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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Listen for the question, does it really need to be this way when it begins to rise up within you? That question can lead you to more liberation in your spirituality, more health in your relationships, and a clearer sense of who you are meant to be. Today, we start the first of two summer series, reads a classic. And heads up, we switched the series. In your journal, it says we're doing sacred practice today.
Speaker 1:We're not. It's reads a classic. Deal with it. Adjust your journal dates accordingly. I know it can really mess you up, but you got this.
Speaker 1:Now it is probably no surprise to you that I love classics. I'm rereading Jane Austen's novels right now to prepare my heart for her 200 birthday this December. So a bit of a nerd alert. I take reading classics very seriously, but should you? And what kinds of classics are we talking about in this series?
Speaker 1:Well, years ago, I was a camp speaker at Keats Island Camp and one summer, we repeated a refrain that I love. When I would read a passage of scripture to preteens and camp counselors, I taught them to then say with me, for the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, for the word of God within us, thanks be to God. Kinda wondered if you'd say it out loud but you didn't. Guess you don't know it. It was incredible to hear 200 young people internalize that refrain together for a week.
Speaker 1:What reads a classic will do is start at the bottom of this threefold affirmation. By turning our attention to words on pages that have inspired deep reflection, corrected heresy, and made it possible to hold onto faith, we notice how God works within us and among us still. So thanks be to God. Today, I am going to introduce you to one of our very own Christian weirdos, as I like to call her, Hildegard of Bingen and her classic skivvius. But first, let us pray.
Speaker 1:Loving God, we take a moment to settle in. Maybe we consider the ideas and books that have meant something to our faith. It's likely most of us aren't reading as much as we used to. Maybe we're only taking in ideas that fit into our worldview and honestly don't challenge how we live. But on the other hand, maybe we're so inundated with ideas and we don't have the energy to sort through them.
Speaker 1:And so today and throughout this series, we ask for renewed curiosity. And now as we breathe in and out to center ourselves in this place, we borrow these words of Hildegard of Bingen as our prayer too. Holy Spirit, quickening life moving all things. The root in all creation who washes all things of impurity removing sins and soothing wounds who is shining light and laudable life, awakening and reawakening all things. Amen.
Speaker 1:Alright. The first in our read the classic series, we will talk about Hildegard of Bingen, but what if Eve, Viriditas, and the sapphire man. So let's begin with Hildegard of Bingen's own words from the preface of the classic Skivius, which is Latin for know the ways of the Lord. It happened that in the eleven hundred and forty first year of the incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, when I was forty two years and seven months old, heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain and inflamed my whole heart as the sun warms everything its rays touch. Now in a moment, I will show you this illumination that launches the visions in Skevius.
Speaker 1:But suffice it to say for now that Hildegard's very aware of her place in time. She dates her visions like the Hebrew prophets or John receiving revelation on Patmos. Carrying on. And immediately, I knew the meaning of the exposition of the scriptures, though I did not have their interpretation of the words of their texts or the division of the syllables or the knowledge of cases or tenses. Now Hildegard wrote Scivius over the course of ten years with the help of her secretary, Volmar, who you will also get to peep in the image that opens Skivius.
Speaker 1:And while Hildegard became this towering figure in Christian doctrine in the twelfth century, she actually begins by saying a voice from heaven addressed her as fragile human, ashes of ashes, filth of filth. By the way, I hope I never hear God speak to me like that or speak to you like that. Now it is possible that this is kind of a false modesty or the way, and specifically women with authority spoke eight hundred years ago. All the same, she makes this humble case that she should be trusted. But I had sensed in myself wonderfully the power and mystery of secret and admirable visions from my childhood as I do now.
Speaker 1:This I showed to no one except a few religious persons who were living in the same manner as I. Until the time when God wished it to be manifested, I concealed it in quiet silence. Now Hildegard is not a typical mystic. She's more of a prophet and polymath. But still, she saw visions often associated with mystics who might starve themselves of food or people so that their brains could get a little bit trippy.
Speaker 1:And this wasn't Hildegard's vibe. She wasn't into extreme fasting, and it's believed that she actually didn't spend a lot of time in solitude just praying. And honestly, I think she was way too busy for all that. Hildegard wrote five other works, including texts on science and healing the body. She wrote more than 400 letters of correspondence.
Speaker 1:So you think your inbox is full. She painted and composed music that we can still stream online. She mentored and told her nuns that they could let their hair down. She designed and founded all this funding for two of her own monasteries, and through it all, Hildegard learned to trust what she herself could see. But the visions I saw, I did not perceive in dreams or sleep or delirium or by the eyes of the body or by the ears of the outer self or in hidden places.
Speaker 1:But I received them while awake and seeing with a pure mind and the eyes and ears of the inner self in open places as God willed it. Now I'm gonna show you this image that opens Skevius and then I'll fill you in a little more on Hildegard's background. So here it is. It's called the Cirrus and it's the illustrative context of what we just read. So the thing that looks like kinda creepy tentacles above her head, that's the fiery light of exceeding brilliance.
Speaker 1:And Hildegard is surrounded by gold representing the divine realm, and Volmar, her secretary peeps his head into this illuminated space without being actually situated there himself. But it's kinda cool. Right? To see something of what she saw. But let's spec it up a bit with our girl, Hildegard.
Speaker 1:Hildegard was the tenth child of a noble family near Alzheim, Germany. And at the age of eight, her parents participated in the tradition of oblation, dedicating a tenth child to the church, a practice that Hildegard would later rebuke. And Hildegard was given over to the care of a reclusive nun who lived in a hermitage off the side of a Benedictine monastery in Disobodenburg, which housed both monks and nuns. And in November, Utah, Hildegard's spiritual guide and monastic teacher, died. And Hildegard was then elected the new abbess.
Speaker 1:And an unlike this more mild Utah, Hildegard was a force. She took charge and grew the community of nuns until it couldn't even coexist with the monks. With the help of her family connections, Hildegard relocated her 18 nuns to the Rupitsburg near Bengen, situated at the confluence of the Naha and the Rhine Rivers, this symbolically rich place for Hildegard to call home for the next thirty years. Now maybe you're thinking, okay, Bobby. I can see why you like this broad, but why should I care about Hildegard of Bingen?
Speaker 1:I mean, it's not likely that you're having cosmic visions you're meant to write down. It's not likely that you're going to offer a tenth child to a nunnery. It's not like you're headed for sainthood. Sorry, but I know maybe I shouldn't judge but come on. Not one of us is going to be named a doctor of the church which Hildegard was by Pope Benedict in just 2012.
Speaker 1:Now back in 2011, I wrote a paper about Hildegard in grad school for my systematic theology a course subtitled prolegomena scripture, the triune God creation and providence, all one class. Seminary is cool, you guys. But seriously, I wrote this paper because I needed to know a leader and a thinker like Hildegard existed. Hildegard is a part of the continuous community of Christ. She is one of our very own.
Speaker 1:And she gives us permission to care about what we care about, to call leaders out when they lack virtue, and to gather people and to shake them with our own voice. She gives us permission to resist apathy and dryness, to create beautiful works of art, and to apply ourselves to wisdom and ecology and leadership and ultimately, to love. Hildegard doesn't need to mean everything to you, but you should know that she existed. So I'm gonna give you three snapshots from her 26 visions in Skivias. Get ready to get a little weird.
Speaker 1:So the second vision in the first book of Scythias is about the fall of man. And with it, Hildegard tackles this age old question, where does evil come from? Eve, whose soul was innocent, for she had been raised out of innocent Adam, bearing in her body the whole multitude of the human race, was invaded by the devil through the seduction of the serpent for her own downfall. Hence, the devil cast out Eve and Adam by his deception from the seed of blessedness and thrust them into the darkness of destruction. I cannot do that voice when I read that part, the darkness of destruction.
Speaker 1:So as a result, Hildegard writes, creation, which had existed in great calm, became this place of agitation. And still she says paradise is not gone. It exists in a physical place and blooms with the freshness of flowers and the charms of spices. Now this take on Eve might seem subtle to us, but the medieval world held that Eve was the first sinner, the true transgressor, and therefore Eve was the gateway for sin to enter the whole world. And Hildegard takes the blame off of Eve's shoulders and places it onto the devil.
Speaker 1:And scholar Barbara Newman writes, by presenting her own version of the story of the fall, Hildegard introduces her own themes into the Genesis account. So she realigns Adam and Eve so that they face their real enemy together. And for me, Hildegard is this conscientious objector to the status quo. She stays rooted in her tradition, sometimes uncomfortably so for us. It's a very twelfth century German Catholic tradition.
Speaker 1:And still, she displays the enduring strength of small change. Take her take on Eve. Throughout her work, Hildegard acknowledged the gender hierarchy of the world that she lived in. But she also subverts norms by exercising authority, personifying divine traits as female, and keeping up a correspondence with powerful men who wanted her advice. We're talking about the heads of monasteries, archbishops, popes, and one of the most iconic rulers of the medieval Roman empire, emperor Frederick the first.
Speaker 1:Think about the line that this woman had to walk. If she stepped too far out in front or expressed any kind of heresy, she would have been shut down. But she wasn't. Her work was preserved, and she is an example, one I have needed of what following Christ can look like. Please, do not underestimate the strength of small changes in your life and in your faith.
Speaker 1:Listen for the question, does it really need to be this way? When it begins to rise up within you. Go where it wants to take you. That question can lead you to more liberation in your spirituality, more health in your relationships, and a clearer sense of who you are meant to be. Now we turn to a bigger theme that underpins Hildegard's work and this takes some work.
Speaker 1:It's the Latin word viriditas which means greenness. Now to get to Viriditas, we're going to travel by way of the soul. So here is Hildegard's analogy of a tree to the soul. It's like, put your seat belts on people. The soul in the body is like sap in a tree, and the soul's powers are like the form of the tree.
Speaker 1:How? She asks. The intellect in the soul is like the greenery, viriditas, of the tree's branches and leaves. The will, like its flowers, the mind, like its bursting first fruits, the reason like the perfected mature fruit, and the senses like the size and shape. And so a person's body is strengthened and sustained by the soul.
Speaker 1:Hence, o human, understand what you are in your soul. You who lay aside your good intellect and try to liken yourself to the brutes. Growing in every part of Hildegard's theological garden is this idea of viriditas. But what does it mean? Viriditas means greenness or this holy greening power.
Speaker 1:And by it, Hildegard means this vital force that sustains all life's greenness. And it's tricky to comprehend the full picture of viriditas as just the color greenness, so translators call it freshness and vitality, fertility, dewy moisture, fruitfulness, and lushness. And I like to think of it as the lushness of life. So Hildegard, she calls her readers to sense their soul in their body like sap in a tree. Look how the sap carries nutrients through a plant's xylem and phloem, forming bark and greening leaves.
Speaker 1:So it is with the soul enlivening the body. Of course, Hildegard didn't have our microscopic botany, but the image inspires wholeness and integration. The critic, Fiona Maddox, says, Hildegard's entire theology is based on the harmony of the created world and its relation to God. Viriditas is more than a metaphor for Hildegard. It is the energetic force of life moving through all of nature and that includes your body and your soul.
Speaker 1:Now let me ask you, when was the last time you really thought about your soul? Maybe in deconstruction, you questioned the soul's validity. Maybe without evidence of heaven, you wondered if the soul might just slip away. Maybe in the reclamation of an embodied faith, you kind of put the soul to sleep. A couple of years ago, I heard the psychologist and researcher, Dacher Keltner, speak about the soul on a podcast, and he argued that we should use the word soul more often.
Speaker 1:That it's a powerful term to connect the physiological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of what it means to be human. And I have been thinking about this challenge ever since, and in a way, trying to bring back the soul to my own vernacular. O human, understand what you are in your soul, writes Hildegard. Do you understand what brings you life? Do you understand what settles your nerves?
Speaker 1:Do you understand the kind of beauty that makes you feel small and grateful? Don't liken yourself to the brutes, writes Hildegard. Is your politics vicious? Does it divide? Are your habits so thoughtless that they're shaping you into someone you actually don't even wanna be?
Speaker 1:Have you refused to corral your morality? There is a way to live, writes Hildegard, and it's flowing in our foothills and through our own hands. Sense the freshness of God everywhere. Now we aren't quite done with Burititas yet, but I want to make a stop over at Hildegard's image of the sapphire man. So in Scivius book two, Hildegard describes a vision where she perceives God's mysteries as in the trinity.
Speaker 1:And this is the image that accompanies it. It's called the three persons. And in it, she sees a bright light without flaw or illusion, and that's the father. It's the outer silvery circle. And within this bright light is the figure of a man, the color of sapphire.
Speaker 1:And this is the incarnate son. And in the image, he stands looking out, and his hands are open toward us. Every part of him is sapphire blue. And then there's this gentle glowing fire that designates the holy spirit. This is the orange ring around the sapphire man.
Speaker 1:And Hildegard writes, the bright light and the glowing fire pour over the whole human figure so that the three are one light in one power of potential. Come on. It's an image to really meditate on. Hildegard was a vision seeing leader. She reached for natural metaphors over man made structures that honestly never fully permitted her into their halls of power.
Speaker 1:So you know what she did? She made a world to thrive in anyway. And in that world, Christ is like a gemstone. To Hildegard and her nuns, sapphire had healing properties and stood for warmth and wisdom and something pure and beyond human perception. Hildegard's visions might feel weird to us, but the images are beautifully biblical.
Speaker 1:Ezekiel speaks of a sapphire throne of the divine. Psalm one tells of green trees planted by streams for those who know the ways of the Lord, Skevius. Jeremiah says, the faithful will be planted by the water, sending roots out by the stream so there will be no fear of drought, only fruit that keeps on coming. John 15 speaks of Jesus, the vine, and his followers, the greening branches who abide in him. So what does any of this mean for you?
Speaker 1:I actually think it's pretty easy to get at what Hildegard was on about. Let me tell you how I experienced the greening of God this week, And then I'll point you back to the sapphire man before we go. After spending the week with my nose buried in this classic, I tell you I did it for you, scivius. I looked up, and would you believe that I found viriditas, the greening power of God, in the way our Uber driver spoke so whimsically about mocktails in Malaysia, in the way my colleagues chimed in and belly laughed at a lunchtime story told by our very own Kevin Borst. In the flavor bursting in my mouth from my backyard, Saskatoon berries ripened on the tiniest of little trees.
Speaker 1:I felt viriditas, the lushness of life in the burst of color of lilies, red and pink in my own garden, in the coffee with a friend. I don't actually know that well, but with all this room for us to draw closer. And the woman sitting in front of us at the Calgary Surge basketball game cheering so loudly for the other team because, as she told us, number five was her brother, and so I could not help it. I cheered for Abdul Muhammad too. I felt viriditas, the lushness of divine life when my husband and I shared one set of binoculars at Anne And Sandy Cross Conservation Area so that we could both see the red tailed hawks overhead and the American goldfinches in the bushes.
Speaker 1:Verrititas in my body moving to the music as soon as Jason Isbell started to play at the Big 4 Roadhouse. Viriditas. As I looked back at the picture of the sapphire man, I'd see his hands. They're open toward us so that we will know that all of it, the birds, the flowers, the sisters, the musicians, the lovers, the friends, the long gone saints, all of it is given to us by God who through Christ offers himself to the world. Sometimes we are looking so hard for God, but God is the greening force all around us.
Speaker 1:So take some time and make your own viriditas list this week. Do it for Hildegard. Do it for you. Let us pray. Loving God, thank you for the stories and words of saints and weirdos who remind us how at home we all are in the communion of the divine.
Speaker 1:For the ways that we struggle to make small changes, to reach for faith when times are hard, to notice beauty, and to stay grateful, we trust that Jesus will show us the way. So spirit of the living God, present with us now, enter the places of dryness, blow away the dust, water deeply what is good and growing in our lives so that we can participate in your work of healing and greening within us to better love and to better serve the world. Amen.
Speaker 2:Hey. Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we are posting content regularly for the community.
Speaker 2:You can also join our Discord server. Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in, have a great week. Talk to you soon.