The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



The Feast of Pentecost, June 12, 2011, St. Bartholomew’s Church Nashville

“You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; * and so you renew the face of the earth” (Ps. 104:31).

Go ahead and take a deep breath. Today’s sermon is about three meanings for a single word, the Hebrew word ruach; a word we find today in Psalm 104, which tells the familiar story of Creation in poetic form. We’re used to the rather systematic and sequential account of the six days from Genesis 1, after which God rests, but our psalm covers the same ground in a different way, including for good poetic measure Leviathan, the great sea monster that God made for the sheer sport of it. Now that’s poetry. The psalm includes the wind from God (that’s one meaning of ruach) that plays over the waters of chaos in the beginning of Creation: a word translated in our Prayer Book Psalter as “Spirit” (that’s a second meaning) but just as easily translated as “breath” (that’s a third and final meaning). The breath of God not only renews the face of the earth but is also breathed into Adam and Eve by the God who shaped them from the earth. These days we seem addicted to shallow breathing (I speak metaphorically), and that’s not a good thing. So take a deep breath, ye sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, because the breath of God that gave them life also gives you life, and new life as well.

So let’s think about this breath for a moment, and stick with the Psalter for the time being. Psalm 144 tells us that we human beings “are like a puff of wind”, transient that is, unless God upholds us by his mighty breath. The theme’s repeated in Psalm 39: “truly, everyone is but a puff of wind”, and “those who stand erect are but a puff of wind”. It’s humbling, isn’t it, to consider ourselves as merely wind, a lot of hot air as it were? I think that just about catches the sense of things, at least in regard to bishops! Psalm 39 adds something else to this humbling picture, because a variant reading of the final verse of the psalm contains this prayer, “Turn your gaze from me, that I may catch my breath, before I go my way and am no more”. (I’m indebted to poet and Hebraist Robert Alter for this reading.) In other words, human beings are breath and we need to catch our breath. We live in the space and time between one breath and another, and it’s the Spirit of God that brings us into existence and then by his powerful breath sustains us. So don’t hold your breath during this sermon, or indeed in life. Christians should always remember to breathe deeply, as it were, because God is at work in us.

It’s this same wind or Spirit that Jesus breathes upon the apostles gathered together on the evening of the Easter Day, our Gospel reading today from John. The Spirit that he breathes upon them is the same breath of life from God that came into his lungs again on the Day of Resurrection. He’s sharing his new life with them. This breath is also the mighty wind which comes upon the disciples on the Day of Pentecost. In Luke’s Gospel account that’s completed by our first reading from Acts the disciples were told to remain in the city of Jerusalem until they were clothed with power from on high. Now they are sent out into the world, propelled by the Spirit of God. In both accounts of the giving of the Spirit we’re witnessing the birthday of the Church, the day on which the Church’s lungs fill with air, with the breath that comes from God. The Church begins to breathe, to take on new life, and its life is a gift from God. The Spirit of God is God, making it as clear as possible that it is God himself who sustains our life as a community. From this point on the Church’s story will all unfold as the wind from God directs.

It’s Pentecost today, and the Feast itself speaks of the themes of new life and new birth. In the early Middle Ages, as the Church moved out of the Mediterranean basin and into France and Germany the Feast of Pentecost developed as an alternative to Easter as a time for Holy Baptism, because by late Spring time the ice of Northern Europe would have melted and the water would be warm enough so that the baptismal candidates could stand the temperature. “Whitsunday” preserves this usage in its reference to the white garments of Baptism. I don’t think there’s any danger today that our confirmands or anyone else is going to catch cold while renewing their baptismal vows.

And that of course is what we’re doing, tapping into the power of the Spirit that’s manifest in the experience of being born again in Baptism. It’s the birthday of the Church and also the day of our birth, because it is God who gives us second birth from the womb of the Church. Now it’s time for our confirmands, and for each of us, to fill our lungs with the breath of God, to begin to breathe deeply and to live fully the new Resurrection life that God intends for all of us.

- The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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