2014/07/20
Matthew
13:24-43
Deacon David Lewis
Saint Charles Catholic Church, Imperial Beach/San Diego, CA
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.
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