Need to Weed

There have many books written on the Sower and the Seeds.

It is hard to figure out how one gives a short homily on it

because one could talk for hours on this very subject.

I would like to reflect on just two components.

The first is the Sower and how he sows;

then I want to talk about the soil

where the seed is choked by the thorns or the weeds.

The first one is the recklessness of the Sower.

Any farmer knows that seed is expensive.

Everything is in the seed.

The idea that the Sower would just recklessly

throw the seeds onto all types of soil

would outrage any farmer at such an idea.

It would have been silly.

No Sower would do this.

No farmer would recklessly throw away so much of the seed.

But that tells us something about God.

God’s is trying to communicate that

God’s abundant grace is indeed reckless.

He just showers us with his abundant grace.

And in doing so he is showering his seeds everywhere.

He will constantly shower us with his Word.

He will constantly pour out his grace and his love to all of us.

It is really important for us to know

because what that means for us is

that no matter what we do and no matter where we go,

God’s love and God’s grace is always going to be showered upon us.

His grace, the seed, is going to continuously be poured out into our hearts.

God will continuously welcome us back.

Here is an important thing;

there is nothing that we can do

that will ever make God love us anymore.

And there is nothing we can do on the negative side

that can make God love us any less.

God’s love and abundant grace is

always going to be showered upon us.

There is a readiness issue here but

that subject of the second part of this gospel, the soil.

The readiness of the soil of our hearts is

where we want to spend our time.

All of us, any of you watching,

like to think we have good soil. Right?

That is why you are watching.

That is why we are here is because we believe

that the soil of our hearts is ready for the Word of God.

That is generally true.

Today I want to focus on the weeds,

the thorns in today’s gospel sometimes choke the Word of God.

The work that we need to do as Christians

is not to coerce God to give us more seed

because the seed is coming no matter what.

But what we have to do is ready our hearts

and take out all those weeds.

There is a need to weed the soil of our hearts.

Let me give you an example:

In my neighborhood, when I go out walking,

I always see this one neighbor who is always weeding her garden.

It’s extraordinary, she is down on her knees

and she is just doing it with her fingertips.

There is no tool involved here.

She is just pulling up all these little weeds.

Every time I see her, she is just doing a little bit.

Once I had an opportunity to ask her about this

because her garden is beautiful.

It is absolutely beautiful.

And she said, “Oh, when you go to plant stuff, she says,

if you just pull out the little weeds,

they will just come up with your fingertips

but if you let them grow, they will grow deep down

and they will actually get bigger than the plants.

It becomes hard to take out the weeds.

I weed every day, she says,

just a little here, a little there

and I try to keep the soil clean.”

We would do well to do that in the soil of our hearts.

Sometimes the weeds of our life can

take hold of our heart, the soil of our heart.

And sometimes it can be hard to root out

but if we can root out those weeds when they are still young

they are easy to pull out.

What are the weeds of our heart today?

There are many but I would like to group it into three categories

that might be helpful to memorize.

It’s Possessions; Processes and People.

Let me explain:

Possessions.

I think we all have some things in our life

that in a sense are a distraction from God.

They are not the same things for everybody.

For some, the things or possessions that get in the way,

the weeds in our life,

can be like technology.

But for others, technology is actually an enabler.

Some people find it hard because they are distracted by computers.

And they do not have time to pray.

And yet, other people will actually use technology to pray.

It is not the thing itself, not the possession itself,

but what it does to us.

If we are honest, we could all reflect on possessions

that can separate us from God.

Technology and computers are just one example,

there are many more and some things

can be bit more insidious like alcohol.

There can be lots of things that eat into our lives,

that we spend hours collecting and fawning over them.

We have to be careful that possessions do not become weeds.

And each one of us has to do this separately

because possessions have a way of possessing us

as opposed to us possessing them.

The second one I am just going to call Processes, habits if you would.

We can all develop habits that are not healthy,

that can take us away from being good people;

whether it is a habit of snapping back at our spouse;

or snapping back at our parents

when they ask us something completely reasonable.

We get into this habit of being and it is really a thorn.

It is a weed in our life that we need to take out.

There are many habits of the heart or habits of thought.

Even habits of thought can take us to a wrong place,

a place that we do not want to be.

If we weed those out early

it is easy to remain in a good space with the Lord.

But if we let them take root,

they take us somewhere we just do not want to be.

These habits can also be the words we use with each other;

they can be weeds in themselves.

Sometimes I witness how couples talk to one another

or talk to their children;

or even more so children talk to their parents.

Is that really how we want to talk to our parents?

Is that how we want to talk to our friends or our spouses?

Is there not a gentler, kinder way?

These are little weeds that can get into our lives

and they can choke the Word of God.

The third is People:

Now this sounds very harsh

but sometimes, there are people in our lives that are thorns;

that are weeds choking the Word of God in our life.

When I was a child, I had a friend that just was toxic to me.

Every time he would come around,

I would inevitably get in trouble.

I would inevitably do things that were just not my best self.

My parents helped me to decide to change this.

He wasn’t a bad boy but the two of us together

just never produced good.

It was always bad ideas, goofy things.

He went off his way and was a good man

and turned out to be a good man and

I like to think that I went off to be a good man.

We have to be careful that there can be people in our lives

who choke out the Word of God by gossiping.

And after we leave them, we know we are not our best selves.

If we cannot change that relationship,

then sometimes we need to remove the weed in our life

and say I just cannot be there.

Today, God showers us with his grace

and will always throw the seeds of the Word of God

into our hearts but that we have a need to weed.

It is not just a once-off thing.

We cannot just weed once a year.

It is a continuous process.

We keep on weeding from our hearts.

One of the places where we can do this weeding is in prayer.

There we can decide what possessions

are choking the Word of God in my life?

Do we have processes, habits that separate us

and keep us away from God’s Word;

and do we have people who are choking the best part of ourselves.

Possessions. Processes. People.

We need to weed.