May 23, 2021 “Spirit and Breath” – Psalm 104:24-35

Psalm 104:24-35
“Spirit and Breath”
May 23, 2021 – Pentecost

I grew up with asthma. I’m not sure just when it came on, but it was some time in grade school. I remember days, and especially nights, of simply trying hard to breathe. A vaporizer would be puffing away in a corner and, at least early on, the smell of Vicks VapoRub filled my nostrils. If it got bad enough, there would be what felt like a long, long drive to the emergency room, an even longer wait on a hard chair, then finally an injection of epinephrine that would begin to loosen my lungs and let me draw in air.

Things are different now. Even just 30 years ago my daughter’s asthma was better controlled and managed. But there were still trips to the ER, rounds of prednisone, and inhaler routines for her to learn. I’m talking about all this because the translation of the psalm we just read together, in verses 29 and 30, reminds us that in the languages of the Bible “spirit” and “breath” are the same word. It’s more than just a metaphor at work.

In verse 29 we heard, “you take away their breath, and they die and return to their dust.” In verse 30 we read, “You send forth your Spirit, and they are created…” For both of those, “breath” and “Spirit,” it’s the same Hebrew word, ruach.

The same was true in our reading from Ezekiel 37. God told the prophet to prophesy to the “breath,” which is also the “spirit,” telling the Spirit which is breath to breathe on those dead bodies that had come back together so that they could breathe and live again. What we call the Holy Spirit is at work, but His work brings literal breath to creation, to human beings. That’s why, when we consider what God’s Spirit does, we need to take account of the breath of living things, especially of human beings.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we suddenly became more conscious of breath, specifically the possibility of the absence of breath. We learned that the key symptom and hazard of COVID-19 is shortness of breath. It can get to the point that those suffering most need extra oxygen or even help from a machine that breathes for them, a ventilator. Lasting damage to lungs can be one of the ongoing effects, even if one recovers from the disease.

To cope with the threat of losing our breath to coronavirus, we’ve had to accept breathing through a mask. Some of us have struggled with it, finding that a covering over nose and mouth in itself can cause one to feel short of breath. I know that feeling from my childhood asthma hospitalizations. The first time an oxygen mask was placed over my face my unconscious reaction was panic. It felt like I was being suffocated rather than helped. Yet, in Christian love, and in response to the moving of the Holy Spirit, we’ve put on those masks against the virus so that not only we, but others can breathe.

Pentecost today focuses our attention on the Holy Spirit, but it should not turn our minds away from the simple and truly profound matter of literally, physically breathing in this world. As “spirit” and “breath” are the same word in Hebrew and Greek in the Bible, “spirit” includes “breath” in God’s concern with us.

If you look over all of Psalm 104, you will see it is a celebration of God’s creation. The last part which we read focuses especially on the living part of it. “The earth is full of your creatures,” says verse 24. Verses 25 and 26 point out that even the ocean and other waters of the world are full of life, not just the dry land, “living things both small and great.” And there are even human beings on the sea, “There go the ships.”

Yet verse 27 tells us, “These all look to you to give them their food in due season.” Living beings in this world, even all the “creeping things innumerable,” are absolutely dependent upon God for the gift of life. “When you give to them,” says verse 28, “they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.”

Then comes verse 29, to which I’ve already referred, which specifically considers God’s gift of breath. If God were to turn away from His creatures, “they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.” Now we can spiritualize that breath, and we often do in Christian thinking, and talk about dying spiritually and how when we believe in Jesus the Holy Spirit enters us and gives us new, spiritual life. But this Psalm and Ezekiel today remind us that God not only gives invisible, intangible “spirit” to His world. He gives it, He gives us, literal breath.

Pentecost concludes the season of Easter in the church year. But when we turn from Easter to Pentecost we are not turning away from the glorious story of how Jesus rose physically from the dead in order to focus more on some sort of non-physical, spiritual hope for us and for our world. No, the Holy Spirit was given to inspire Christians to keep on preaching the resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, just as Peter did on Pentecost just a bit further on in Acts 2, verse 24: “God raised him up.”

Those bones got covered with flesh in Ezekiel and then filled with breath so they could rise and live again. Verse 30 of this psalm says, “When you send forth your spirit (your breath), they are created and you renew the face of the ground.” Peter in Acts 2:32 proclaimed, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses,” and goes on in the next verse saying that when Jesus was raised and exalted He had, “received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit.” That promise of the Spirit is genuine, physical, walking-around, breathing-in-and-out life. It’s breath.

That’s why I have to talk about painful subjects today: not just people who can’t breathe because of asthma or COVID-19, but people who cried out “I can’t breathe!” as life was being taken from them. In 2014 Eric Garner spoke those words 11 times while held in a chokehold by New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo. Following Garner’s death, “I can’t breathe!” became a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter protestors. But it did not keep George Floyd from having to say the same words multiple times during the nine-and-a-half minutes ex-police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck until he died. Not long after that, Johnny, a young black man from Haiti whom many of us know and love, wrote on Facebook, “Please, let me keep BREATHING when I visit America…”

If the Holy Spirit is also breath, if God wants people on this earth to live and breathe, we have to reckon with these things, with those willing to take the breath from a person just because of his race or color or some other supposed difference.

Lest you think what I just said is some sort of political statement, wholly endorsing a particular party, I will also say that the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is also breath, means not denying life to those who have yet to draw even one breath in this world. The first breaths of every child are the precious gift of God. No one has the right to take those away. Let us be moved by the Spirit to say “Black lives and breath matter,” while also insisting that the lives and future breath of unborn infants matter.

Yet I’ll also say that just preventing deaths, stopping the taking of breath, is not the whole of it, whether it’s through police reform or the ending of abortion. If we truly believe that through Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit has come into the world to give life and breath to the world, then we will work toward a world, we will seek the kingdom of God, where Black lives have room to breathe, where they can flourish and prosper as well as white lives. We will also seek the kingdom of God where all babies have food, housing, education, and health care to keep on breathing strong into old age.

There are other matters of Spirit and breath in this psalm today. As I said, it’s about God’s care for His whole creation. It’s about His delight in everything He made. The fisherman in me leaps with joy as I read those words in verse 26 about the ocean “and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.” Leviathan is a strange, maybe mythical, monster that seems to represent evil incarnate at points in Scripture. Yet here that beast is, made by God to “sport,” to play in the depths of the waters the Lord created. God loves His world, loves everything He’s made. He wants it all to sport, to play, to enjoy the life that He breathes into it through His Holy Spirit.

Which is why you and I as Christians must also consider what we do which may take breath from the world itself, from all life in it. Let us think about what we burn and pour into the air that hurts breathing. Whatever you think about climate change, I will testify that human beings do make a difference to the air of this world. One cause of my childhood asthma was growing up near Los Angeles in the 1960s. The air there was worse then. Cars had no pollution control. When the wind was still or blew the wrong way, it was hard to breathe, not just for me but for millions of people. It’s still that way in many places, like Beijing. Human consumption of fossil fuels is the cause of it. I don’t know exactly what the psalm means in verse 32 when it says God “touches the mountains and they smoke,” God does not want you and I to fill the air with smoke.

I’ll just keep going here and try to get myself in more trouble by going back to the subject of COVID-19 and the saving of life and breath from that threat. For Christians, wearing a mask or getting a vaccinated are not mere personal choices and decisions for ourselves alone. We do those things out of Pentecost conviction that the Holy Spirit of God comes to bring life and breath to this world, not just for us, but for everyone around us. As Peter says in Acts 2:39, “The promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” If we say we believe in the Holy Spirit and a promise which is for everyone, but then refuse, with no good medical reason, to get vaccinated for the sake of others, then what we say is not the Spirit. It’s just hot air.

As we celebrate the invisible, intangible gift of the Spirit this Sunday, let us not forget to thank God for the very, very tangible gift of air that flows in and out of human lungs. Let us join in the work of the Spirit which wants to bring breath to those lungs, no matter the color of skin that surrounds them or whether they are still waiting to take a breath. Let us work for room to breathe in this world for all people, whether it’s infants or elders, Palestinians or Israelis or indigenous peoples in our own country, whether it’s those who take their breaths in a wheelchair or from an oxygen tank.

Yes, I know it may sound like I’m mixing things up. We typically think that the Holy Spirit is wholly spiritual. We suppose the Spirit is all about eternal life and about our own spirits soaring off to heaven when physical life is done. But here I am blending ordinary life on earth with all of that, mixing up physical health with spiritual life, politics with religion, and salvation in Jesus with saving the planet. But this Psalm and Ezekiel teach us those things all belong together. I’m not mixing them up, I’m trying to put them back together. It’s Spirit and breath. You and I and the people around us are made to draw in the grace of God and draw in the air of this world.

In our Gospel reading Jesus said in John 16:13, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” “All the truth,” means all the truth, not just about life in the world to come but about life in the world we inhabit right now. And the Holy Spirit comes to pour breath and life into this world now. We receive and join the Spirit when we ourselves do that which brings breath and life. That’s all the truth.

The signs of Pentecost show us that the Holy Spirit is spirit and breath. There was a physical wind. There were flames of fire. And there was a miraculous hearing of the Gospel, each person in the language which was breathed in and out in the places from which each came. And every once in a while, the Spirit still gives us miracle signs that He cares about every part of us, not just some hidden, incorporeal piece we call soul or spirit.

I was about 17 years old and carrying a backpack up a trail in Zion National Park with a group of older Boy Scouts when I felt my asthma coming on. It usually didn’t bother me too much away from the murky air of Los Angeles, but that day I felt my chest tighten and breath shorten as I walked. I started to panic, which I’m told can make things worse, fearing I’d have to just stop, struggle to get back to a car, ruin the trip for everyone else. But then I did something I’d often done before during asthmas attacks, without much effect. I prayed.

When I prayed, I thought I heard the Spirit of God answer that time, “Just keep going.” So I did, one foot in front the other, breathing hard up the slope. And my chest began to loosen, my steps got a little quicker, and before I knew it I was at the top of a ridge and headed down an easier path on the other side. I was able to breathe well for the rest of the trip. It was a gift to me and, though they didn’t know it, a gift to my friends on the trail that they didn’t have to nurse me back down and go home early.

I call that a tiny miracle in my life. Nothing quite like it has ever happened for me again. I still have a bit of asthma that shows up in the middle of the night. But the gift of breath the Spirit gave me that single time reminds me that He is not just spirit. He is breath. He cares about and fills my whole self, including my lungs, just as He cares about and fills the lungs of all creatures, especially the human ones, on earth.

Maybe you can point to some little work of the Holy Spirit like that in your life, maybe something bigger, maybe nothing at all. I pray the Lord has or will give you some sign of His Spirit like that. But this is my witness that He does care about breath. We receive His Spirit and breath and we are called to invite others around us to breathe Him in with us.

On Pentecost the Spirit came to send the apostles, to send you and me, out into the world with the Good News of new life and new breath through the grace of Jesus Christ. We share that breath by telling someone about Jesus or inviting them into the community of God’s people. We also share that breath by standing up with those who may have breath stolen from them, by receiving a vaccine that will save not only our own breath but that of others, and by doing what we can not to pollute the air we all breathe on this earth. That’s all the work of the Holy Spirit. That’s all the breath of God filling you and me as we care for both His Spirit and His breath.

Holy Spirit, come and fill us today, by the grace of Jesus Christ who gave up His breath for a little while so that we all might breath forever, in the love of God our Father.

Amen.