Pentecost 2023

In the wee hours of the 18th of February, 2022, my son was only a few minutes old. After more than thirty hours of labour, my wife Sorrel was resting, if exhausted stillness can truly be called rest, and Tobias has gone from the purply gray of a newly born baby to the rosy hues of a human being who has taken their first breaths of air.

In the dim light of the nighttime delivery room, I witnessed Toby begin his life as each of us did: receiving the first gift not given by our mothers: the air which fills our lungs and which is closer to us than any touch. The breath which is synonymous with life itself.

It is no coincidence that in so many languages, there is a close relationship between air and breath and life. In the Greek of the New Testament ‘psyche’ signifies both breath and soul, and the ps– of psyche shares a history with the sp– of spirit, and both share resonances with the ghos– of ghost: all repeat the sound of our breathing, all echo the sound of our breath leaving our bodies.

Because just as breath accompanies us in the first minutes of our lives, so, too is it there with us in the last minutes before we die.

Breath is precious and breath is perilous.

Even little Toby, in those first minutes and hours of his life struggled to breathe: the doctors worried that though he cried and wailed as any baby might, he wasn’t getting enough oxygen into his blood.

So, even as he drew his first precious breaths, the shadow of peril was not far away. Or, put another way, as he was given oxygen to breathe by a machine, it became evident from the very first that even our breath is not something we own ourselves: it is something for which most or indeed of us might, at one time or another need help. It is something that is not our own possession: our breath is something shared.

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As Jesus breathes onto his disciples, in one of the most intimate and troubling scenes in the Bible. Troubling not because it necessarily disturbs or upsets, but troubling because it interrupts what we think we might know about who God is and what God is like.

The scene is the upper room, to which the disciples had fled following the arrest and execution of their friend and teacher. We might imagine it as a claustrophobic attic space, warm with the heat of bodies and close with from many people sharing a small space and breathing the same air.

Following his arrest, the disciples had fled from the authorities, leaving their friend to die, and frightened, one imagines, not only to encounter the religious authorities, who consider them traitors and blasphemers, but indeed to encounter, if Mary Magdalen and the others are to be believed, the very one they had abandoned and betrayed.

Closeted in the upper room, literally con-spiring, breathing together, as they sought to find a way to survive, they are confronted by the resurrected Christ, and his words for them are not words of reproach or judgment, but simply: peace be with you.

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The echoes of close rooms and the air of danger are, for us today, of course, all too familiar.

We have now had years of experience and years to remember when, for all of us, the air itself we breathe became an object of fear and the instrument of peril and even death.

Closed in our houses, most of the world avoided breathing as best we were able, except where safe, except where our co-conspirators were familiar and known.

How sorely we wished for that word of consolation: peace be with you.

Instead, many of us, who were not required on the front lines of care for those sick and dying, or at the tills and in the classroom, retreated into fearful bubbles, relying on video calls, soughdough starters, and an hour a day of fresh air, to keep the fear and the anxiety at bay.

In this sense, our months of lockdown, our years of fearing the very air we breathe, serve as a microcosm of life bounded by fear, shaped by the horizons of our human finitude.

And the Good News of Pentecost, the Good News of the spiration of the Third Person of the Trinity, is that wherever we are and however closed our worlds may feel, that peace is never far away. Indeed, it is as near to us as our own breath.

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Much of theological discourse is taken up with emphasizing the otherness of God, the ontological distance of the One Who Is from the contingency and impermanence of the fallen world in whisch we find ourselves.  And indeed next week I will speak to you from this lectern about the strangeness of the God who is One and Three and how this strangeness liberates God from any conception or boundary that we, from our limited frame of reference, might care to impose.

But today we speak of a God who is so familiar, so known to us that we can speak of her as breath itself.

On the stained glass windows behind me, we see images of God’s great miracles as recounted in scripture, the Old Testament on the bottom and the Gospels above. The wonders that are the bright colour and deep texture of the history of the people of God may be precious to our story and vital for our understanding of who God is and who we are.

But they can seem distant, indeed from another age.

Where is that God today? Tonight?

Jesus gives his answer to this question by sharing once again the breath of life with his friends. Those who had died in fear and in shadow of the cross, are once again given life. We who were dead are now yet alive.

So close your eyes.

The God to whom Christians have given witness for two thousand years is not only enthroned on high, but is also near at hand, as close as food on the tongue, as drink to a parched throat, as breath to our lungs.

Breathe in, slowly, savouring this ever-present experience of life.

Breathe out, feeling your blood pressure drop, an echo of the peace Jesus proclaimed to his lost and frightened friends.

In.

Out.

As close to us as our own breath.

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You can open your eyes

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In a few minutes’ time we will come to the table to share in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, food and drink being that which we most need to sustain life, after breath itself.

By these signs, the Christian faith has recognised the holiness of the most ordinary of human actions: eating, drinkning, breathing.

To speak of the work of the Holy Spirit is to speak of the revelation of all things as participating in God’s ongoing work of creation and reconciliation, of healing and making out of our fear and our violence that peace which passes all understanding.

May we open our eyes to see it, as those first dicsiples saw, and in seeing, in breathing it in, find our lives beginning once again.

Amen.