A Sharing of Breath

A Sharing of Breath--May 3, 2018

"When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, 'Peace be with you.' After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.  Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.  Jesus said to them again, '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. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained'." [John 20:19-23]

Breath is a curious thing. 

Right now, there is a breath of air in my lungs (whoops, there it went; now there's another).  That air is not just contained within the space that my body occupies, but in a very real sense, that air is me.  The oxygen in the air I just breathed actually becomes a part of me, coursing through the blood in my body, and fueling every cell that makes up the human called "me."  The breath I take in comes to be a part of my body, which is to say, at least in part, that if it is true that you are what you eat, then it is also true that I am what I breathe.

And then, of course, the reverse is true with every breath out.  When you and I exhale, we give back carbon dioxide, which had been accumulating throughout the cells of our bodies, and we expel that out into the world.  What used to be a part of us is now "out there," joining up with the invisible ocean of air in which we are all swimming all the time.  And some of the air I have just breathed out, the person next to me will breathe in, while my lungs take in air that they have just breathed out as well.

Breath is funny that way--it is, in a sense, just about as personal and intimate as you can get--and yet, it can be shared (and is being shared all the time) with the rest of the world all the time. (This is not even mentioning the exchange between plants and animals, in which the carbon dioxide I exhale is taken in by the trees and grass around me, and they give me oxygen I need.)  So in a real sense, it is possible for breath that was a part of me just a moment ago to fill your lungs and become a part of you--at least if we were in the same room breathing the same air, or when a first responder does rescue breathing.

There's a sense of that closeness, that intimacy, there when Jesus "breathes" on his disciples and gives them the Holy Spirit.  It echoes the early scenes from Genesis when God takes the lifeless lump of clay from the ground and brings humanity to life by breathing into the dust of the earth, as the Spirit of God broods over creation at the beginning (see Genesis 1 and 2).  You can hear the Spirit-breath-wind connection, too, even in the word "spirit," which comes from the same root ("spir-") as "inspire," (to be "breathed-into," as by divine presence), "expire" (to breathe out one's last breath), and even "conspiracy" (literally "breathing together").  The Greek of the New Testament carries a similar connection between the Spirit and the wind or air, with the word for "spirit", pneuma, related to the word for wind/air, and carried over in English into words like "pneumatic" or "pneumonia."

So there inside this locked room on the first Easter evening, Jesus breathes out some of himself and gives himself to the disciples.  He communicates the Spirit to them.  That hopefully reminds us that for whatever Christians think they mean by "the Holy Spirit," we are talking about a reality connected to Jesus.  We are not talking about an abstract impersonal Force, a la Star Wars.  We are not talking about a different deity with a different personality or different rules of engagement.  To be filled with the Spirit of God is to be filled, in a sense, with the same breath that was in Jesus and now resides in us--indeed, like air molecules, the Spirit even becomes a part of us.  

That means that for whatever the Spirit does in our lives, it will bear a certain similarity to the character of Jesus himself.  The way that Jesus provocatively crossed barriers to share a table with the people written off as just "tax collectors and sinners" became the way the Spirit of Jesus led the early church to cross barriers out beyond Judeans like themselves, to Samaritans (the scandal!), to Gentiles of all languages, cultures, and religious backgrounds.  The way Jesus taught and practiced radical forgiveness became the same way the Spirit of Jesus gave the huddled band in the upper room the authority to announce forgiveness of sins.  The way Jesus healed people regardless of how much it upset the Respectable Religious Crowd and unnerved the powers of the day became the same way that the Spirit of Jesus inspired the apostles to heal people even when it got them into trouble with those same religious and political so-and-sos.  See a pattern here?

What the walking, talking Jesus did in 30AD Palestine was connected with that the Spirit-led followers of Jesus did--because the Spirit we are talking about is, after all, the Spirit of Jesus!  There's no bait-and-switch.  The early church was not given license, like a restaurant franchise, to take the cross-shaped corporate logo of Jesus-Corp for brand recognition and then take their mission in whatever new direction they wanted.  No, the Holy Spirit who indwells the people called church is the Spirit of the same Jesus--so at our most faithful, we will continue to be moving outward in the same ways Jesus did.  

This is really important to be clear on, because it is the presence of the Spirit that makes us more than simply a Jesus-Appreciation-Club or a Ancient-Palestine-Historical-Society.  We don't just gather on Sundays to recite our favorite past acts of what-Jesus-once-did-but-is-no-longer-in-the-business-of-doing, but rather the Spirit of the same Christ Jesus is let loose among us, so that we will continue to do what Jesus did:  pushing across boundaries in love, practicing radical mercy even to our enemies, working for healing for all people, regardless of whether it scandalizes the Respectable Religious Crowd.  That's what the church is always to be about--not just because that's what Jesus was about in the first century, but because it is still what the Spirit of Jesus leads us to do and to be in the twenty-first century.  

See? It's like breath.  Jesus breathes (the Spirit/wind/breath/pneuma) onto his followers, and now the same vision and mission and love and passion that animated Jesus become a part of us.  And ever since, in a long chain of followers, the same Spirit has been breathed from one generation to another, all the while still being the Spirit of Jesus, who leads us in his particular direction.

Our job as Christians is not to try and forcibly copy what the historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth, did in his setting--or else we would all be wearing tunics and sandals, speaking Aramaic, and trying to get a modern person to crucify us.  It's not that we have to slavishly duplicate what Jesus did two thousand years ago.  It's that the Spirit of this same Jesus has been breathed into us, so that the Spirit fills our very being like oxygen in our bloodstream, and so that the living presence of this same Jesus will lead us to work and act and love and dare in ways that look like Jesus, and sound like Jesus, but played in a new key, so to speak.

You are what you breath, it turns out--and Jesus has breathed the Spirit into you.  Where will the Spirit lead you today?  How will someone see Christ in you?

Lord Jesus, let your Spirit animate us today, and then send us where you will...