Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. David Williams; 05.24.15
Scripture Lesson: Acts 2:1-21; Ezekiel 37:1-14
Listen to Audio Here:
All of us have our own gifts, our own abilities, certain things we’re good at. They are as different and various as our personalities, as those unique features of our nature that make us distinguishable as individuals. And then there are those gifts that all of us have, because they are a necessary part of life and being human.
Like, say, breathing. It’s a skillset that we all share, and that presumably, we all need to be pretty good at. It’s kind of necessary that we be good at it.
I feel this reality, from my memory of being a boy, because when I was a lad, I was asthmatic. I was bad at breathing, which isn’t the same thing as being terrible at calculus or getting a C minus in AP European History. My folks got me tested, once, and it was determined that the source of my asthma was my allergies to a few things. Like grass pollen and tree pollen, dust and dust mites, cat dander and dog dander and guinea pig dander and wombat dander and the dander of the Kalobatippus, which may have been extinct for one point seven million years, but ya just know some of that stuff has is still floating around. My body was convinced that every last one of those things was a dangerous enemy, bent on my destruction. It tolerated nothing.
Which meant, every once in a while, that my breathing didn’t work so well. I remember the feeling, sitting awake at three in the morning, watching the one channel of television that was still broadcasting in 1980, watching a rebroadcast of that season’s Hart to Hart, and laboring to breathe. Every breath shallow, because my lungs felt different, as small and tight as my little boy fists, and I would strain with each breath to stretch them out, to return them to what they should be.
My lungs would crackle and bubble and whistle, as the breath hummed through constricted airways with a peculiar musicality. Sometimes, because being up late and struggling to breathe gets old after the first few hours, I’d talk or sing with the wheezing, using the sounds of my strangled breathing as a proxy for the vibrations of my larynx.
And the moments would stretch by, seemingly forever, each breath like Sisyphus heaving that rock eternally up that mountain.
But then there’d come a moment when that changed. Somewhere in the complexity of my hypersensitive immune system, the overzealous monitor who’d pressed the big red shut-down panic button would realize that there really wasn’t anything wrong, and signal the all clear, and the breath would return.
I’d feel it, this movement, this release, like the Grinches heart at that moment of realization. And the breath would ease, and the whole character of life would return to how it was meant to be.
That, in a funny way, is what Pentecost marks, every year, in the life of our faith.
The Pentecost story in Acts 2 is an important fulcrum in the story being told by Luke. Having told the story of the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection in the Gospel of Luke, the same historian begins the narrative of the movement that would rise up in response to Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles.
Chapter one of the Acts of the Apostles was mostly transition and housekeeping.
It is with chapter two that the story of the early church begins, when the confusion and bafflement about what comes next after the cross and the empty tomb gets swept away. It starts on a day of noise and hubbub in Jerusalem, with the disciples gathered into a room by themselves. Pentecost means, in the Greek, “The Fiftieth Day,” and the crowds that were in Jerusalem had gathered for one of the many festival celebrations that defined the life of that city.
The Jewish celebration of Pentecost marked fifty days following the celebration of the Passover, and the festival was often called either the Festival of the Weeks or the Feast of Harvest. Shavuot, they call it today, which is what I’ll be celebrating when I wander over to share it with our Jewish friends over at the Sanctuary retreat center this afternoon. Shavuot is the grain harvest, as opposed to the later harvest of fruit, Sukkot.
On that day Jerusalem was full of life and noise. With the disciples gathered all together, we hear that “..suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.” How many of you remember what it sounded like when that derecho roared through here a couple of years back? In my mind’s ear, what I hear is that...a great sound, a huge sound, a someone-grab-the-dog-cause-we’re-going-to-the-basement-right-now sound.
As with most language describing our interaction with God, it’s metaphor. It has to be metaphor, because wherever God is involved, human language comes apart like wet toilet paper in a tornado. What happens is not a violent wind, but is “like” a violent wind. The image are intended to evoke the immense and transforming energy of God’s presence, but in slightly different ways. The word for wind used by Luke is pnoes, derived from the word pneuma, which in Greek means wind, breath, and spirit. It’s the same word used to describe the Holy Spirit in verse 4. It’s the same word used in the ancient Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible that was circulating at the time of the Apostles, way back in Genesis. There, pneuma fills in for the Hebrew word ruach, which means exactly the same things. Wind, breath, and spirit, all at once. Both words speak to the life giving and ordering presence of God, that wind blowing across the primordial waters of chaos in the first Creation story. The wind that blows across the waters of chaos, we think, and it sounds like something that could easily roar like a supertyphoon.
Yet it is also the word in the second Genesis story, where God forms the first adam, the creature of earth, from the clay, and breathes life into it. There is a tenderness there in that story, a softness, an intimacy...and yet the ruach, that spirit that transforms a dead and inanimate thing into a living being, is the very same thing.
It is that breath that returns in the passage from Ezekiel this morning, as part of that prophet’s message to a people who were without hope.
This vision is one of a great valley, one that could be accurately called the “Valley of the Shadow of Death.” It’s filled with bones and lifelessness, the remains of a people. There’s nothing there anymore, nothing at all. They are not just bones, but dry bones.
It’s a stark and desolate image, in which no hope remains. It is the most primal form of ruin.
In the midst of this bleakness, Ezekiel finds himself set down by his Creator’s hand and spirit. He surveys the death around him, shown them all by his Creator. He gets asked a question. “Can these bones live?” And he says, wisely, “Um, I think you have the answer to that.” The answer rested in God’s creative power, so far beyond Ezekiel’s grasp that in this vision he wisely chose not to even hazard a guess.
In this vision, that which seems totally lost, irrevokably broken? It gets remade. And then it is not just remade, but given life again. “Come from the four winds, O breath,” Ezekiel is told to say, and he does, and what seemed broken beyond repair is made whole again.
This, on Pentecost, is the gift we are called to remember. It is the gift of life, of potential and possibility, written into the moments that are to come. This is our breath, God’s breath, and God’s breath is not just life, but the ability to transcend all of the boundaries and barriers that we set between ourselves and others.
It struck me, as I was praying and meditating over these passages this last week, that there was a peculiar resonance with this return of breath, a resonance that had to do with the cross. How does crucifixion kill? It's not loss of blood, and not really shock. Crucifixion kills by putting an endless pressure on the human diaphragm, until it is so overstrained that you cannot continue to draw breath. It crushes the breath from you, suffocating you over hours and hours.
And yet here, as the church is born, the human beings who took the breath from God-made-flesh are given God's life and breath in return. It is that moment, the "inspiration" of God, from which the church draws its life and its power.
It is a power that steps across language, across race and gender and ethnicity and nation, across our self-doubts and limitations. It is God’s own love, God’s own nature, working to overcome our strangling fears of everything that is not us. On this Pentecost Sunday, let that be the breath that fills you.
Let that be so, for you and for me,
AMEN
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