May 24, 2007
Breath
The Day of Pentecost 2007
The Earth’s atmosphere is a relatively thin envelope of gases composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a smidgen of others. Perhaps our most vital activity in return for our lives, together with all the rest of creation, the animals, the plants, is constantly to be at the process of recycling this envelope. For it connects us in an essential and almost intangible ambiance. Philosopher-scientist Lewis Thomas, it was, who likened our atmosphere and its function most to the walls of a living cell.
In a remarkably similar way does God’s Holy Spirit wholly envelop us. It sustains our lives, creates our communities and connects us in them, and most importantly, enables our reconciliation with one another. No wonder that in so many languages spirit is translated as “breath.” And further, we well remember how it exists quite apart from us and like Jesus told Nicodemus, this Holy Spirit lives and moves, comes and goes as it damn well pleases.
Unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, God’s Spirit seems limitless. We, by God’s grace, become the occasions, the stewards to receive and recycle its energy in service to God’s will. We are created by God as those spiritual beings whose vocation is to give human shape to the Spirit as we mature into the way God imagines us to be. Indeed, a case can be made, can it not, that this life begins with our first breath just as it ends with our last. That is a reality with which both pro-life and pro-choice advocates must contend.
Have you ever imagined how a symphony orchestra or a chorus could function if there were no air, no breath? The wind instruments, the strings, the percussion, all depend on there being an atmosphere if there is to be music, an atmosphere which they can move and shape if there is to be music. So is our mission as churchers to shape Spirit. In the way a musician shapes the air into sound, so must we take our lives, the instruments God gives us and use them to play God’s melodies, to shape God’s Spirit in service to God and to our fellow human beings.
Perhaps one of the most grievous examples of the way we cripple this stewardship is our continuing effort to transfix Holy Spirit in our own interests and not God’s. Of course, the mere thought of such a thing is ludicrous. But not a day passes that we churchers do not strive to fashion and refashion that Spirit in some way so as to warp the gift of Pentecost.
Just as we contaminate the Earth’s atmosphere by our carelessness do we defile God’s Holy Spirit by forcing our identity upon it. Global warming pales beside the toxicity of the church’’s current selfish obsession with its manners, morals, and means at the expense of its mission. We must remember on this Pentecost Feast that we are not only the community created at the first such gathering, but we are, as well, the community commissioned not only by but for Pentecost. We are Spirit-enabled to become Spirit enablers.
The constellation of propers for this Sunday overwhelms us with this good news. Acts’ accounting of the fire, wind, and apostolic headiness that birthed God’s church (Acts 2.1-11). Paul’s catalogue of the gifts of the Spirit to fulfill the church’s purpose with shape and substance (1 Cor 12.4-13). Jesus’s granting of apostolic ministry by the power of his own breath, a portend of the Spirit to come (Jn 20.19-23).
This Pentecost Sunday calls us once again to such ministry. “Breathe on us breath of God,” we sing and pray. This Pentecost comes once again to brace and refresh us, to call us back to and enlist us in the Way, the Truth, and the Life revealed in the Upper Room. This Pentecost comes once again to drag us kicking and screaming away from our fascination with ourselves and our need for ecclesiastic security. And this Pentecost comes once again to license us as God’s agents as Mary sang to show the strength of God’s arm, to scatter the proud in their conceit, to cast down the mighty from their thrones, to lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things, to send the rich away empty, and to champion God’s peace and justice and love for all.
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