Day of Pentecost A
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
May 31, 2020
Come Healing of the Spirit
A couple of years ago my wife was invited by the University of Illinois to give a lecture on their campus about women in medicine. I went. To my surprise the first woman in medicine Deb considered was Hildegard of Bingen.
I was surprised because I knew Hildegard only as someone, not of Deb’s medical tribe, but my own, a religious type. Hildegard was a Benedictine nun, the abbess of a monastery in Germany in the 1100’s, and from time to time I’ve come across her writing. She was something of a visionary mystic, a great writer on spiritual giftedness; Pentecost Sunday, this is like the best day of the Church year on which to remember Hildegard in a sermon! She had religious visions and her writing is shot through with vivid imagery; here she writes in the voice of the Holy Spirit:
“I am the Supreme and Fiery Force who kindles every living spark…. As I circle the whirling sphere with my upper wings of Wisdom, rightly I ordain it. And I am the fiery life of the Divine essence: I flame above the beauty of the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And, with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life. For the air is alive in the verdure and the flowers; the waters flow as if they lived; the sun too lives in its light; and when the moon wanes it is rekindled by the light of the sun, as if it lived anew. Even the stars glisten in their light as if alive.”
Turns out she wrote about a lot more than Holy Spirit mysticism. She wrote books about philosophy, she wrote music, and, as Deb taught me, she wrote what some consider the very first European medical textbooks. Her monastery had an infirmary that served like the community hospital, and when Hildegard got frustrated with the damage her uneducated monastic sisters were doing to the local populace in there, she sought to standardize and improve medical practice. So I guess she was one of our very first professors of academic medicine. Her first medical text, Physica, was kind of a pharmacology text, all about the healing properties of various plants, reptiles, fish, and stones (!). And you thought healing crystals were all New Age, didn’t you? Her second book, Causae et Curae, is about the causes and cures of various diseases, 300 chapters worth. Most of it you wouldn’t want to try – blood-letting; that sort of thing – but some of it is preternaturally right. She trained her people to check blood, pulse, and urine. To avoid infection, she wrote, be sure you boil the water. This is 700 years before Louis Pasteur and the dawn of microbiology.
And through all her work her faith shines. There is that Holy Spirit infusing all of the creation, the creation that is thereby both natural and divine, and she wanted her medical workers to understand the place of humanity and disease in that created context. She uses the word “green” a lot, linking the “green health” of the natural world to the health of the human person. In her mind medicine was a kind of gardening, and the point of it is to get us back to the healthy state of the Garden of Eden, God’s living intention for us. Pull those weeds in your body; water the plants – stay hydrated!; nurture the growth and bring the life. That’s all medicine is, is it not? I was reading Hildegard this week, but in my mind I was hearing the Woodstock song: “We got to get ourselves back to the garden ….”
This day, the Day of Pentecost, is the great festival of the Holy Spirit, and we remember the giftedness of the Spirit in our creative use, this day and in all our lives, of language, of poetry, of science, and of music – the arts! But this Day, this year, we are all laser-focused on the Spiritual gift that is named in St. Paul’s list in First Corinthians 12. It is one of the gifts of the Spirit, says Paul: healing. O come, Holy Spirit! The healing art.
I remember years ago when our congregation did together a couple of seasons of small group sharing, prayer and study together. “Unbinding the Gospel,” we called it. I was part of one group in which one of our newer church members said, “I’m never sure what we’re talking about when we talk about the Holy Spirit. I get the God the Father part, and I sure know Jesus, but where is this ‘Holy Spirit’ y’all talk about?”
And I watched as the people of God began to teach and share. One saw the Spirit in her singing: “It transports me,” she said; “I learn more Scripture and learn more about God in choir than anyplace else.” Another as a schoolteacher: “When I stumble on something that makes a connection better than I ever expected I look up and say, ‘Come, Holy Spirit!’” I shared my own experience coaching youth baseball. Every team every season moves from a group of individuals to a community, and if the Spirit wills it’s a community that nurtures growth and gives life. The Spirit transports you; makes connection; builds community; nurtures growth; gives life – right there, in every creative and inspired art that you recognize as touched by God, right there is the Holy Spirit coming to you.
And St. Paul says that one of the creative and inspired arts that comes to us by the Spirit, is healing. Hildegard, too, the healer and the Spiritual mystic, has much to teach us about the connection of the two. I have been amazed during the months of our pandemic response, at how often I’m asked about where is God in all this. The sickness, the death, the fear, the employment numbers, the loss – where is God in all this?
I try to be sympathetic: yeah, there are things in this world that are not of God, and this disease, this threat, is one of them. But brother, I always want to say, with eyes of faith, can you not see? Because the beloved people of God are in great need, the Holy Spirit is – right now! Every moment! – moving among us with great power. Turn off the silly news for a minute and look around you: this is the greatest united community health response that you will know in your lifetime – look with eyes of faith and don’t ever lose sight of that bottom line. These sacrifices we are making, from the very smallest to the stake-your-life-on-it sacrifices, are not for the sake of war this time, but for the sake of life. Community together – right there’s the Holy Spirit coming to you.
With eyes of faith, can you not see it? A whole world community that is doing medicine. And the front-line workers, the healers, the people putting themselves forward for the sake of us all, is there really any doubt that their work is creative, inspired, touched by God? It is the gift of the Holy Spirit, healing. Right there is the Holy Spirit coming to you. See it with the eyes of faith and know, that the Spirit of God has come upon us, and even now is moving among us with great power.
Now, this sermon does not end this morning when I stop talking; this sermon is going to continue with this message through the next song. That’s because on Pentecost Sunday we remember that the message comes through music and art and vision e-e-even a little more sometimes than when I talk at you from out of a pulpit.
Through this next song you’re going to see pictures, the kind of pictures we’ve all been seeing for months, of front-line healers. See if you can’t see such images a little differently this time, and see the Holy Spirit at work.
For those of you watching this who are members of Faith, many of these pictures are people you know. This is kind of a love letter to our Faith people who are doing this Spirit-inspired work. Some of them will be easily recognized by you. Some of them you will not recognize, swaddled as they are under all those layers of PPE.
But what I hope you do recognize, is the Holy Spirit when you see it.