A reading from the holy gospel according to Matthew. On leaving the house, Jesus sat down by the lakeshore. Such great crowds gathered around him that he went and took a seat in a boat while the crowd stood along the shore. He addressed them at length in parables, speaking in this fashion. One day a farmer went out sowing.
Part of what he sowed landed on a footpath where birds came and ate up the seed. Part of it fell on rocky ground where it had little soil. That seed sprouted up at once because the soil had no depth. But when the sun came up, it scorched it, and it began to wither because it had no roots. Again, part of the seed fell upon thorns, which grew up and choked it.
And finally, some of the seed landed on good soil and yielded grain a 100, or 60 or thirtyfold. Let everyone heed what he hears. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Well, I don't know about heeding this parable of the seed, which has all kinds of problems in it, but I hope we all got the message from Jeremiah.
This is a slightly different aspect of Jeremiah. Usually his message comes through in a pretty gloomy, four alarmed way. If there's a sad note to be struck, he strikes it. We have the word in English Jeremiah. But today there's a very different message coming from this gentleman who was also a prophet.
And notice how concrete the language is. I would even say it's poetic if I knew the meaning of the word. There's nothing abstract about this. Here you have a man who is having some kind of a communication of some sort with the divinity. I don't know what it was, but it was something.
And he gets the message that he's called upon to do something. And all he can think about is, first of all, the magnitude of the task is to be that he seems to be called to do, and his absolute inability to do it. And so he withdraws. And so Jeremiah has these words coming from divinity of who is in the driver's seat. Who is running the show?
If God asks us to do something, who's going to see that it's done? In the last analysis, am I the one who is solely, totally, wholly responsible for the consequences? Or in some way am I, now notice, a responsible, autonomous instrument, not just an instrument, not just a tool. God respects a human being more than to use him as a tool. But God does expect me to cooperate with him as part of the overall scheme in which I am the instrument of what he once done.
This is the whole theme of war and peace. But bringing it down more to earth, if I may say so, one of the best and most recent examples I have seen of this is Sally Fitzgerald, who edited the letters of Flannery O'Connor. And when this was going on, her marriage of over thirty years was breaking up. Her world was crumbling. She had never written a book.
And someone suggested that this ought to be done, that someone should gather Flannery O'Connor's letters and put them in a book form. She felt utterly incompetent to do it. These are her own words. She felt she couldn't do it. It was she had no reason to think she could do it.
She had no experience, none whatsoever. Her husband, of course, was a a writer and all that, but Sallie wasn't. And all the work involved, just a plain labor of gathering letters, sorting them, It's enough to and plus the stress of her domestic problems. Well, she didn't want any parts of it. And yet she says she felt she was called to do it.
She didn't hear any voice saying, come on, Sally, I want you to do this job. But she just had that feeling, that persuasion, that this was something she ought to do. And she felt utterly incompetent to do it. And secondly, she had every reason to feel incompetent. She was very honest, but she started the job.
And she says more than once, she felt there was something operating beyond her, just the way things would fall into place and so forth. But you see, she began without any confidence that she'd ever complete the job. And she did it for very, as we would say, high motives. She thought it was something that was needed, that this that Flannery O'Connor had that these letters had a valuable message for our contemporary world, as I certainly think they do, but they weren't doing anybody any good, scattered all over the country. You see, just the work of gathering these things, finding them out, sorting them, editing them, making all the decisions, finding people who didn't want to give her the letters, trying to argue with them persuade she never did persuade the mother to give up her letters, for which I respect the mother very much.
They're not private public property. But anyway, this was a tantalizing job. This was an aggravating job. And you don't have all that Elon of being creative when you're gathering somebody's letters and editing them and putting them in the book for it's slave labor in many ways. Very tedious, dry, and she never expected to be any kind of a success.
Who would after all, when you've been dead for fifteen years, you're pretty dead. Well, all I can say is look at the facts of the case. Look what the consequences have been. That book of letters has proved a while a whopping success. It's gone to a second printing, beyond all expectation.
I'm only giving you this as just a little instance. A woman who felt utterly incompetent, just as the man in Jeremiah's account this morning, felt utterly incompetent to do something that they thought was the work of the Lord. Now that is you see, I hate to use that kind of language. But when I say that, I mean that in some way you have a persuasion that what here's a job that needs to be done, that it will be in the interest of the Lord's work. It is that you're hearing light hearing some voice and seeing lights flashing and all that kind of stuff.
And inevitably, you take all the founders, I say all the founders, of the great religious orders, did they have a vision of an enormous congregation of houses spread all over the known world, of men and women clamoring to get in, of magnificent edifices, of prestige, of wealth. Did they have all that in mind when they started out to do a job? I challenge you to give me one that ever had any vision like that. Just one. None of them had.
But I do say this, everyone felt I use that word because they had a it isn't just the consequence or the conclusion of a syllogism. This is something that you feel with your whole being. You give it to yourself in your totality. You use the little word I in its magnificent universality of all your being. It's something you really, profoundly want.
And it is and when I say want, I want to be careful with that word. In many instances, the person involved didn't want to do it. Christ didn't want to do go on the go on the passion. He begged God to be freed of it. So let me take back that word want.
Many a man and many a woman, singly or maybe in the union of the family, have gotten into situations and have done work and have achieved goals that they didn't want to be involved in. And they'd begotten to be spared of being involved in. But they had the calling. They had the calling. Now, hate to use that word calling too because we get all involved in a lot of junk there.
But the point is that when a human being is convinced that what they're doing is the Lord's work, and I'll tell you now, there's one very simple little test of that, and that's the word duty. Duty. It's a four letter word, I believe. And therefore, it's kind of naughty today. But when a person has assumed responsibilities, then once that commitment is made, they don't have to worry about where where the the work of the Lord is.
It's right there on their foot on their threshold. It's right there. But we may not our inclinations may be against doing it. I'd like to emphasize this because I don't want to give you the impression that in doing God's will, it's doing something that I'm overwhelmingly joyous about doing, that I enter into it with all kinds of hosannas and hallelujahs, that I'm getting self fulfillment. Oh, ye gods, let's be self fulfilled.
Priests leaving the priesthood, nuns leaving their orders because they find no self fulfillment. Wives leaving their families, husbands abandoning them because they have a right to self fulfillment. What hogwash. So I this isn't a matter of liking. This is a matter of persuasion, of conviction, which rises above liking.
There are many things we have to do which we know we should do, are right and availing to unto salvation, but they're not the things we'd like to be doing at all. And so when we come back to this story today, it is something so oh, so important in our own lives that we realize that when we're following our calling, our vocation, wherever that be, there isn't one vocation. You might say there are as many vocations as there are individual responsible human beings, because each one is called in his own individual way. And when we are in that groove, let us profoundly realize, that we're not there alone. That if it's a calling, whose calling is it?
God's. And let's not wait for all kinds of of religious experiences to confirm this. Let us not ask for signs. The sign is very simple. What's on my doorstep that needs doing in the name of the Lord?
And if I do it in his name, he's there with me. It is his work. And if it's his work, let me realize my share in it. Don't you ever underestimate your share in the opus dei, the work of the lord. But on the other hand, don't ever think that you're so important that you can do it alone.
If god calls you, he's calling you to work with him. In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.