God's Breath
The season of Easter concludes as the season of Pentecost begins. We affirm today that the vibrant spirit that animated Jesus the Christ remains alive in Body of Christ. Of course, the Spirit that enlivens and unites all creation did not suddenly make an appearance in this world 2000 years ago. As our opening hymn and scriptures remind us, the Spirit brooded over the chaotic waters of creation, and spoke through the Hebrew prophets, and inspired the life of Jesus, and then, when earth felt most bereft, that same spirit blew through the people at Pentecost “on the rush of a wind.”[i] The same vivifying force continues to blow through the cosmos today. Sometimes the wind is wild and unpredictable, disrupting old patterns of thought so that we can, in the words of the prophet Joel, “see new visions” (Acts 2:17). At other times the movement of the Spirit is a gentle breath, resuscitating deadened hearts.
I’ve thought often this week about the way the Bible’s writers imagined God as breath, especially as two of our own have struggled to breathe. Both ___ and ___ have lain in two different hospitals for more than a week with pneumonia, a disease whose name derives from the same Greek word pneuma that Christian scriptures use to mean 1) spirit, 2) breath, and 3) wind. The Spirit of God IS both a gentle breath that restores us to life and a wild wind that reshapes us.
Two biblical stories of God’s pneuma blow through our Pentecost celebration today. The first is an eerily quiet Spirit, invisibly attendant over the bleakest landscape you could imagine. But the Prophet Ezekiel did somehow imagine it: a desolate valley of bones—bleached white and brittle dry—a mass grave of thousands upon thousands, and no living thing in sight. This nightmare might have originated in stories of the Hebrew people who were carted off to Babylon after Jerusalem’s destruction. Perhaps as the captives were forcibly marched away from their homeland, Ezekiel’s people walked past open graves of their dead, bleak signposts of their people’s doom. But this dream has such utter lifelessness that it seems imaginatively accessible only to those of our generation who have seen, for example, pictures of the mass graves of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. Or to those who only now can grasp humanity’s potential for nuclear holocaust. How could a pre-atomic bomb civilization from the 6th Century BCE conceive of a world so entirely swept clean of all life? How could any pre-Apollo 11 writer depict an earthscape so like a moonscape, so empty of even one blade of grass or one droplet of water or one slight breeze?
How could anyone then or now, standing imaginatively before such a nightmare, imagine any way of going forward after such obliteration?
The only thing to do in such a time is to be very still and wait upon the Spirit. The Spirit can show us the bleached bones piling up in our lives or in our community or on our planet. The Spirit that birthed the church can even reveal in the Church itself the bleached bones piling up in grand cathedrals and storefront churches. We are called to witness these signs. And to listen in the soundlessness as the Enlivening Spirit breathes her resuscitating breath. Hear the horror and hope of bones rattling as they come together into human form again: toe bones connecting to the foot bones, foot bones connecting to the . . . ankle bones, ankle bones connecting to the . . . shin bones. “Now hear the word of the Lord: Them bones, them bones gonna rise again.”
Horror and hope mingle in such a landscape. Fear of the strange combines with an instinct for change. We’re not sure we want to witness resurrection, much less experience it ourselves, but how can we not choose renewal? In Ezekiel’s vision, resurrection looks like we’re rewinding that gruesome scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazi villain, having gazed into the Ark of the Covenant, is melted away, layer by layer, to a skeleton. Ezekiel the prophet sees a reversal of bodily decay as sinews reattach to bone and skin reform on sinew. Yet these reassembled humans remain in inert piles, a still horrifying sight because “there was no breath in them” (Ezekiel 37:8). So the prophet summons the very Breath of God: “Come from the four winds, O Spirit. Come, Breath of God” (37:9).
And in his dream “the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude” (37:10), indeed “the whole house of Israel” (37:11).
Friends, you and I sometimes feel like the living dead. We go through the motions of life without passion. We make the same mistakes, follow the same habits, zombie-like. When we enter the bleak landscape, let us summon the Spirit.
And let us remember Ezekiel dreamed about a whole group of people who’d lost hope. The process of being reassembled and reconnected and revivified happens to whole communities as people stand on their feet again TOGETHER, a vast multitude that can move out of the valley of the dry bones.
We come together as a church to draw a deep collective breath. Together. As even now you can I can fill our lungs and feel the gentle breath of God connecting us to creation, to one another, to enlivening purposes. This is one story of the Spirit as a quiet breath that restores us to ourselves and one another and God’s loving intentions.
Today’s second story, from the book of Acts, describes the coming of the Spirit “like the rush of a violent wind” (Acts 2:2). God’s rough wind did not comfort the disciples, did not softly redirect them, did not breezily rearrange a few of their priorities or prejudices. No, “like the rush of a violet wind” the pneuma shook those gathered for Pentecost into a radical new awareness that God would now work through them.
The original Spirit-filled church born on Pentecost began dramatically. No wonder that kind of fervor was unsustainable. So eventually the followers of Jesus traded the risky “faith of Jesus” for a safer “religion about Jesus.” Church leaders soon began creating rules and rituals rather than roadways toward the Always New.
Yet even today there are spiritual descendants of the first Spirit-infused disciples, and they remember that Jesus had to pass through death into life, had to walk through the lonesome valley of the dry bones. Novelist Reynolds Price, who nearly died from cancer 20 years ago and who finally met his physical death last year, came to value the Spirit’s way of dying to the old so the new can be born. In one interview he commented on the therapies that saved his life but lost him the use of his legs. He explained, “When you undergo huge traumas in middle life, everybody is in league with us to deny that the old life is ended. Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, ‘You’re dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?’”
Ezekiel was telling the exiled Jews, “We’re dead. Who are we going to be tomorrow?” We are no longer in Jerusalem. We will get there eventually. But even here in this seemingly Godforsaken time and place, we can tap into the Spirit of God.
“You’re dead,” Ezekiel continues to tell us today. So . . . who are YOU going to be tomorrow . . . if you cannot be patched up after illness or bereavement or financial loss or family crisis or some colossal screw up or some average disappointment? Can you be some new someone who is alive and awake spiritually?
“You’re dead,” Ezekiel prophesies to the 21st Century Church. So who are YOU going to be when the next Great Awakening stirs the corpses sitting silently now in your many pews? Will the Church continue to produce preachers who spew deadly hate speech? Will the church continue to cover up the abuse of children? Will the church continue to worship a violent God? Will the church continue to scapegoat a few in the name of moral purity and miss Jesus’s mission to care for “the least of these”? Many already hear dry bones a’ rattling and a violent wind a’wailing as a spiritual REVIVAL spreads among many faiths, a movement some are calling the world’s first interfaith Awakening. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus are being revived as they emphasize compassionate living over correct doctrine, as they find what is true for them through their own experiences and reason more than from religious authorities and literal interpretations of sacred texts, as they borrow and adapt spiritual practices from one another to create healthier persons and a healthier planet.[ii]
While it may seem that dogmatism and fundamentalism are increasing, they are really the inevitable backlash of frightened people to this multireligious Awakening. Anxiety in times of change is normal. After all, it IS scary to watch the dead come to life. But our age’s own Ezekiels are beginning to prophesy their visions of new life.
When we recognize, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places, the Spirit’s movement, we can cooperate with the Spirit to root out the dead parts in our individual lives and create freer faith communities upon the ruins of the dying church. The pneuma may be fierce but it is blowing out the deadened bits of hierarchy, literalism, and tribalism in order to make way for radical compassion, inclusion, unity, peace, and liberation—the aims of a global spiritual awakening.
On the birthday of the Church, let us thank God for the pioneers of our faith as we ourselves continue to pioneer ever faithful and ever new ways of following Jesus and responding to the pneuma of God. Open Table has a prophetic role to play in recognizing what has died and seeing where the Spirit is moving in the world so we can join in that work.
The poet Wendell Berry is one of my nominees for a modern prophet, a successor to Ezekiel. His poem “A Vision” might be the anthem for this new spiritual awakening:
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
PRAYER: Spirit, lead us from the valley of dry bones to this Edenic valley of peace. When Pentecost truly comes to us again, revive our bone-dead faith so that our men and women, young and old can see visions—like this one. Equip us, Holy Wisdom, to take up the hard, hard task of bringing that vision to reality. Amen
