Bishop Anthony B. Taylor
Bishop Taylor delivered the following homily on Sunday, July 20.
One of the prayers that I find most helpful in my personal life as well as in my ministry as a priest and now as a bishop is the famous Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
This is a prayer for wisdom, courage and ambiguity tolerance — the ability to recognize the limits of what we can do, to pick our battles wisely, knowing that everything ultimately is in the hands of the Lord and he will sort it all out in the end.
That’s what Jesus is saying today in his parable of the Weeds and the Wheat. The farmer knows he can’t eliminate the weeds without damaging the wheat — destroying the good along with the bad, so he exercises ambiguity tolerance. He lets the weeds and the wheat grow together until harvest and then he’ll sort it all out, burning the weeds and storing the wheat. Jesus explains that the weeds represent evildoers, the wheat represents those who do good and the harvest represents the final judgment when God will sort it all out — condemning evildoers to hell and welcoming his holy ones into heaven.
That’s the meaning of this parable. There is nothing perfect in this world, including not even the Church. Now obviously we should always strive to be the best we can be — change the things we can — in our personal lives, in our families and in our world. And there are many things that need to change and I hope that in the upcoming elections we will all work courageously to correct the grave evils in today’s world, especially unjust violations of the right to life and to human dignity, injustices that no one should ever have to tolerate, evils which have been allowed to grow up alongside the wheat in American society for far too long, especially laws that permit the grave evil of abortion, and also — much in the news today — unjust laws that violate the human rights of today’s immigrants.
We have some rights that come to us directly from God which the state cannot legitimately deny us — we call these inalienable rights. Every human being has an inalienable, unlimited, God-given right to life from the first moment of conception and every human being has an inalienable, though not unlimited, God-given right to immigrate when circumstances require — limited only by the common good, that is, the common good of the whole world, not that of a single nation.
God gave this planet to the entire human race, without distinction. And with the right to immigrate comes the right and obligation to participate fully in the life of the community. There should be no second-class residents.
And wouldn’t it be nice if the Lord would just step in and sort things out right away, like at the end of the parable in today’s Gospel, then we wouldn’t have to struggle to correct these and the other evils in today’s world. Well, in fact he has already intervened in Jesus Christ! In Jesus’ teaching and in the witness of his life. In his teaching as interpreted by the Church, Jesus has already separated the weeds of error from the wheat of truth — for instance the Gospel of Life. And by his cross and resurrection he has already broken the power of sin and death and now all who follow him on the path of truth and life share in his victory.
So if we already share in his victory, why does the hard work of correcting the evils in today’s world — the work of building the Kingdom of God — seem so overwhelming, so much bigger than our own limited abilities to set things right? Many people who feel called to work to make the world a better place simply don’t know where to start, so they don’t do anything and by their inaction end up being part of the problem.
For instance, many white Southerners during the days of segregation, people who in many respects were good people, but who by their silence and inaction were complicit in the inhuman exploitation of their black brothers and sisters. Are we any different from them if we keep quiet on the issue of abortion or on the need for immigration reform that respects the human dignity of our Hispanic brothers and sisters?
So where do we start? We have to start with ourselves — otherwise we will end up returning evil for evil, hating the abortionists instead of treating them with the same love that Jesus showed his unjust killers.
Martin Luther King spoke a great deal about the inner holiness, the sacrificial love, that non-violent resistance to evil requires. And the holier we become, the better our world will be. Notice I said holier rather than more righteous even though the word righteous appears in today’s Gospel.
The reason is that Jesus emphasizes elsewhere that he calls us to holiness and holiness is more than just righteousness. Holiness is righteousness plus charity, righteousness plus ambiguity tolerance. Holiness is righteousness plus wisdom, plus serenity, plus the ability to accept with humility the things we cannot change, plus the courage to change the things we can, confident that God will sort it all out in his good time and with our collaboration, on the last day, if not before.
