God’s Breath, Our Breath If you are a parent, you understand this all too well. When your child hurts, you hurt. When your child is rejected, you are rejected. When your child cannot breathe, you cannot breathe either. Scriptures: Psalm 104, Acts 2:1-21 We all need to breathe, that we know only too well. We need to breathe air for life, we cannot do without it. These past weeks we have been weeping with those whose loved ones could no longer breathe, because their lungs were destroyed by coronavirus. This week, we weep yet again, over something equally insidious … in Minneapolis a young black man, George Floyd, was deprived of breath by a Police Officer and died. Rev. Adam R. Taylor, executive director of Sojourners, writes “George’s death feels like too much, adding insult to injury as the black community deals with the trauma of losing such a disproportionate number of loved ones due to COVID-19 and now has to see what feel like almost daily reminders of our dehumanization.” [1] It’s hard to imagine anything more frightening than having your breath taken away. Though I don’t mention it often, I have mild asthma. It usually goes away quickly. And still, when I am out on a walk and I feel that pressure in my chest, my first response is fear. Still I remember a much deeper sense of panic, when my children were little and suffered from bronchiolitis, their little chests expanding to take in what air they could. “I can’t breathe” is not a sentence we want to hear on our news. It is physically shocking to see someone having their life taken away in this way. Today we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which came as a rush of violent wind. God’s Spirit shows up as breath or wind throughout our scriptures. In the beginning God’s Spirit sweeps over the chaotic waters like a wind, a creative wind bringing life to a lifeless void. In the second chapter of Genesis the Lord God appears as a kind of craftsperson, forming humanity from the dust and breathing life into their nostrils. The Psalm we read today, 104, celebrates God’s creation, telling the hearer that when God takes God’s breath away creatures die (Psalm 104:29). There is no survival without breath. In John’s gospel the day after the crucifixion Jesus comes to stand among the disciples in the upper room. He says "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 29:21-22). Jesus imparts the Holy Spirit with his breath. This is the very breath that was taken away from him on the cross as he died of suffocation. It is God’s breath. And then, in the passage we read in the book of Acts today, the disciples are together again, when the Spirit of God sweeps into the room like the rush of a violent wind. It is this event that enables the disciples to preach and witness to Jesus’ work and teachings. It is an event, that enables people of different tongues, different experiences, different cultures to understand one another. Human breath, air, open pathways, healthy lungs, are all necessary for life. But what about God’s breath: the Holy Spirit, how does this differ from human breath. Sitting with the scriptures and the stories from the news these past weeks, I have become convinced that these two kinds of breath are not separate. They are the same. The psalmist says that creatures die when God takes away God’s breath. But what of God, when a person’s breath is taken away, doesn’t God die a little too? The story of Jesus coming to the world is the story of God’s great empathy with humanity. What Jesus feels, the parent God feels. And there is no doubt that when Jesus was crucified, suffocating on the cross God’s breath was taken away. God died on the cross too. Any parent who has lost a child can attest to this experience. Throughout his life Jesus showed his own oneness with the people around him. He felt their hunger. He felt their thirst and he felt their pain when they were sick. We often think of Jesus’ wonderful kindness for those he met. We see it as an example for ourselves. But we sometimes forget that all the actions and teachings of the gospel come with the powerful message … each episode in the story reveals something already true about God. God is fully present to us in Jesus. And in the Pentecost story, God’s Spirit is breathed into the disciples’ lungs. God’s breath is in us. When we – or even any creature – have our breath taken away God dies a little. God feels that pain. If this sounds improbable, remember that we are talking about our parent God. If you are a parent, you understand this all too well. When your child hurts, you hurt. When your child is rejected, you are rejected. When your child cannot breathe, you cannot breathe either. A few years ago, I attended a workshop on ethics, given by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Ethical Leadership, Walter Earl Fluker. This workshop took place a few months after Michael Brown had been killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Professor Fluker presented a case study based on the story of Michael Brown and asked the attendees to break out into groups to discuss. There was one black woman and one black man in my group. The other group members were white, well meaning, sensitive women. Ministers and seminarians. As we went around the group sharing our emotions on first hearing the story of Michael Brown, the one black woman took her turn. She began to weep with grief and fury as she explained what it feels like to be the mother of black sons in these times. Then she stopped, “I can’t do this … I can’t stay here, I need to leave,” she said. One of the white women in the group tried to let her know she had been heard. But, she was right. She couldn’t stay. A part of her died in that shooting in Ferguson and every one before and since then. Each man taken could have been one of her sons. She was telling us white people we needed to do our work alone. She couldn’t be expected to be a part of it. I know institutional racism happens, I know it exists. I have friends and colleagues who told me about being stopped for driving while black. But I have never had a close friend lose a child to jogging, walking, singing, shopping, driving while black. That day, at the workshop, I learned why white people need to do their work alone. And we have a lot of work to do. When I hear stories like the one we heard this past week, I think about holding the police who committed the crime accountable. I think about the need for police training in de-escalation. I wonder who raises a man who can go ahead and suffocate someone who is already immobilized and crying out “I can’t breathe.” These are all externals: ways to pass out blame, ways to get myself off the hook for my complicity. This is not at all what God’s great empathy looks like. What if I felt the same connection to George Floyd as to my own children, when they were little, sick and struggling to breathe? Rev. Don Remick, Bridge Associate Conference Minister of the SNEUCC spoke of his reactions to the past week’s news in a conference video on Friday. He said he could feel emotions around him from those who are disheartened, those who grieve, those who fear, and those whose anger is rising to rage, that this just keeps happening. He confesses that his own reaction is tied to his whiteness. He wants to “calm down the rage,” to say “take it easy, don’t act out.” He wants to console the grieving and offer statements of hope for the disheartened. He says, “As white folks, we want to take away the pain. We don’t want to be exposed to uncomfortable emotions: they hold a mirror up to us of complicity, silence and neglect.” And so Rev. Remick invites us white folks “to pay attention to those emotions. Don’t fix them or dismiss them, respect them and honor them. Let them into you heart and to your soul, to the place where awareness and behavior can change.” [2] He invites us to act within our communities, starting with ourselves. To examine what we have inherited, what has been hardwired in us through our families and life experiences. At Wollaston Congregational Church we began some of this work when we read and studied the book “Waking Up White” by Debby Irving. [3] We still have a lot of work to do and so we need to stay on it. This isn’t the sermon I wanted to preach on Pentecost. I wanted to preach a sermon of celebration and joy, for the gift of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church. But it turned out that I couldn’t preach anything else. The Holy Spirit of God is our very life breath. To turn away from its pulling and prompting is to die a little ourselves. Here’s a prayer by Steve Garnaas Holmes. [4] May we pray: When you send forth your spirit, all beings are created; and you renew the face of the ground. His name was George Floyd. I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. He was God's beloved, breathing God's Spirit. In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. He was black. The Body of Christ. When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. He was slowly choked to death by a white cop. His life didn't matter. We do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. “Please, I can't breathe...” Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Amen [1] https://sojo.net/articles/george-floyd-deserved-breathe-free?fbclid=IwAR10X-CU0bJVletUeEotKgAhaoPputaltfyytE4kp-BGrzkYVqD4FWYAQ0A [2] https://www.facebook.com/sneucc/videos/291844538516332/ [3] Debby Irving, Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race, (Elephant Room Press, Cambridge MA, 2014) [4] https://www.unfoldinglight.net/reflections/6ncfxpw5k7swh2msrn2y9e7kfzkxc4
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April 2022
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