Homily for Tuesday, 28 July 2015– Ferial

Tuesday of the 17th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Exodus 33:7-11, 34:5-b-9, 28;  Psalm 103:6-7, 8-9, 10-11, 12-13; Matthew 13:36-43

We hear today from the book of Exodus of a particularly frustrating time for Moses as he leads the people of Israel home out of slavery in Egypt. Does it not seem that, at every turn, the people of Israel complain about something on their journey: The desert heat; not enough food; not enough water… “Moses, he looked at me funny”?! 

The people of Israel are badly behaved in other ways. They fail to trust on many occasions in God, through Moses, to lead them back to their homeland. But this is also a time at which Moses especially seeks the help of the LORD to lead Israel. A tent, “called the meeting tent,” is set up in the middle of the desert to be a place where the people could “consult the LORD.” The people of Israel had access to God like never before through this “meeting tent.”

Moses enters the “meeting tent” and, “for forty days and forty nights,” he is alone with the LORD. And what does Moses ask of the LORD? We hear that Moses asks for God’s mercy and forgiveness toward the “stiff-necked people” he is leading. Moses first acknowledges God’s name, “LORD.” And then Moses acknowledges the greatness of God’s mercy: “The LORD, the LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity.”

God’s mercy does not mean that the people of Israel will escape without consequences for their unfaithfulness toward God. And yet if, in the highly symbolic language of Exodus, God will punish the people “to the third and fourth generation for their fathers’ wickedness,” God promises to continue his kindness “for a thousand generations” toward those who remain faithful. God’s mercy; God’s forgiveness, even before we ask for it, always greatly (we could say infinitely) outweighs God’s wrath; God’s punishment.

And here in the book of Exodus God’s greatest act of mercy yet is to have Moses write on another set of tablets the Ten Commandments. Do we remember perhaps how, earlier in Exodus, Moses descends the mountain after receiving the original Ten Commandments on tablets and, when he sees the people making a golden calf idol, he destroys these tablets. Here, through Moses, God offers the people a new beginning. God offers them mercy and forgiveness, even if it is difficult for us to understand God offering a set of commandments as an act of mercy. This is the people’s opportunity by God’s mercy to renew their vows; their promise to remain faithful to God and just toward one another.

In a similar way we are continually given a chance at renewal, especially through the sacraments of reconciliation and Eucharist, because God is merciful toward us. God’s infinite mercy and forgiveness toward us are shown by Moses’ re-presentation of the Ten Commandments to the people and again through Jesus’ parable of the weeds among the wheat in Matthew’s Gospel.

God invites us not to pull up the weeds too early and so to risk destroying the wheat. God gives us a renewed chance at faithfulness, captured in the image of Moses writing the Ten Commandments a second time. Our God is infinitely merciful toward us and invites us to the same mercy and forgiveness toward one another and ourselves.

Homily for Sunday, 20 July 2014

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Wisdom 12:13, 16-19; Psalm 86:5-6, 9-10, 15-16; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-43

Who among us enjoys gardening or farming knows someone who is a gardener or farmer? Who among us enjoys baking?

We have in our Gospel reading today from Matthew a God of many interests. Our Gospel presents us in three parables with God the farmer who sows wheat in a field, God the gardener whose crop of choice is mustard, and God the baker who introduces yeast into a batch of bread to leaven it.

The problem with these three activities, farming, gardening, and baking, is that their finished products can be unpredictable.

God the farmer sows wheat in a field. Has anyone here who has gardened ever tried, seemingly in vain, to keep a garden or a farm free of weeds? Each year, my parents grow a large vegetable garden. This garden is surrounded by an open field that is mostly clover and dandelions. The seeds of these weeds, along with those of even more infamous chickweed and Canadian thistle, are constantly blown into the garden, and so weeding the garden is a constant effort. At our house now, Fr. Joe is the gardener extraordinaire.[1] I know from living with him how much effort Fr. Joe puts into clearing weeds from his beautiful gardens.

I would enjoy gardening if it were not for having to clear weeds. I would like to adopt God’s strategy: leave the weeding to harvest time, pick the crop and the weeds together, and then sort the crop from the weeds, keeping the crop and throwing away the weeds. And yet this approach to gardening by me would be due to laziness; for God it is the approach of patience and mercy.

The weeds among the wheat in Jesus’ parable are “the children of the evil one”; of “the enemy”; the devil who sows weeds among “the children of the kingdom” so that the good crop and the weeds become undistinguishable from each other until harvest time, the time of God’s kingdom brought to its fullness. But we inhibit the final wheat crop, the Kingdom of heaven, from coming to its fullness if we pull up the weeds too early.

What will be of God’s wheat field, our world, in the meantime is somewhat unpredictable. Will there be more wheat than weeds; more good than evil or not? We cannot know this until harvest; until the end of time. God, in his patience and mercy, invites us to live with and even to nurture this unpredictability; to tend the field lovingly so that wheat and weeds grow up together.

God is not the typical gardener or farmer. And so would we not question God’s gardening techniques: God, why allow the weeds to grow up alongside the wheat? Why allow evil in the world and here in our nation and in our city? Why allow war, violence, poverty, and hunger to persist? Why not uproot these weeds immediately? What kind of farmer is our God anyway?

God is not much better as a gardener than as a wheat farmer. God the gardener would plant a mustard seed in the middle of his garden. If the seed grows, it will become a large bush and the ‘birds of the sky [will] come and dwell in its branches.’” This is great; just what we need, God. The birds will come and dwell in the branches of this giant bush that was once a tiny seed. Birds make a mess of gardens. They make noise. They carry seeds that grow into more weeds…

God the gardener; God who is patient and merciful; God who is “lenient” and whose might is justice as our first reading from the Book of Wisdom says, invites us to live with the unpredictable. God invites us to be confident that in the end, when the Kingdom of heaven reaches its fullness, evil will be no more. The weeds will be destroyed. The good crop, the Kingdom of heaven, that we pray to come in the Our Father during every Mass will come to fruition and will thrive. We do not know exactly how this will happen, but we are invited to live with this unpredictability; with the unknown. We are invited to be confident that, with our co-operation in tending and nourishing God’s garden; God’s growing Kingdom on earth, this garden will produce a bumper crop of goodness; of patience; of mercy.

And if we have difficulty living with the unpredictable; trusting that God will bring about the fullness of the Kingdom of heaven in time, a kingdom free of evil; a garden free of weeds and noisy, messy birds, we could always turn to God the baker. Wait, maybe this is not such a great idea...

In his parable of the yeast that we hear today, Jesus gives us a kind of recipe for the Kingdom of heaven: ““The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened.” The problem with this recipe is that, while we know to add “three measures of wheat flour,” God does not say how much yeast to add. To all among us who have ever baked: Do you not hate incomplete recipes?

There is, without doubt, a danger in adding too much yeast. I am reminded of my own experiments with my mother’s old (and somewhat temperamental) bread machine growing up. If I added even slightly too much yeast to the pot, the rising ingredients would overflow from the inside of the machine and make a mess of the kitchen counter.

God the baker; God the farmer; God the gardener invites us to live with this unpredictability in the process of bringing about the fullness of the Kingdom of heaven. If we trust in God’s patience and mercy, God the farmer will in time sort out good from evil; the wheat from the weeds. God will overcome the weeds; the evil; the sin of the world, once for all. God the gardener is, after all, a God who can transform a tiny mustard seed into a magnificent bush that gives shade; gives life. And so maybe, after a few spectacular messes in the kitchen, by the grace of God the baker we will eventually find out the exact amount of yeast needed to bake the perfect loaf of bread…

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[1] Fr. Joseph Trovato, CSB, is a priest of the Congregation of St. Basil living at St. Kateri Tekakwitha Parish, Irondequoit, NY.