Homily 15th Sunday in OT Year A Is 55:10-11; Rom 8:18-23; Mt 13:1-23
Well, there probably isn’t a parish in our diocese that can relate any better to today’s parable than all of you. With the wonderfully fertile land of these mountains, its fields and forests, and your farms, flower beds, and gardens, you know well what it takes to sow, plant, cultivate, and harvest fruitfully.
Before I make crystal clear the point of the parable Jesus left implicit in his explanation, I want to play a little more with his metaphor. These days sowers who go out to sow don’t just randomly scatter seed around and then wait to see what happens.
They plant seed in the best soil available to them, and plant it deep enough to ensure germination. Their soil may require additives for extra nutrition, it may require hay or mulch to retain moisture. It has to be watered regularly, and its location must provide proper light conditions for optimum growth.
But that’s not all ... to ensure fruitfulness once things sprout from the ground, other additives might be needed to guard against harmful bugs, weeds, or disease. And then there are those pesky critters – birds, rabbits, groundhogs, deer – who need to be kept at bay, with fencing or netting or by some other way.
The point is that in order to get from seed to harvest, consistent and persistent attentiveness is required, each and every day. If the sower gets lazy or distracted, the harvest is hampered. and fruit will be scarce.
And so it is with the garden of our souls. Our spiritual soil is not set in stone. We have the freedom, the power, and indeed, the responsibility, to maximize its richness, both by what we put in, and by what we keep out. If it’s hardened, shallow, rocky, or thorny today, it doesn’t have to be that way tomorrow.
It comes down simply to this: properly prioritizing your life, so that you never fail to give God what he wants and needs from you, to make you the faithful and fruitful disciple, he wants you to be. He needs your time, effort and energy to do that. You need to sufficiently divert those resources from worldly anxieties, pleasures, riches and responsibilities, and redirect them to the Lord.
Before God’s Word can bear fruit in you, it needs to be securely planted in your ‘soil’. That can’t happen if you don’t hear it, and listen to it, regularly. This is the privileged venue for the proclamation and preaching of God’s Word.
You are here today, and that’s great. Many of you have taken time out of your vacation to join us ... even better. But are you always here, every weekend, except for serious reason? This week I saw the woman who’s been cutting my hair for the last 15 years. She’s a faithful, practicing Catholic. Her kids go to Catholic school; she’s a catechist, and helps out in other ways too.
I asked her how her pastor is doing, and she said, “Oh, actually I haven’t seen him in a couple of months. You know summer weekends are so busy with the kids stuff, graduation parties, weddings and showers.” I thought to myself, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
But I continue to see the same kind of thing here, among faithful, practicing Catholics, and that’s why I’ll continue to raise the issue every now and then. So ... have you ever not been here, for the less than serious reasons of:
... making more money, doing chores around the house, hosting guests, celebrating something else, sleeping in, playing sports, pursuing hobbies, interests, and activities on the perfect summer or winter day?
There may be the rare exception to what I’m about to say, but I haven’t come across it yet. I can’t envision a scenario in which, by taking two hours out of a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning each week, a person would jeopardize their ability to ...
... put food on the table, be the best student, athlete, artist, or professional they can be, deepen relationships with family and friends, maintain their health, fitness, and well-being, or adequately enjoy the wholesome things the world has to offer.
Missing Mass without serious cause is not only a violation of the third com-mandment and a serious sin, but it deprives you of the seed and nutrients you need, for a healthy, fertile, fruitful soul. Ok, so once you are here to hear God’s Word, you gotta make the effort to really listen and understand.
It’s easy to be distracted ... surveying the crowd to see who’s here and with whom, what they’re wearing, how they’re acting ... daydreaming about someone or something ... stressing about everything you need to do next week ... praying private prayers while the Word is being proclaimed.
You know, the Mass is in English now and no longer Latin, so we can all be full, conscious, and active in our participation and engagement of the liturgy. Other prayers have no place during this sacred celebration, not even the rosary. The Blessed Virgin Mary would tell you so herself.
Sometimes, despite our best efforts to focus and listen and participate, we still don’t quite grasp the meaning of God’s Word in its fullness, or how we’re supposed to apply it to our lives.
This is when we need to add more nutrients to the soil ... reread the readings using a study bible with good notes; consult a scripture commentary; reread my homily on the website; come see me, or a fellow parishioner you trust, to help you understand; prayerfully seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit; attend the adult faith formation and faith sharing events we offer at the parish.
Yes, acquiring these nutrients for your soil will require those same resources of time, effort and energy. But if you commit to shutting down the computer, TV, tablet, and smart phone for just a half-hour a day, you’ll find those resources ready at hand. PAUSE
Few are the folks who never find themselves on rocky ground at some point in their lives, and the rise of those rocks is often beyond our control … a sudden health crisis, job loss, loss of a loved one, family strife.
If we’re regularly nurturing our soil with prayer, penance, fasting, the sacra-ments, and spiritual reading, so that the seed is securely rooted within us, it’ll be easier to maintain our faith, hope, and trust in God’s Word thru our trials and tribulations.
Persecution is an ever increasing threat to Christians in our world today. At the end of last year, Cardinal Dolan said we are living in the age of martyrs. Half of all martyrs were killed in the last century alone, and there have been over a million people killed so far this century, for their belief in Jesus Christ. It’s estimated that every hour, a Christian is tortured and martyred somewhere in the world.
The persecution we’re likely to face is far less deadly, but can be quite hurtful nonetheless. You might have seen the recent ad in the NY Times by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, that criticized the Catholic Supreme Court Justices for voting in favor of Hobby Lobby Craft Stores, a Christian business that sued the government over the HHS mandate to cover contraception in insurance.
The ad claimed that the all-Roman Catholic, all-male majority put religious wrongs over women’s rights. The National Organization for Women has labeled institutions including several Catholic dioceses, EWTN, The Little Sisters of the Poor, and the University of Notre Dame, the “Dirty 100” for their religious freedom lawsuits.
Closer to home, a close friend of mine told me how her spouse responded, when she suggested he turn to God for help with his personal problems, citing the incredible turnaround she’s made in her own life, by doing so.
He told her quite coldly, “That’s because you’re living a lie, a delusion. This world is nothing but misery and suffering, and there is no other world to come.” I’m sure many of you have been comparably criticized, insulted, or worse, by some of the people you love in your lives.
Persecution is survived by courage, fervor, and zeal for the faith; and by patience, tolerance, and love for the persecutor. These things don’t just pop up in our soil. They need to be cultivated by the means already mentioned: sacraments, penance and prayer.
Worldly anxiety often comes from two fundamental misguided notions: that everything we need to do, depends completely on us, and that we really need all the things we really want. Neither is true. We should do the best we can and make the most of what we have, without shortchanging the Lord our God, and trust that he will make up for the shortfalls.
The lure of riches, of pleasure, of popularity, of beauty, of life experience, of enjoyment, of prowess in mind or body, etc.; these are the things that tempt us to equate the extras we want, with the basics we need. Resist that temptation with all you’ve got!
Keep yourself safely away from the thorns – from the people, places, things, activities, and websites, that threaten to spoil the soil in your mind and heart, by contradicting the Word and its message of truth, its message of salvation.
If you let yourself be bombarded by the voices, who tell you over and over, that you don’t need to hear the Word of God, and believe in the Word of God, and act on the Word of God, eventually you’re going to be convinced it’s true ... but nothing could be further from the truth.
Failing to hear, failing to believe, failing to understand, and failing to act on God’s Word, in order to bear fruit for his kingdom, has real consequences. And as you’ll hear the next two Sundays from this same chapter of Matthew’s gospel, those consequences are not very pleasant at all.
As I said at the start, it all comes down to making the right choices to establish the right priorities. Two prayers I’ve recently prayed say it perfectly well. One is from the feast of St. Benedict yesterday, the other is from today’s Divine Office.
O God, who made the Abbot Saint Benedict an outstanding master in the school of divine service, grant we pray, that putting nothing before love of you, we may hasten with a loving heart in the way of your commands.
Heavenly Father, we praise you with our lips, with our lives, and with our hearts. Our very existence is a gift from you; to you we offer all that we have and are. We pray this as always through Christ our Lord. Amen.
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Rev. Michael G. Cambi
7/13/2014