Last weekend was the first Sunday the liturgical color was green since last February. We had the purple of lent, the white of easter, the red of Pentecost. And remember, after Pentecost we had the two great solemnities of Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi Sunday.
I was leading a support group the other night, and as an icebreaker question, each person was asked their favorite color. A few of the people said blue, finding blue to be peaceful and calm. But, I said, green--dark hunter green. For one, it was the color of my first car, a hunter green 1992 firebird. But, green is also the color of my childhood: I grew up running through the forests and fields out in my hometown of Madison, which is much more rural than here in Lyndhurst. Also, in high school and college, during the summers I would work in the nurseries, taking clippings from the different plants, grafting branches. One summer, for 8 hours a day, I simply watered plants and trees. So I associate that color green with new life. And liturgically, too, green is the color of new life, not simply of plants and trees, but the new life and growth which is to occur in our souls during this season after Pentecost.
In fact, though we Roman Catholics wear red on Pentecost, many Eastern Catholics wear green, not the fire of the Holy Spirit, but the new life He brings to the Church and to the Christian soul.
Spiritual growth is one of the foci of Ordinary Time. In spiritual life we are either growing or fading, ascending or descending, flourishing or stagnating. There are no plateaus in the spiritual life: we are either growing in our prayer life or falling away from vital practice, growing in a spirit of self-sacrifice or tending towards selfishness, becoming more patient or less patient, increasing in virtue or leaning toward vice.
God wants His children always growing, always learning, always becoming the people he made us to be. And in our Second Reading, St Paul provides us with two laws of spiritual growth.
The first law of spiritual growth is that we must die to sin: “You too must think of yourselves as dead to sin,” St. Paul says.
The second law is that we must live for God. Paul writes, “you too must think of yourselves… as living for God in Christ Jesus.”
What does "dying to sin" mean?
We are called to put to death our self-centered tendencies, all of them, our transgression of the laws of God, all of them. For not only do our sins hinder the life of God within us, they cause destruction in our lives, our families, and our society.
Flirting with sin, making little compromises with the commandments, or simply giving up and giving in to sinful inclinations and habits, these things suffocate the life of Christ in our souls.
And instead of living with interior peace, joy, meaning, wisdom, and courage, we end up exhausted, depressed, frustrated, with our relationships burdened with these attitudes and behaviors that should not exist.
Dying to sin is hard - because temptation is tempting. But God is on our side, and if we ask for his help, he will give it to us!
There is a story of from the life of St. Francis of Assisi. The great saint was being overwhelmed with temptations to break his vow of chastity. He would pray, but the temptations just got worse. He knew something had to be done to wake himself out of this cycle of temptation. So on a particularly cold winter’s day, he stripped down naked and threw himself into a ditch full of snow. It was a shock to his system, and it was a way of showing the devil that he is willing to suffer in order to remain faithful to God.
Sometimes we only think of St. Francis as having this unique relationship with animals. But, the man was hardcore, he was serious about rooting out sin from his life. He knew that sin and the life of God were totally incompatible.
Yes, Our Blessed Lord is merciful to the most hardened sinner who repents, but he also calls us to purity, chastity, moral fortitude, obedience to the commandments. So, if there is a particular sin which keeps lingering, we do well to make frequent use of the sacrament of confession, but also to practice some mortification, some fasting, some act of self-sacrifice to put those temptations in their place.
The second law of spiritual growth is living for God. Dying to sin, resisting our self-centered tendencies, is necessary but not enough, if we wish to become the people God made us to be. We also need to do something positive. Christ calls us to action, he calls us to love. "Love one another," Jesus commanded us at the Last Supper, "as I have loved you".
Jesus isn’t simply talking about love as an emotion. He’s not saying that we need to walk around with dreamy eyes toward each other. Love is an action. It is doing what is best for a person. We are grow in our capacity to love as Christ loved by forgiving others when they offend or hurt us, by reaching out to those in need, and, as we reflected upon last week, by being bold in sharing with others the meaning and purpose that comes from knowing, loving, and following Jesus Christ—spreading the Gospel.
I could give countless examples from the lives of the saints of what imitating Christ’s charity looks like. July 1 is the feast of St. Junipero Serra. When Pope Francis visited the United States last year, he canonized Junipero Serra, at the first canonization to be celebrated on U.S. soil.
During the time when our founding Fathers were fighting for our nation’s independence, the Franciscan Priest Father Junipero Serra traveled up the coast of present-day California, establishing missions, laboring for the spread of the Gospel.
Father Junipero was originally a university professor in Spain and a very learned man. But he heard the Holy Spirit urging him, not simply to share the knowledge of academia, but the knowledge of Christ. So he gave up his university career to come to California to teach the Native Americans about the Lord Jesus. He devoted himself to building churches and schools for the poor and the native people, catechizing those in his care and raising up dedicated priests to continue the Lord’s work.
During that time, when the civil authorities were violating the humanity and rights of the indigenous people, Padre Serra was devoted to improving their spiritual and material well-being—boldly fighting against their mistreatment.
For his work in raising up priests from the native population, Junipero Serra is a great patron Saint for vocation promotion. There is even an international group for the promotion and support of vocations who look to his patronage called Serra International who have a chapter here in Cleveland and meet regularly to pray for vocations.
When his body was exhumed for the purpose of the canonization, it was shown that he had cancer of the legs, making the long hard journeys up the coast of California even more difficult. Yet, he did so, out of love for God’s people, fueled by fervor for the spread of the Gospel.
Pope Francis called Junipero Serra one of the founding fathers of the United States and praised his willingness to abandon the comforts and privileges of his native Spain to spread the Christian message in the new World.
We might not be called to travel halfway across the globe to engage in missionary work, but each of us are called to help others know Christ, to die to sin and to live, not just for ourselves, but for Him who died and rose again for us, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
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