Pentecost
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Sermon by the Rev’d Pamela Snare

"For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body..."

At the risk of tiring everyone with yet another account of an experience on my sabbatical at a Benedictine monastery in Normandy, I am going to be bold in passing on to you what has been given to me. Before two weeks of my month long stay in the monastery had passed, a deep desire arose in me to do something for, or give something to, this community of women who had embraced me from afar and taken me into their "home" (for lack of a better word) on the basis of a brief week-end encounter some fifteen years ago, and a lengthy e-mail describing my sabbatical project for which I was applying for a grant.
My first week, indeed the first day of my first week, I was assigned to work in the kitchen with Sister Stephanie. After our introduction to each other, she said, "Pamela, do you like to cook?" I said, "Oh yes, I love to cook." She responded, "Then you must prepare an American meal for us." I said, "Oh no, Sister Stephanie," overcome with fear at the thought of preparing a meal in an unfamiliar kitchen for 27 nuns who were raised on the delicacies and the delights of French cuisine. "Besides", I thought to myself, "what is an American meal? Meatloaf and mashed potatoes? Hamburgers and hot dogs? Fried chicken and gravy?" How lifeless and dull and unappealing they all sounded.
By the end of two weeks, however, such gratitude and joy had taken root in me that my fear had completely evaporated, and I told Sister Sarah that I wanted to cook a meal for the sisters as a sign of my gratitude. I had even decided on a menu, except for dessert. When would be the best time? We elected for dinner on September 29, the feast of St. Michael and all Angels. I was excited at the prospect of being able to give something to these women who had given so much to me.
But I had this interior sense or urging of wanting to do something more. To give them something they could keep - a reminder of my gratitude for them, for who they are, for their unstinting offering of themselves to others, for the way they welcome all who come to them as Christ.
But what do you give a community of nuns? I was at a complete loss. So I prayed. I prayed, "Lord, show me something which would be fitting as a gift. Put something in my path that would be appropriate." As I prayed, I made a mental note to keep my eyes and my ears open, to be attentive. Because, of course, it makes no sense to pray for God to show you something or lead you to something and not to pay attention to what is going on around you. You have to be attentive to each moment if you want to recognize the gifts of God.
Now, of course, I was not going out on shopping sprees while I was in the monastery. However, my last Sunday in the monastery was my mother's birthday. Since there was no phone from which I could call her in the monastery, I had determined that after lunch, I would walk the two kilometers to the Abbey village of Bec and call from the public phone there. Which I did. When I hung up the phone, I had about one and a half hours before Vespers at the Abbey Church. What would I do with myself? I looked out of the phone booth and saw a sign: Yves and Co.: French antiquities.
I am a patsy for anything antique, hand-made and beautiful, from furniture to linens, so I decided to peek in this shop. It was actually a house, the bottom floor being the shop, and the second floor the residence of the French couple who owned it. I made my way through the entry hall, and looking to the floor on my left, I saw, encased in glass, a hand printed page of parchment about two by three feet. It was written in red and black ink, and at the top of the page, set to Gregorian chant was an antiphon, in Latin, of course, for the feast of the Holy Trinity. It read: "In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body." As soon as I saw it, I knew. This is the gift. Nothing else, in its beauty or in its substance speaks what I have lived here as this does. In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body. That was what I needed to say to the sisters. That expressed the communion, the profound sense of love and trust that had been birthed between us.
When I returned home to the US and told my spiritual director here about my sabbatical, he said to me, "Pamela this is remarkable, this is amazing, that these sisters would so welcome you, so embrace you, so receive you into their life. You are Episcopal, they are Roman Catholic. You are American, they are French. It would be like us Episcopalians welcoming a Pentecostal Holiness Christian into our midst."
I believe that what I was given on sabbatical my friends, was a vision of the Kingdom of God. I believe that what I experienced was the work that the Holy Spirit does in us and is meant to do in us as members of the Body of Christ. I do not believe that this was an accident. I do not believe that it was a "special thing" that was given to me. I believe that this is what happens when a community of people open themselves to God's leading, are committed to following the pattern of Christ's life, and welcome each other and all who come to them as Christ.
It would have been easy for me to put this experience in a "special" category, to distance myself and the implications of this experience for my life by thinking, "Oh well, that is what life is like in monastic communities, but that doesn't happen in the 'real' world," But if I did that, I would be assuming that the Holy Spirit is not active in my life, or active in your lives, as it is active in a small community of women in Normandy.
The fact is that the Holy Spirit is active in us and in our lives all of the time, every day. So how do we learn to live according to the Spirit? How do we learn to recognize his presence and guidance in our daily lives? How do we allow ourselves to become his temple, building bonds of charity and trust between us at Christ Church, in our families, in this community, in our schools?
The first step is simply to trust that it is so - that God is not a liar. Jesus said that he would not leave us alone, that he would send us an Advocate. An "advocate" is someone who pleads in favor of someone else, who supports someone else. That means trusting that God is not against us, but for us. That his only desire for us is for our good, and that his Spirit is constantly active and acting for our good. He is not our enemy, but our friend. Does that mean that everyhing in our lives will work out as we have planned or as we desire? No, it does not, for at least two reasons. First, we do not have unerring knowledge of what is best for us. We see only partially and dimly. So part of what it means to live guided by the Spirit is to accept reality, to accept what is, even when it is not as we planned or desire, as a means whereby God can work and is working for our good and the good of others. We may not be able to see this until years later, if then. Which is why we live by faith, not certainty, and this kind of living requires patience, longsuffering and steadfastness. This is especially hard for us, living as we do in a culture which seeks instant gratification. It is hard for us to take the long view of faith and patience, but that is how God works, and if we want to cooperate with him, we must accept the way in which he works and accomplishes his will.
The second reason everything in our lives may not be as we planned or desired is because of the fact and the reality of human sin. We and others are constantly distorting God's work through the Holy Spirit, throwing things off course because we visit evil upon each other. We also have to trust that when we or others put up roadblocks or detours in God's working, he is constantly working to find a means to bring us and others back where he intends for us to be. We and others cannot finally thwart God's working, but he is constantly having to rechart and update his work because of our blindness and hardheartedness.
And finally, allowing ourselves to be guided by the Holy Spirit means taking our lives and the lives of others seriously as the means whereby God is working to save us and others and the world. This means not compartmentalizing our "relilgious" life, our "spiritual" life from the nitty, gritty of our daily lives - our family life, our work life, our community life. It means being attentive and alert to what is taking place in our daily lives as a means whereby God is acting to make us holy and to form us into fitting vessels of his presence.
The challenge for me in returning from sabbatical has been not to compartmentalize this experience but to try to use the new eyes, the new ears, the new way of being I lived and learned in Normandy in my life here. Old habits die hard. It takes energy and effort to be open to the "re-programming" of our interior selves by the Holy Spirit - to be open to changing the way we see and the way we hear and the way we perceive and the way we are. It doesn't happen overnight, and it takes patience, endurance and steadfastness.
The challenge for all of us, my friends, is to look upon the daily "stuff" of our lives, even the disappointments and the failures, as the raw material in which the Holy Spirit is acting to build relationships of love and trust, peace and unity in the community of Covington, in Christ Church, in our family lives, in our work lives, in our school lives. Life in the Spirit requires our daily commitment and attentiveness, but it is no less available to us than it is to a small community of nuns in Normandy.
May the Holy Spirit give us the desire and the will to seek His guidance daily, and to train ourselves to be attentive and responsive to his leading. Amen.

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