Father David Herrera - July 19

St. Philip Catholic Church: One of the things that happened when I was trying to take serious my faith back in the day, it was that I wanted to do everything perfectly. I wanted to pray the rosary perfectly, I wanted to have this perfect prayer life. And I started the first day and I was doing great and then I fell. I fell asleep and I was like, Okay, the next day will be perfect. And then I fell again. And it was like a continuous fight of us trying to find this perfection in my prayer life. And then Mass also, I'm gonna be attentive into Mass, I'm gonna do this, do that. At that time I was going to seven AM Mass during the homily, I fell asleep as well. So I was like, Man, I cannot attend this perfection that I'm looking for. And does the thing we all have this perfect scenario, perfect dream that we have, a perfect life. A perfect marriage, perfect friendships, church, society, per perfect family, a perfect spiritual life, or even a perfect world. And then just like me, you get hit with the reality that we are not perfect, that there is good and evil in this world. And then we go to God and ask the question, a very difficult question, which is God, why don't you just get rid of the evil of the world? Or even we go farther than that when we have a good journey of faith. However, we keep falling in the same sins, in the same habit, bad habits that we have. And then we also ask God, God, why don't you just change my But today we are reminded that evil in the world was never God's intention. Everything that the hand of God created was created for good. Everything was good. However, we as humans have these limitations and we don't like them. We feel like these limitations as humans kind of oppress us, so we decide to go against God's rules. God's creation against his order. And slowly we start resisting God and his gospel, and slowly but surely we start to fall away from God. And that is exactly the situation that Jesus is speaking to us in today's gospel: that there is good and evil in the world, and that we'll in While we live in this world, we will have to be able to discern between those two. The question is, what types of seeds are we putting in our path? Are we putting those good seeds? Are we putting those evil or bad seeds in our path? However, we must we must understand something that the evil doesn't usually present to us in a horrible or bad way. And that is the difficult part because it presents to us rather in something tempting, in something good to the eye, and even a similar good seeds, to the point that we see it and we think it must be good. However, have you ever had some type of food that looks great and then you taste it and it taste as awful? See, that's that's where we have to discern between good and evil. It might look great for us, but when we start to see it, then that's when we realize what actually it is. Take sacrificial love, for example. Bad seeds that look like sacrificial love, but it only looks like Sacrificial love if I benefit from it, if each person only looks for themselves while there are just feelings, until what I get what I need from the other person. And we think that that's sacrificial love, but it is not. Take friendships for example, which good friendships, good seeds are those friendships that are a gift from God who gets us closer to God, they offer to us corrections. They will hold us in moments of difficulties and they also bring the best of us. However, there are those friendships that look like good friendships, but slowly help us to normalise gossiping, judging. They lead us away from Christ, away from prayer. In a way they lead us or encourage us to sin and to focus more on the world rather than God. Take also piety. You know, piety we love more God and we serve others, but there's also this bad seeds that looks like piety. A false piety that only focuses on feeding our pride, our judgment against others, that provides this false false peace that we are doing good on the exterior, but interiorly we're doing horrible. So how do we tell the difference? If the bad seed can look so similar to the good seed, how can we know? And Jesus gave us the answer we have to look at the fruits. We have to look at the fruits of the actions that we are doing. That action that I'm doing right now, is it bringing good fruits? Is it is it bringing me closer to God or away from God? We have to look at the fruits of relationships. Is that relationship that I have a good relationship that is getting me closer to God or is it just causing me to fall away from God? We also have to look at the fruits of the decisions that we make in our life. not just the decisions we make now, but rather what's gonna happen with this decision that I'm making. Are the fruits of this decision in my future gonna bring good fruits or bad fruits? And we also have to look with not only our eyes, but also our heart. But with a heart that has God at its center, and we also have to look at God. See, the sermon is not only about examining ourselves, it is also about remembering who God is. And that brings us to another point in this gospel. It brings us to a point where They went to the owner and they're like, Well, there's this bad weed, so we we should go ahead and take it out. And the owner was like, No, we're gonna wait patiently. And that's what God is. He waits patiently. He's willing to wait for our conversion to go back to Him. Because can you imagine if we were destroyed as soon as we commit a mortal sin, we would not be here. So we should be grateful to God. That he is patient. One of the things about God is that He doesn't look at the evil, He looks at us for who we are His beloved sons, His beloved daughters. He awaits patiently until the last minute. God does not give up on you. And this should give each one of us great hope. So the question is not whether God is patient because He is patient. The question is how we will respond to that patience. Because while God can wait and wait, we are not eternal. We will die at some point. So when is gonna be that time that you actually take to make that conversion back to the Lord? Brothers and sisters, before we point to the weeds around us, Jesus asked us to examine The fuel of our own lives, the fuel of our heart. So this week let us ask the Lord to shine his light on those areas of our lives that are giving bad fruits. Because today the Lord is asking each one of us, Are you becoming more like Christ or more like the world?