Sermon for June 9, 2019

Pentecost Meditation

June 9, 2019

I’d like to ask you all to take a deep breath with me. Breathe in. Breathe out. Once more. Breathe in. Exhale. Now, don’t you feel better? That’s what I do right before each time I get up to speak. The simple act of breathing can be a prayer, especially when it’s intentional and when it’s a way of welcoming God’s breath of life into your body.

Air is fascinating to think about. It’s all around us. It surrounds us and engulfs us. We swim in it every moment of our lives. Unless it’s one of those oppressively humid days, we usually are not even aware of how the air completely encompasses us.

Not only does it surround us, it permeates us. How can you really tell where the air ends and I begin? The large flat muscle at the base of my rib cage expands and draws air into my lungs. Millions of tiny gas molecules flood into the millions of tiny air sacs in my lungs, and then, an amazing event takes place. It is an exchange. On the edges of these tiny air sacs there are tiny little blood vessels filled with red blood cells. The red blood cells sort through all the gases in the air sac and find the oxygen and take it in. The red blood cells take that oxygen and rush off to the rest of the body and deliver it to a single cell in another part of the body. It stops and injects the oxygen into the cell. To the cell that is like pumping gas into the engine. Like fire! The oxygen ignites into a fire of energy. The fire produces smoke and water. The smoke is carbon dioxide – the trash of the cell. The blood cell then takes the trash back to the lungs and dumps it into the air sac so that it can be exhaled from the body and sent back into the atmosphere.

Pretty cool.

So, where does the air stop and my body begin? You can’t really say. Air totally permeates my body.

Not only does the air surround us and permeate us, but it also connects us. Here’s what really blows my mind. There are organisms out there that feed from our trash. We call them plants. All that polluted carbon dioxide that we exhale is like the nectar of the gods to the plant world. They breathe it in, burn it, and dump their trash back into the atmosphere. Their trash is called oxygen. It floats around until it finds my lungs again. I breathe it in, my cell burns it, and dumps my trash back into the atmosphere.

So basically, we’re all swimming around and breathing in each other’s trash. How’s that for a lovely picture? Think about it, though. What a beautiful picture. It is the rhythm and interconnectedness of living things on our planet, all woven together and interpenetrated by air.

Do me a favor: take another deep breath with me. Breathe in. Breathe out. Once more. Breathe in. Exhale Today is the day we celebrate the gift of the Holy Air – Divine Breath. That’s what the Holy Spirit is, the breath of God. In the New Testament, breath and spirit are the same word, pneuma. It’s where we get the powerful word pneumatic from, as well as the breathless word pneumonia. The Holy Spirit is the breath of God, and like the air that we breathe, we’re often oblivious to the presence of God’s Spirit until we find that we are gasping for breath. Pentecost reminds us to take a deep breath of God’s Spirit and fill our lungs with God’s life that’s blowing in the world, surrounding us, penetrating us, and connecting us.

We breathe in, we breathe out.

Air. Breathe. Spirit. It’s what happens when we come to this place. We are floating around all week, doing whatever it is we do. We get used up. We collect the junk of our everyday lives. We wrestle with pride and greed, lust, envy, despair, anger, worry, whatever, and we build up the sludge of life.

Then God draws us in to the sanctuary. God breathes us in and we become aware of the Spirit at work. We enter God’s story as we take time to think about the radical love of Jesus. The experience permeates our bodies. God invites us to lay our garbage right here and he exchanges it for the life-giving grace found in Jesus.

Then God breathes us out. We leave full of hope that comes from the knowledge that we are loved. We are forgiven. We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God and sent out to share love with others.

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The question for us today is this: How well does God’s body breathe? God draws us in, but do we resist? Do we say, “No, I don’t need to be gathered into God’s presence, I’m fine out here on my own”? Or, do we drift in here, holding onto our garbage, covering it up so that no one can see it, unwilling to come raw and vulnerable into God’s presence?

What might happen if all the people, in all of our sanctuaries, came authentically before God and let the Spirit of God transform us, ignite us with the power of God’s grace and forgiveness, and allowed ourselves to be exhaled into the atmosphere of life?

That would be a mighty, rushing wind. That would transform humanity to the ends of the earth. May we join together as God Breathes us in, and God breathes us out.