Removing the weeds was taking me a long time because just like today’s Gospel mentions, the process of removing all these weeds requires care to avoid pulling up the grass. So as I was explaining all this to Father Jim, he jokingly suggested that I just mow down the weeds and keep watering the yard and it will look like green grass.

            It got me looking at today’s Gospel parable in a whole different way… Not as Jesus explains it at the end of the Gospel, which is pretty self-explanatory, with the Jesus being the sower, the good seed that becomes wheat, being the children of the kingdom, and the weeds the children the devil ultimately being burned … but when Father mentioned mowing down the weeds and making them look like grass, it made me think “Do we do that with our sins?” Do we try to make our sins look like virtues? Do we try to make those things that don’t belong in our life look legitimate? Do we reason why its’ OK to do things that we know are contrary to God’s teachings? Do we help the poor only so that we can brag about it later? Do we hold opinions on the faith contrary to the Church’s teachings, and justify our own belief by our own theology? Do we allow ourselves to repeatedly commit a sin, but justify it because we do it less frequently than our friend?  What weeds do we have in our life?

            Let’s face it… you don’t have to have a green thumb to grow weeds, they are easy to grow, too easy to grow, they sprout up all the time, and everywhere. Just like sins, they are everywhere too. Some sins are easy to spot, making them easier to find remove, some are hidden among other sins and don’t become visible until the bigger ones are gone.

Getting rid of bad habits, sins, sometimes takes little effort and we need only to bend over and pluck it from the ground and toss it into the trash. Other times they have deep roots and are hard to remove, requiring persistent tugging and effort, and eventually we persevere as they finally break free. However, sometimes we pull on the weed and it breaks in two, leaving the root still firmly in the ground ready to sprout again. And, sometimes we just walk past them and ignore them leaving them be to grow bigger. Each bad habit we have, each sin we commit, deters from the quality of our spiritual life, and the level of happiness we can achieve, just as each weed with its thorns and stiff stems makes our yard less enjoyable to walk on.

So if we choose  to allow the sins to continue and just mow them down to make them appear like virtues, we are allowing them to continue to exist among the grass, allowing their roots to get deeper and more intertwined with the grass, making it that much more difficult to remove as time goes on.

            So how do we achieve a virtuous life, a life of good habits, a life free od weeds? We start by acknowledging that we have weeds in our garden. Then we have to make the effort to get rid of them. We can get down on our and knees, and slowly one by one address each weed grabbing it and plucking it from our lives. It takes some work, but once we have cleared away the initial weeds, with regular maintenance it becomes much easier to keep up with the new small weeds as they sprout up. It might go without saying that  the weeds sprout up a lot less frequently when we surround ourselves with others that are virtuous, because if we surround ourselves with others who have weeds, the seeds from the weeds will blow into our yard and make it harder to keep up ours weed free.  

            But remember we are not on our own, we have a divine loving master who wants our gardens, and our yards to be free of weeds too. He sent his son to help us kill the weeds in our lives, to give us the strength to persevere when the weeds get thick, to offer us the Sacrament of Reconciliation to clear our garden of all the weeds it contains and start fresh. He gives us the life giving water we need, the good seed to plant, and the Church to surround ourselves with others that are trying to stay weed-free. Don’t mow your weeds to look like grass, instead strive to enjoy the true authentic soft grass of virtue under your feet.