A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, mark well the parable of the sower. The seed along the path is the man who hears the message about god's reign without understanding it. The evil one approaches him to steal away what was sown in his mind. The seed that fell on patches of rock is the man who hears the message and at first receives it with joy.
But he has no roots, so he lasts only for a time. When some setback or persecution involving the message occurs, he soon falters. Falters. What was sown among briars is the man who hears the message, but then worldly anxiety and the lure of money choke it off. Such a one produces no yield.
But what so but what was sown on good soil is the man who hears the message and takes it to heart. He it is who bears a yield of a 100 or 60 or thirtyfold. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Whatever we may think about Jewish practices, there's one thing that that we cannot miss and that is that their concentration was on god.
Now that very concentration led them into very silly things. There's no other word for it. But the point is that we mustn't forget what was their guiding light. It was god. And two things occurred to me this morning to that pushes that into our perspective that we see it.
First of all, you heard what our lord was saying here about about the lust of the world and of money. And Christ said, my kingdom is not of this world. He said, you belong to my kingdom. That's what you are when you follow Christ. And, therefore, the world of Christ and the world, in quotation marks, that is opposed to Christ has to be opposed to us and we opposed to it.
Never forget it. When you're comfortable, that beautiful word today, with the world, there's something's happened. Either you become the world or the world has been con has become Christ's world, and that's a figment of a man's imagination. It hasn't happened yet. Now one of the basic principles of Jewish economy was the first fruits of everything, of the of fruits, of of grain, of animals, of the human being.
The first fruit had to be offered to god or its replacement. The first fruit, the first child born of a woman was supposed to be offered to God. In other words, you offer God nothing but the best and the first. You think of God first, not of the IRS. And the second thing that we are living in this world, and if we don't do anything in opposition to this world, we are going to be sucked into it, and that means to be sucked down.
And so the Jews had a fervent observance of the Sabbath, which again they carried to extremes about this business of doing no work. Remember, they had refined that to such an extent that if you went through a wheat field and grabbed a head of wheat and ate it, that was work, and you had violated the Sabbath, and therefore, you were unclean. Now you see, it's easy to smile at what we call these absurdities, but don't smile at what was behind them. They were trying to put god first. They didn't succeed, neither do we.
But that's what the idea was. And you take our lives today. We are embroiled in the world, and we have to be in the world. That's where we are. God put us here, and god's world is not the world we have to fight.
That's not the world that is in opposition to Christ, not God's world. It's the world of man's creation with all the lusts of the flesh and the mind of the imagination. Just take your New York Times or or a Sunday and the priest to take the New Yorker, take the Washington Post. That will tell you what the world is. And remember, the world is coming into our living rooms, into our kindergartens.
It's coming into the nursery of the little babies. It's being fed in with the boob tube. Remember that. And so the Jews insisted on giving god the best and the first and also giving him one seventh of the week. What have we done?
We have practically eliminated the Sabbath. I'm not standing up here and defending blue laws. In my lifetime, a man was killed over in Chestertown because he was on the street during Sunday service because they had a blue law. So I'm not defending blue laws, but I am defending god's right to be remembered at least one out of the seven days of the week. We have commercialized Sunday so that in many ways, it's no different from any other day.
And that's the society, for the most part, we are living in. So we can't we're not gonna change that, but we've got to change ourselves, or at least we had to be fortified about it. Some people resent giving even an hour on Sunday to god. I'm not minimizing the sacrifice that means for a lot of people. I went through it.
I know it. I've sat in the pews and watched my watched to see how long an hour could be, and it seemed like eternity because I had other plans for Sunday. We all know that. There's nothing wrong with it. God doesn't ask us to enjoy what we're doing for his sake.
He didn't enjoy being on the cross. All he asked of us is, do you do it? There is the point. In today's reading, we have that we we go back I mean, the gospel reading. We go back to that idea of this good seed and the rock and all that.
God's word comes to us, but and we must do something about it. But even good, serious, honest to god people who wanna do the best, they can get lost in the doing and forget god and forget god. They can forget why are you doing what you're doing, and you ought to be able to answer that question. Why are you doing what you're doing? And the author you ask the question and the author you give an answer, the closer to god you're going to be.
That will help you to realize that god is in his heaven. He is the earth is his. We are in the palm of his hand. Recognize it. Let us recognize god.
It's the first commandment. Thou shalt love the lord thy god with thy whole heart, with thy whole mind, with thy whole soul, with everything you are. Notice everything you are. You're not just a disembodied, a a Cartesian. You are a human being.
And, therefore, with all that you are, you love god as a human being. And therefore, if you're laying bricks, if you're pushing a typewriter, if you're in front of a computer, if you're mopping up a floor, why are you doing it? Do you see god and his son, Jesus Christ, with you? In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.