Pentecost sermon

Breath … it’s the signal to the world of the beginning of our human life outside the womb. And the ceasing of our breath marks the end of this human life. 

Breathing gives us the ability to live, ensures every part of our bodies is fed with oxygen. Our breathing varies according to what our bodies need – slowing and deepening as we sleep, quickening when we exercise. When we are anxious, we may find that our breath becomes more rapid  – a physical response to enable us to be ready to respond to perceived danger. And we can often deliberately lower our anxiety levels by practising deep breathing that slows the heart rate, and lowers blood pressure.

In the First Aid training some of us attended last week, we learned about synchronised breathing – how breathing at a steady, slower pace alongside someone who may be breathing rapidly or erratically for many different reasons, can enable the other person’s nervous system to naturally mirror ours, gradually lowering their heart rate. One person’s breath can literally change another’s, helping them (and you!) to feel less stressed and more at peace. And there’s more!

I found out last week that the word ‘conspire’ means to breathe together. So, let’s take a breath. Now breathe it out again. And in. And out. Wow! – we’ve just initiated a conspiracy! The word, ‘conspire’ also shares the same root as the word ‘spirit’. So perhaps conspire can also mean to be filled with the same spirit, to be brought alive by the same breath.

I played with imagining what we might see if we could see the Holy Spirit when we come together to worship God, to pray? Just let your imagination fly for a moment! What might it look like? I see it swirling, multicoloured, gentle and powerful, beautiful and terrifying, unpredictable, drawing us together and to God and to every place that God is needed. I recognise that it is, in a profound way, love. 

This happens when two of us come together to pray, or sing, or meditate, as much as when we are two hundred, and this Holy Spirit is powerful, but never forces us. Instead it brings freedom; and we are always free to choose how we respond.

In verse 22 of our Gospel reading this morning, we heard that Jesus, in his first appearance to the disciples on the day of the resurrection, ‘breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit”’.  We don’t often enjoy becoming very aware of another’s breath! Most often our first noticing is because of the smell! I said earlier that we have the capacity to change another’s breath by how we breathe, but that’s not all. There’s even more! Because actually, we all breathe one another’s breath all the time… 

The earth’s atmosphere is quite separate from the near perfect vacuum of outer space – there is an agreed distance, a line, known as the Kármán Line, beyond which none of the mixture of gases in our atmosphere have ever gone. And this line is just 50 miles or so from the surface of the earth. This has been true since the creation of the solar system … beneath this Kármán Line is all the air that ever was! That same ancient air just keeps circulating and recirculating.

This means that as we breathe in today, we breathe star dust left over from the creation of the solar system. We breathe tyrannosaurus rex breath. We breathe air that Bach breathed, or Michelangelo. Air that your greatest hero of all time breathed, and that your most feared or reviled historical figure breathed. When we breathe, we breathe in what was a baby’s first breath, or a dying person’s last.  And as part of this chain of breathers through time, we breathe in, we are kept alive, and when we breathe out it carries something of us into the next person, or plant, or animal, who uses it to live.

So, when Jesus, on the first day of the resurrection. A day that had known such sadness, such confusion, such joy … when Jesus breathed on the gathered disciples with breath that was the Holy Spirit – this was a breath unlike any other that had ever been breathed on earth. This was the breath of the resurrected Christ, the breath of God. This breath was a perpetual, never-ending force for good and for life in the world that grew until it was a mighty wind, sent swirling through another room in Jerusalem where the disciples were gathered, and into and through all of them at Pentecost filling the entire house, and all the people! 

Our own celebration of “Pentecost” is linked to an ancient Jewish holiday, Shavuot. Thousands of people had gathered in Jerusalem for the ancient Jewish festival of Shavuot – celebrated exactly 50 days after Passover. The word Pentecost comes from the Greek word for “fiftieth”.  Reading this story with critical, questioning minds, makes it seem unbelievable. The gathered followers of the Way were all filled with this Holy Spirit and started speaking in languages they did not even know they knew! And they were noisy! And so all these crowds of people gathered to celebrate Shavuot came bursting in to see what all this racket was about, and who was speaking their local language. 

It’s hard to make sense of what happened that day, but clearly something extraordinary did, and the Christian followers increased in number from 120 to more than 3,000. And they were changed. 

Ten days ago, at Ascension, I talked about the fear, and sense of inadequacy that might have plagued the disciples when Jesus ascended, and of the powerful demonstration of God’s trust in them in the act of leaving. And here, today, we see the fruits of that trust, and of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ followers are emboldened, and empowered. The Spirit of God breathes within them, and they are transformed.In that instant, they became the eyes with which God looks compassion on this world. They became the feet with which God walks to do good. They became the hands, with which God blesses all the world. 

But this was not a one-off event. This continues, today. Because the Holy Spirit continues to breathe on and in us. In fact through the Holy Spirit God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, and more active within us than the air we breathe. So today, we can rejoice and feel certain that God is with us, guiding and sustaining us, as we hear the words of Teresa of Avila, a 16th century mystic who is no doubt familiar to, among others, those who attended the Lent group:

Amen