Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
This is Sundays with Bishop Ken.
Thanks for sharing some quiet time with the Lord today. We welcome guest reader Brenda Piazza. Brenda is a parishioner of St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Mendon, New York, where she joyfully serves in a variety of ministries.
Brenda also shares her gifts with us each liturgical season, narrating our little book's reflections.
And now, here is today's gospel and homily.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Matthew Jesus proposed another parable to the crowd, saying, the kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field while everyone was asleep. His enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat and then went off.
When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well.
The slaves of the household came to him and said, master, did you not sow good seed in your field?
Where have the weeds come from?
He answered, an enemy has done this.
His slaves said to him, do you want us to go and pull them up?
He replied, no, if you pull up the weeds, you might uproot the wheat along with them.
Let them grow together until harvest.
Then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters, first collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning, but gather the wheat into my barn.
The Gospel of the Lord.
This gospel set me thinking.
I started thinking, what is a weed anyway?
What makes a weed a weed?
That curiosity took me down some interesting paths.
First of all, I discovered a weed is defined as any plant that is growing where it is not wanted.
In other words, while you can point to a certain plant and say, that's a rose, there isn't any plant that is defined as a weed.
It's simply a plant that grows where it's not wanted.
One person's wildflower might be another person's weed.
We call dandelions weeds, even though they can dress up a field and even be used for food.
There are places in the world where orchids are so plentiful they are considered weeds.
So in the parable about the weeds and the wheat, there was a certain kind of plant in that part of the world that looked very much like wheat.
The farmer is afraid the workers will not always be able to distinguish between the wheat and the weeds.
So what do we learn from this?
The parable in today's Gospel teaches us about God.
God isn't angrily looking for ways to punish us when we fail.
God is more like a grandparent who is patient with the grandchildren.
The reading from the Book of Wisdom describes God as lenient.
Then it says, o God, you gave your sons and daughters good ground in hope you would permit repentance for their sins.
That's a wonderful picture of God.
It occurred to me we could catch the meaning of this Gospel parable by thinking about high school class reunions.
Those of you who are old enough to have had 25 year reunions know how differently we look at some of our classmates. After all that time when we were in high school, our evaluation of some of our classmates was way wide of the mark.
Our judgments were superficial ones based on their athletic ability or their looks.
We thought some were wheat and others were weeds.
But as the years went by, we were able to see them in a different light.
Some of the people we thought were weeds turned out to be fine people.
Actually, it's probably more likely we think of ourselves as a weed.
But God sees things differently. God is patient, kind and loving, like a grandparent.
If you want to know what God is like, picture the farmer in the Gospel.
The servants wanted to go and pull up the weeds and the farmer says, well, let's not be too hasty, too quick to judge. Let's give it some time.
We might pull up some wheat thinking it's a weed.
That's God speaking and it's a picture of God that Jesus himself gives us.
And it's the way God treats us because God loves us very, very much.
It's wonderful to have a God like that.
Let's simply enjoy our God.
When we do that, the love and the praise come naturally.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us today.
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Sa.
