BREATH OF LIFE John M. Buchanan
John 20:19-23 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
May 29, 1983 Columbus, Ohie

If you have been privileged to be present when either the first or the last
breath of a person's life was taken, you have known what it means to stand in the
presence of the sacred. The moment of birth, and the moment of death have been
universally regarded as holy. Yale theologian Peter Hawkins Suggests that even
in this enlightened era “there are no atheists at spectacular sunsets or at the birth
of one’s own child." Primitive people could make the rudimentary observation
that to be alive meant to breathe; whereas to be dead was to cease breathing. It
was a logical conclusion that breath itself was somehow mysteriously full of Nfe,
mysteriously holy. "Breath is the livingness of thase who are alive" is the way
one writer puts it.

So it is that pepular folklore has been entranced with the mystery of breath.
The rapid exhalation during a lusty sneeze, it was thought, totally depleted the
life of the person. The essence of the aliveness, the spirit, as it were, had departed
and the individual was vulnerable either to an invasion of evil spirits, or the non-re~
sumption of breath. In any event, it was an appropriate occasion for anyone nearby
to offer a hasty prayer in the form of "God bless you."

The mystery of breath is in our story too, from the beginning. And on occasion
it has taken interesting forms. Ancient church custom called for the priest to
breathe on the infant being baptized. And sometimes the expressions were nearly
bizarre ~ “ordination by insufflation" for instance. New Testament scholar Raymond
Brown tells about the ancient Egyptian Christian custom of "filling a skin bag with
the hely breath of the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria, tying it up and transporting
it up the river to Ethiopa where it was let loose on the one designated ta be the
head of the Ethiopian church." (The Gospel of John, Vol. I, p. 1023)

There is a fascinating theological insight in the combination of ancient folklore
and church tradition: a very old and surprisingly helpful way to think about God
and God's relationship to us. The church ordinarily calls it the dectrine of the Holy
Spirit and across the years has designated this day, a week after Pentecost, Trinity
Sunday, as a time to think about it, Holy Spirit, however, seems rather ambiguous
to many Christians apparently. Fred Buechner suggests that if you repeat any
English word twenty consescutive times, "umbrella" for instance, it will cease being
a word, lose all its meaning, and become a nonsensical noise. That is what has
happened to the big words of the faith: repeated over and over by generations
of the faithful, they have ceased to have much content. “Holy Spirit" primarily
he suggests, and I agree, is one of those seriously depleted and devalued words.
Hans Kung concludes that the spirit is, for many, "theologically, absolsutely unintel~
ligible.* My proposal this morning is that. we try to understand that Holy Spirit
is a way the church has found it convenient to talk about God, and that a working
definition of Holy Spirit just might be “breath of life." That, it seems to me, is
suggested by the text this morning, the resurrection appearance of Jesus to his
disciples on the evening of the first day of the week.

In the fourth Gospel Jesus calls God spirit. One time, talking to a woman

he met at the well he said: "God is a spirit, and those who worship him must worship

him in spirit and in truth." At the last supper, in a lengthy monologue known as

' the Farewell Discourses he promised the disciples that they would not be alone

after he is gone: the spirit will be given to them. And then, after the resurrection,

this fascinating and powerful incident: Jesus appearing in their midst, showing
his hands and side, breathing on them and saying "receive the Holy Spirit."

~2-

There iS a sense in which this dynamic is what is happening in the
text for the day. The setting is the Temple in Jerusalem, at the feast
af Dedication which celebrated the liberating and cleansing of the Temple
by Judas Maccabeus two centuries earlier. We know the feast by the name
Hannukah. It was December. Jesus was walking in the covered portico
inside the Tempte wall when he was approached by a group of people wha
said: "How long must you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah
say so plainly." It was probably an attempt to trap him: to trick him
into a statement which later could be used as evidence of the crime of
blasphemy. In fact, that is what happens in thenext paragraph. At the
very least it was an ill-advised effort to persuade Jesus to simplify
@ question which was very complex. Clearly, he and they differed regarding
the definition of Messiah. If he had said, simply, "I am the Messiah"
he would have spent the rest of the afternoon defining what the word
did and did not mean.

Now this text js often used as a launching: pad for homilies on
the necessity for being simple, straightforward, and understandable in
our articulation of the faith. It is a geod point and the sermons are
good. Unfortunately it is not consistent with what happens next. Jesus,
in fact, doesn't tell them plainly. What he says is, "I have told you
but you do not believe." What he had told them was that he was the good
shepherd, and while the shepherd figure is loaded with Messianic content,
it is not synonymous with Messiah. Instead of simplifying the issue
in the way they wanted, he pointed off in a different direction: "My
deeds done in my father's name are my credentials" its the way the New
English Bible translates it.

The point is the deed, the act, the behavioral communication. The
point, I take it, is that there are some things in this life which cannot
be pinned down in simple, one-word answers; some things which are only
affirmed, defined and expressed in action. Unless you are marvelously
poetic, you cannot put into words your love for a dear one. I love the
vignette about the ballerina who was asked what she was trying to say
in a particlar dance. "If I could say it, I wouldn't have to dance,"
she replied. -

It is wrong, and dangerous sometimes, to oversimplify and miss the
complexity. I was in a discussion recently in which it was maintained
that any young person in this country who can't read doesn't want to
read. That's an oversimplification. That misses the complex reality
of Daryl, 12, whose mother works, whose father is gone, whose only positive
reinforcement - only good feelings about himseif ~ come when his buddies
cheer him on for knocking out the parking lot lights at Broad Street
Church. It's an oversimplification to say Daryl doesn't want to read...and
our refusal to deal with his complexity may make us feel good and princi-
palled and righteous - and we will have Daryl on our hands for the next
sixty years. It may be emotionally satisfying to see every liberation
movement in Cantral America, or the world, every effort to establish
justice, every organization dedicated to the improvement of life for
the poor, as part of a Soviet -conspiracy...But it is wrong and tragic.
Nothing is ever gained by oversimplifying that which is complex.

"For the real amazement, if you want to be amazed, is the process, You
Start cut as a single cell derived from the coupling ef a sperm and an egg,
this divides into two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage
there emerges a single cell which will have as alt its progeny the human
brain. The mere existence of that cell should be one of the great astonish-
ments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through
their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking
of nothing except that cell, It is an unbelieveable thing, and yet there it
is, popping neatly into its place amid the jumbled cells of every one of the
several billion human embryos around the planet, just as if it were the easiest
thing in the worid to do,”

"No one has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in life
can ever be so puzzling. If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within
my lifetime, ! will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of
them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another,
around the whole sky, until all my money runs out."

Our incipient suspicion of creation has made us uncomfortable with the arts,
in recent centuries, at least. One of the things the Vatican Art Exhibit is saying
to the world is that Christianity used to understand that the creative force within
humanity is divine: that this incredible impulse in us, to stop what we are doing
and pick up a piece of burned wood and scratch a picture of an ox and a tree and
a child on a cave wall; this magnificent impulse to arrange sounds in a relationship
and meter which ends up a Brandenburg Concerto; this absolutely stunning impulse
to get in on creation by adding to it, rejoicing in it, even laughing at it ~ is of itself
the divine; the breath of God which is the breath of life in us,

The second implication has to do with who we are. The question is an old one.
"What is man that thou art mindful of him?", the Psalmist asked, posing the eternal
riddle of our humanity. Anthropologists, Paleontologists, Zoologists, our favorite
Internists for that matter, will tell us that the human body is marvelous but not
altogether unique. The source of pleasure, pain, vanity, and a lot of anxiety to
be sure, but limited, in many ways, compared to the rest of the created order.
There are living things which are larger, stronger and much faster. If we are unique
it is on some basis other than our bodies, Old Testament scholar Phyllis Tribble
tells her students that Genesis 2 is a blunt reminder that the Bible does not present
humankind as superman, but rather lewly earth creatures, made of the dust, made
significant by the divine breath, spirit, Hfe, in us,

That is, of course, both good news and bad news, The bad news is that there
are plenty of reasons for human humility, or at least keeping things in proper perspec-
tive. The bad news is that we have been incredibly arrogant about the rest of crea-~
tion, simply eliminating whole species which were not useful to us. The good news
is our potential dignity, our position in the created order, divinely appointed, divinely
inspired, a result of the spirit, the breath of God, the life in us.

whe

Third, and this too is a gift from Martin Marty, to act Christianly
is to carry the signs of hope, always. We are in the season of Resurrec-
tion. We live in the refracted light of an event so large it, above
all events, defies simple description. Death did not defeat Jesus Christ.
The powers of death were no match for Christ. Fundamental issues are
now resolved. We are safe and free and the whole world is full of possi-
bility because of the resurrection. We are the people, someone said,
who sing at funerals. We are the people who will never give up on the
world, who will be found working for improvement against all the odds,
laboring when everyone else has gone to the party. To act as a Christian
is to be constantly a sign of hope. Those without hope, the cynics,
the ones who have given up on the world, feel no compulsion to work at
much of anything except their own amusement. Ghandi was wrong, someone
told me recently. “Those people over there will always be poor, dependent
and violent and the sooner we forget the romantic nonsense about freedom

and nonviolence the better." I prefer Matin butheraonthesubiest of
hope. He said, "If they told me the world would end tomorrow, I would
a di

still plant a cherry tree."

Christian hope is not starry-eyed naivete. In fact, it confronts
the simple truth that at this moment in history, things are not going
well for our side. Freedom and justice and peace are not, at this moment,
on the rise. Quite to the contrary. Christian hope doesn't oversimplify
and doesn't overstate its own success potential. It stays, firmly, in
the struggle - because it has its roots in Jesus Christ, who was dead
but is risen.

How to act as a Christian? Somewhere before the strategy is devised
there is a basic matter to be confronted. At some point in our pilgrimage
we have to decide that it is important to us - perhaps the most important
thing for us to take care of. At some point we have to see that our
salvation, our wholeness, our integrity as a person depends on how we
answer that question.

Walter Wink, an innovative New Testament scholar, was asked recently
about his OWT "FASTEN pilgrimage. He said something important in response.

"For the first forty years or question is, ‘What is the
meaning ife? We struggle with it and against, we read, pray
and agonize over it. And then in the middle years the burning question
changes. Instead of ‘What_does my life mean?” - Tt becomes =“How, with
the time remaining, can I make a difference?'" a

I suppose we never totally lose the expectation that someday we
will know, intellectually, all we need to know about life, death, God:
and when we have that down, then we will know what to do about it. I
have a hunch that we will wait a very long time; and that our wait will
end when we either sell out to someone's simplified version of the Gospel,
or simply give up on the whole enterprise.

There is another option, however. Jesus said, "The deeds I do in
my father's name are my credentials." Your faith and mine; the faith
of the individuals we have ordained and installed to office this morning,
is authenticated as it takes shape in deeds: acts of moral intensity,
of civility and tolerance for all our brothers and sisters: individual
and corporate acts of tenacious, unrelenting hope for the world.