Sermon: Pentecost

THE DAY OF PENTECOST
May 11, 2008
Fr. Phillip Ayers

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Come, O Spirit of God,
And make within us your dwelling place and home.
May our darkness be dispelled by your light,
and our troubles calmed by your peace;
may all evil be redeemed by your love,
all pain transformed through the suffering of Christ,
and all dying glorified in his risen life.

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On this year’s Feast of Pentecost, we didn’t read the lesson from Acts, the one with the rush of a mighty wind, the crowns of fire, the gift of tongues. And being drunk on new wine! But the Holy Spirit may also come as surely and definitely, and yet much more quietly. And the Spirit’s power may be as strong in listening as in speaking.

The student chaplain was green. Hospitals were new to her, and very sick people were new to her, and the awesome stillness of the dead was new to her. She saw chaplaincy as something she was doing, not something God was doing through her, and she was very self-conscious about presenting herself to patients. The reactions of some patients when she appeared at their doors to introduce herself as a chaplain did not help: some were hostile, some were embarrassed, some were indifferent. Walking into a new room always made her feel like a salesperson making cold calls. And she found it difficult to offer to pray with and for people.
Patients were always coming and going, so she had to confront the agony of introducing herself over and over. Some patients, she was ashamed to say, never even met her:
she would put off the introduction until they had left the hospital. She thought she had managed to put Priscilla off for two or three days—once poking her head into her room, finding to her relief that she was asleep. But when the third or fourth morning came and she was still there, she had to go in. Priscilla was awake. The chaplain’s heart sank slightly, but the patient’s warm face creased into a smile that was as welcoming as a homecoming, and the chaplain settled into the chair by her bed for a visit. It was the first of many.

Priscilla had rich brown skin, saintly white hair and the bones of a still-beautiful woman. They lay just under the skin, for she was far too thin. According to her medical chart, she had cancer. But they didn’t talk about her charts. They just talked, especially about Priscilla. The chaplain was fascinated by her life and asked many questions. She had grown up in the Deep South in the days of segregation and Jim Crow, but that wasn’t what she talked about either.

What she talked about most was the little girl she had been. She told about climbing pine trees and getting sap on her hands, and the way a pine forest smelled with the sun shining full on it and the breeze lifting scents from the dry, slick needles under the trees. She told about playing with dolls made of cornhusks, using a handkerchief as a blanket. She told about going fishing, walking early-morning roads with velvety dust puffing up under her bare feet. She told about living in a tiny cabin and sleeping in one bed with all her sisters, and going to a one-room school. She had loved school, and books, and dreamed of being a teacher. Once a teacher gave her a box of crayons and some paper, and she wore those crayons down to stubs, filling every corner of her paper with colored pictures.

But the school only went to the fifth grade, and so she had to go to work, first as a “kitchen girl” and then as a maid. And she told other, darker things: a man who had come along when she was 14 and left her with a daughter to raise alone. That daughter was her only child. And there were hints of other men, and too much drinking, and some hard and desperate days before Priscilla had settled down and found a job she liked with a family who adored her. She had also bought a little house in which she lived by herself.

Her daughter, who had finished high school, went north, got married for a time and had a baby. Priscilla’s only grandchild. Priscilla’s granddaughter had done better still: she had graduated from college, married a good man and had three children and a career as a professional. But Priscilla’s daughter died and so did her granddaughter’s husband, leaving her with three small children. Priscilla was old then and had no desire to live in a big northern city, but she felt the tug of duty. Nine years before Priscilla and the chaplain met, she had sold her little house and said goodbye to her old friends and her old life and come to Philadelphia to help her granddaughter raise her children.

Priscilla tended the house and garden and cooked and cleaned and was there when the children came home from school. She couldn’t help them do their homework, but she could see to it that it got done, and it did. She loved her granddaughter and her children, and when the chaplain met them, it was easy to see how much they loved Priscilla too. But they were mostly there in the evenings, and Priscilla had not really made other friends in the city. A time or two, there were visitors when the chaplain came by her door, but mostly she was in there by herself.

As the weeks wore on, it was easy to see that she was dying, her skin as thin as paper over the bones of her face. She was more tired too. Once the chaplain came to see her at the usual time and she was asleep. She wasn’t disturbed, but the next day, she reproved the chaplain gently. “Always wake me up,” she said. “I can sleep anytime. I’m in a bed, you know.” So after that, the chaplain woke her up. But she had to do it more and more frequently, and their visits were getting shorter and shorter.

The summer was wearing on too. The chaplain grew more confident in her role now and felt more comfortable with prayer. That was partly because of Priscilla. The first few days, the chaplain hadn’t said anything about praying with her, and she didn’t ask. But then one day, the chaplain asked Priscilla if she wanted to pray, and she flashed her wonderful smile and took the chaplain’s hands in her fragile ones. “Honey,” she said, “I’d like that a whole lot.” So every day after that they prayed together, and because the chaplain loved her and she loved the chaplain, their prayer was real, deep prayer: God-touched.

And then it was the chaplain’s last week in her summer program. And then it was her last day. She hadn’t really seen Priscilla the day before—there had been visitors when it was the chaplain’s usual time to visit, and later the doctors had been in her room. They said hello, but there hadn’t been time to talk.

When the chaplain went into the room, Priscilla was sleeping, and she looked as light and thin as a leaf in late autumn. The chaplain hated to wake her but she did, and she opened her eyes and smiled with a tired approximation of her old smile. “It’s my last day,” the chaplain said to her.

“I remember,” Priscilla said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
The chaplain waited.

“I don’t know what I have,” Priscilla said, “and I don’t want to know. But I know I’m pretty sick. And when I first got sick, I wasn’t sure about . . . about where I was going. I hadn’t paid attention to God for a long time. I had done a lot of things in my life that made it hard for me to go to God. But telling you about my life and remembering things I hadn’t thought about for years seemed to help me a lot. It was as if it all made a pattern. And the praying made it all go together. I don’t worry anymore about what will happen to me. I know where I’m going. I feel at peace now.” She smiled her weary, wonderful smile, and the chaplain smiled back through her sudden tears.

The room was filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit, coming in as softly and lightly as the dawn.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
(T.S. Eliot: “Little Gidding”)

[Sorry, but I can’t find the source of the story about Priscilla and the chaplain. This sermon was first preached at Trinity Church, Marshall, MI, May 31, 1998]