✙
The Readings for the 11th Sunday of Ordinary Time (B2)
The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.
The kingdom God (that is The Church) is like this: scattering seed everywhere and what grows… grows.
What does it mean to scatter seed? To mention these things at every possible point: not in a pushy way, but just direct. When you ask a coworker, “What are you doing this weekend?” The answer is, “Going to a movie” or “Spending time with friends” or maybe “Going on a Date”. Do you respond with, “Going to Mass”? And, again, just in a casual, this is what’s happening sort of way. You asked, here’s what I’m doing.
I’ve told this story before: when I went to the Monastery, coworkers at my old job were like “I didn’t even know he was religious.” I totally wondered what I had been doing wrong. The seed was not sown. There were no blades springing up. In the end there was no harvest. But when I crossed myself for grace at lunch time, suddenly other started to do so as well. When you plant seeds, you do so “courageously,” “by faith and not by sight” as St Paul says.
We plough the fields, and scatter the good seed on the land;
But it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand:
He sends the snow in winter, the warmth to swell the grain,
The breezes and the sunshine, and soft refreshing rain.
Chorus All good gifts around us
Are sent from heaven above,
Then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord
For all His love.
We cooperate in this action, but the process is God’s. It takes our courage and our faith to participate. And our humility. We have to relinquish control and the drive for success. Our job is to sow the seed – a constant and repetitive function; a necessary one but not one with a lot of reward and glory.
How will you scatter seed on the job, on the bus, on the freeway? How will you scatter seed on social media and on those cold calls you have to make for he office? How will you scatter seed as you shop, or as you walk through the park?
Doxos 