27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Peace be with you and greetings on this our celebration of the Mass for the 27 ^th Sunday in Ordinary Time. You know, I was talking to a friend the other day who works at Kroger and he told me an interesting story. One Sunday afternoon he was working the checkout line and he had just finished ringing up a lady’s groceries and asked her if she wanted to pay with cash, check, or charge. As she was digging through her purse for her wallet he happened to notice a TV remote control and couldn’t help asking, “Do you always carry your TV remote in your purse?” “No” she said with a big smile. “I asked my husband to come with me to help with the shopping but he said he had to stay home and watch a football game so I figured this was the most wicked thing I could do that was still legal.” So – here we are today, having just listened to that beautiful story from Genesis 2 about the creation of the first man and the first woman and the story continues, doesn’t it?

You know, I heard another homily in the not too distant past, where the Priest suggested this very Creation Story from Genesis 2 we just heard, actually lays out the fundamentals for human anthropology. Specifically, from the very beginning the Bible tells us we are all created to be social creatures. Now I know that may not track with what our Western society teaches today about how important our personal individualism is, but like it or not fellow Christians, the Bible tells us we are all created to be social by nature. Listen one more time to what we just heard from God in Genesis, “It is not good for the man to be alone I will make him a suitable partner.” With his uniquely human rationality and capacity to love, Adam needs someone coequal, a soul mate, someone to share his life. That good old heathen Aristotle even said, “We can only be friends with someone who is our equal.” “A friend” he said, “is a second self.” And this relationship between man and woman presented in Genesis is meant to be the deepest form of friendship. The Bible tells us, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one flesh.”

Wow, now that’s a very sensual sounding verse from the Bible isn’t it? Well again interestingly, in our modern American society, we Catholics are often criticized for being overly puritanical or actually opposed to human sensuality as though it is something evil. My sisters and brothers, there certainly couldn’t be anything further from the truth. Follow me here for a minute. I once read an article by Dr. Scott Hahn where he says Satan is probably a greater theologian than anyone alive. He says Satan could probably quote the Bible or any other religious text better than any human on earth. Dr. Hahn points out that every single demon Jesus ever drove out in the Bible knew exactly who Jesus was, the Holy One, the Son of God. Now how did they know that – because those nasty old demons had faith? Oh come on Scott, how can that be, demons with faith? You see faith in and of itself, without love, collapses in on itself and of course; Satan and his demons have no love. Everything in the Christian world must be related to love and just like faith, that includes human sexuality. God is love and as Thomas Aquinas said, “love is willing the good of the other.” So, the casual Playboy philosophy where sensuality is good in and of itself, as pleasure or simply recreation, independent of love and commitment, will eventually collapse in on itself and create pain, hurt, and suffering. Remember, love is willing the good of the other and it must be elemental in every Christian’s life. With love human sexuality is a beautiful gift from God.

Why is love elemental for our human existence, the Bible emphasizes it, especially in the New Testament; all people are called to holiness and if God is love holiness and love must be codependent. With this specific emphasis that all people are called to holiness, Vatican II articulated this about marriage, marriage is every bit as much a vocation or spiritual calling as the Priesthood or religious life. My friends, marriage is a vocation from God. When two people are married they are actually mirroring what God is, because God is a loving relationship. The Father and the Son are equal and their love of each other as the Holy Spirit is also equal. The Biblical image is clear. Marriage is not simply some secular or social arrangement. It is part of God’s plan for God’s purposes. Marriage is a symbolic sign of God’s very way of being. Now meditate on that for a while folks. Marriage is a symbolic sign of God’s very way of being.

Now we have the Gospel reading for today and along with it, we have an elephant in the room no one wants to talk about, divorce. Because of everything going on in our national and local governing systems now a days concerning marriage, I’ve stopped referring to what we do here in the Church during a wedding as simply marriage, I now call it Sacramental Marriage. You can have a marriage in a courthouse, on the beach, or on a mountaintop, performed by your best friend if you want, as long as he or she goes on line and orders the right certificate for ten bucks or so. If you want a Catholic Sacramental Marriage however, a Priest or a Deacon must do it in the Church. Now I certainly don’t want to correct the Evangelist Mark but I would like to qualify for the purposes of this homily, we are talking about Sacramental Marriage in the Gospel reading.

Jesus himself quoted Genesis 2 before he said, “Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” Friends, God doesn’t make mistakes. If God caused you to say yes He cannot cause you later to say no and that’s what Sacramental Marriage is all about. Consequently, in the Catholic Church we have this process, which very few understand called Annulment. That’s Catholic divorce right? Wrong!!! It is a process that proves, a Sacramental Marriage did or did not take place and there are many, many reasons why the authentic truth might say it did not.

In our Church Marriage is and always will be sacred and sacramental but wherever you may be in your life remember God is love. And remember what Paul says at the end of Romans 8; “Neither height, nor depth, nor anything in all of creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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Paul T. Keil, 18-19 July 2026 16 th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Season A Peace be with you and welcome to our celebration of the Mass for the 16 th Sunday in Ordinary Time. OK, some of you may remember I’ve said before, in Matthew’s Gospel, Chapters 5, 6, and 7 comprise the whole Sermon on the Mount, but did you know Chapter 13, where we are today, is often called the Sermon of the Parables. In this single chapter Matthew strings together seven separate parables from Jesus. Today we just heard numbers two, three, and four. Last weekend we heard the first one with the Parable of the Sower and what happens to the seeds scattered in different places. Next weekend you’ll hear the final three parables from Chapter 13 so, be sure to come back. So, what is Jesus saying in these readings. Last week we heard the parable about seeds as an allegory for Jesus’s words falling on a path and being eaten by birds, falling on rocky ground and withering with no roots, falling into thorns and being choked by life’s anxieties, and falling on fertile soil to bear fruit. Today we have Jesus giving us another parable about planting seeds and again, just like last week, Jesus’ disciples ask him to explain the parable. And since He stops to explain both parables about planting, he just might be trying to emphasize something important here for his disciples, and for us. One thing is clear in these parables however, God’s Kingdom will always coexist in this physical world with forces opposing it, like the wheat and the weeds growing together. Now many religious people struggle with this condition. Some see it as predestination. A weed in the wheat field or a seed in the rocks must represent people predestined to go to hell. That’s what it literally says, right? Still others ask in frustration; this is God we’re talking about, why does God’s Kingdom have to struggle with opposing forces at all? Why doesn’t God just get rid of the evil? Well, our old friend, St Thomas Aquinas wrote quite a bit about good and evil coexisting in our fallen world. He said sometimes the two are so tightly interwoven that you couldn’t have certain types of good without certain types of evil. For example, he said simply, “there would be no virtue of the martyr without the cruelty of the tyrant.” Friends, God delights in our freedom, our intelligence, and our cooperation when we freely make the decision to accept God’s love. Without free will we cannot choose to love. Jesus’ explanation of the wheat and weed parable certainly helps when he says; “The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels” and in the next verse he says; “The Son of Man will send his angels.” There is a very important take-away here every single Christian should remember. Eternal judgment belongs to God alone, not to anyone else – period. This is a consistent message Jesus gives us in all four Gospels but unfortunately, there are those who sometimes forget this simple divine fact about humanity’s relationship with the unlimited creator of the universe. We may perceive an individual as being bad or even intrinsically evil but judgment for their immortal souls belongs exclusively to God. I always like an old adage that goes like this, “if I ever get to heaven, I may be surprised by who I see there, and they may be even more surprised to see me.” I’ll admit, over the years for a long time, as I’ve meditated on this parable about weeds and wheat or last week’s parable about seeds, especially the ones falling into thorns choked by worldly anxiety, there was something always bothering me. You see, if we’re not careful both parables can make life, heaven, and hell sound kind of random or worse yet, they can make God’s love sound like it is exclusively reserved for preselected people. I know now however, there is nothing further from the truth. If you’ve lived life for a while and think back to times when you were say maybe,,, struggling in school, or first dating, or trying to make ends meet while raising a family, or competing for promotions at work, or trying to buy that first house, you realize there may have been times when your life wasn’t very spiritually fruitful. In fact, I now realize there were times in my own past when thoughts of God, salvation, or prayer were nowhere in my daily routine. I even wonder; was there a period in my life when I was one of those weeds or a seed in the thorns? Thankfully, with reflection on the whole of Scripture, guidance from the Church, and maybe some help from the Holy Spirit I realize now these parables are not “either / or” propositions. God doesn’t intentionally create some people as weeds and some people as wheat nor does God throw souls into the wind to randomly fall in the thorns, or on stony ground, or in fertile soil. If you’re not careful, you can come to those conclusions, however. You can read the Bible too narrowly and pick out verses here and there that help support your personal image of what you want God to be. Those tend to be the same people who like to do God’s judgment work for him. Here’s the thing; some of us here today may have actually spent some time as those ugly weeds but at some point, with God’s help, we decided to change and now we’re wheat growing in that good old fertile soil. My sisters and brothers, sin must never be viewed as a permanent state. Like we heard from the Book of Wisdom today, “you gave your children good ground for hope that you would permit repentance for their sins.” This is the greatest gift of our Christian faith; God loves us all so much, even great sinners, God is always ready to forgive. So, here’s a challenge and homework for us all today. Most of us know people out there from all age groups, but especially some of our youth, who may be temporarily living life like the weeds in our parable today or maybe tangled in those thorns of life’s tribulations. First and foremost, we must be confident, sin is not a permanent state of life, second, we don’t judge, third, pray for them no matter how nasty they may seem. And finally, if we’re really, really brave, we offer them a hand to pull them up and out of the weeds, rocks, or thorns into God’s fertile soil.