Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 16, 2023 - Isaiah 55:10-11; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-9

“For creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord, but because of the one who subjected it.”

Last night at the Confirmation, I asked the three young people, all teenagers, who were about to be confirmed, when they were little and people said to them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” One of them said a police officer, one of them said a lawyer, and one said a veterinarian. In one way, things don’t change much from generation to generation. But then I asked the congregation the same question I am going to ask you. How many of you had a fantasy about what you wanted to be when you grew up? Put your hands up. Nice and high so I can see them. Good. Now leave your hands up alright. Now, anybody who wound up not pursuing that fantasy, put your hands down. Aha! Hardly anybody in the congregation wound up being what they imagined they’d be when they were growing up. And why does that happen?  Because our plans change or are changed for us. Lack of money to go to the college we wanted to go to. A sudden death in the family that changes both our social and our financial situation. Hanging out with a different crowd of people who turn our heads in a different direction. Meeting a teacher who inspires us in some way. Winding up moving from one place to another and losing track of things. But we wind up doing something. And the something that we do might be something that we choose, or it might be something thrust on us. 

Then I asked the congregation another question. Many of you, just like me, are in our retirement phase, but the same question goes for everybody, whether you’re still working or retired. Do you feel - whether or not you got to do what you wanted to do or wound up doing something you had to do - do you feel that, during your working life, you have contributed in some way to the betterment of either the larger society or your immediate surroundings? Put up your hands. Yeah, things turned out pretty well that way, didn’t they? Huh? Even though you might not have grown up to be the ballerina or the cowboy or whatever it was that you thought you were going to be, you wound up doing something meaningful, not only to yourself but to the wider world. 

That’s why I wanted you to pay very close attention to what St. Paul said in the Second Reading. It’s a concept that doesn’t come easily to us. He says, “The whole of creation, the whole of creation, was made futile, subject to futility, by the one who subjected it.” But then he says, “… in hopes that you would be a part of a new creation of which we, we, are the first fruits.” What he meant by that is that the sin of the first human beings darkened the prospects for life on this planet. And we interact with not only the rest of the human species; we interact with the rest of the planet. The flora, the fauna, everything. And just to take two disparate examples, last week’s weather has got to convince a lot of people that we are in a climate crisis. Got to. People out in Arizona who love heat are complaining that they are having too much of it. Highland Falls, which never had a flood in a hundred years, was inundated.

And take another example. When I was growing up, when many of you were growing up, we may not have liked, but we took for granted as the status quo, the Jim Crow South. And then, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, a movement bubbled up from the populous about a more just and fair way of doing things that finally resulted in the Civil Rights Act, created by a President not known to be particularly liberal. And we thought we did it all. It’s all done now. And now, a half century later, we realize that it is not all done and, God help us, in some ways it’s being undone. 

Because of human sinfulness, humanity and history moves forward in kind of a back-and-forth motion. We accomplish a little bit, then we un-accomplish some of it, but not all of it. Then we accomplish a little bit more, then we un-accomplish some of it, but not all of it, and so on and so forth. We do that as a human species because of sinfulness. We’re never moving forward in a straight line. 

But that’s why I asked you to see if you could spot the connection between the first reading and the gospel. They are all about abbondanza, as they would say at Mama Leone’s. Abbondanza.  God tells Isaiah, “Don’t be fooled. Just like the rain produces a good crop - the rain and the snow are necessary for the growing season - when I plant my Word, eventually it produces what I sent it for. It does not come back to me empty-handed. It may take a while, but it produces what I sent it to do.” Jesus tells a parable about the Sower. Now, later on in the same passage, St. Matthew gives a meaning to every one of the things in the parable. But that’s not how Jesus told the story. Jesus just said, “Look, when a farmer goes out, he just takes the seed, and he throws it everywhere. And then nature does its thing, and we get a 100-fold yield or a 60-fold yield or a 30-fold yield.” That’s impossible. In the ancient world, the best growing season might get a 10% yield. Might get a 10% yield. So, what Jesus is talking about is impossible abundance that comes from the hand of God. What God wishes for His creation, always and everywhere, is great abundance, great joy, great fullness. But sin prevents that.

In our baptismal grace, and in the grace granted us in our Confirmation, we have both the calling to vocation and some of the tools to work on the futility of creation. That’s our job. It’s the job of Christians, it’s the job of Catholics, even more than it’s the job of all other human beings, to work on what’s wrong and make it a little better. We may not even see the results of our own working. We may retire, die, without ever knowing what happened to the good things we started, the just things we accomplished, the beautiful things we made. But they’re out there, percolating beneath the surface, because God, the God who gave us Baptism, the God who gave us Confirmation, is all about abundance.