Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies Podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew.
[00:00:31] Speaker C: Glory to you, O Lord. On that day, Jesus went out of the house and sat down by the sea.
Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat down and the whole crowd stood along the shore and he spoke to them at length in parables, saying, a sower went out to sow, and as he sowed some seed fell in the path and the birds came and ate it up.
Some fell on rocky ground where it had little soil.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: It sprang up at once because the
[00:01:11] Speaker C: soil was not deep, and when the sun rose it was scorched and it withered for lack of roots.
Some seed fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it.
But some seed fell on rich soil and produced fruit a hundred or sixty or thirty fold.
Whoever has ears ought to hear the
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Gospel of the Lord.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Have you ever noticed in your lives that when things start to go wrong, they rarely just stop at one thing? They tend to spiral up a bit?
That's been my experience, and I've tried to do a bit of analysis on why that is, what's actually going on.
And what I've tended to notice is after the first thing goes wrong could be something quite simple, or it could be something pretty big.
My initial reaction, although it may not always come shooting out at me, is a touch of anger.
And that anger builds on itself.
Before I know it, I'm yelling at the dog, or I'm yelling at the cabinet that I just banged my head on, or the thing on the floor that I tripped over.
All these things that have nothing to do with what I'm struggling with.
I start to show anger to Sometimes it even manifests itself towards people that I deeply care about. My friend, I will be a little bit more acid tongued. I know that's hard to believe, but a little bit more and a lot shorter one with them.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: And it's rooted in the fact that
[00:03:10] Speaker B: my anger that builds in me hardens
[00:03:14] Speaker C: my heart so much that even though
[00:03:17] Speaker B: God's grace is constantly around me, around us, it can't penetrate.
It gets stopped. It's like the rocky ground that Jesus refers to in the Gospel, because in order to fully receive grace, in order to fully experience the ways that God can enter in and bring us peace, calm and love.
We have to be fertile ground to allow that grace to germinate. And as long as we block it with anger or stubbornness or selfishness, it has a real hard time entering in.
But if we can create fertile soil that is open to God's presence, all of a sudden those little things become almost non existent.
And in fact, the bigger things we struggle with suddenly become more bearable.
Because the constant in our lives is that God is always trying to reach out to us with grace and love every single day of our lives.
But it is up to us to welcome that grace, to receive it and allow it to enter in and to change us.
One of the ways we can have that fertile ground within our hearts is to always take the time for quiet and prayer.
Because it's in those moments of quiet and prayer that we break away the stony hearts that we can sometimes have. And all of a sudden they're more open and more attuned to what God is doing in our midst.
And then that grace can take root and produce good grain 30, 60 or a hundredf.
