Episodes
Sunday Mar 09, 2014
Life Essentials: Breathe
Sunday Mar 09, 2014
Sunday Mar 09, 2014
Rev. Dean Snyder
Genesis 2:4-8
John 20:19-22
Let me say a word about the series we are doing during Lent. It is part of our overall “Strengthening our Core” theme. Our overarching theme is how we can be strong, healthy, and well-balanced people of faith and a strong, healthy, and well-balanced congregation. The people at my gym tell me that you become stronger, healthier, more balanced by strengthening your core.
This particular series for Lent we are calling Life Essentials: Basic things in life that are important for physical and emotional health … things like breathing, eating right, sleeping, bathing, exercising, crying and laughing.
Here’s our thesis: that the ordinary essentials of life can be means through which we may be touched by divine graces.
The church explicitly says this about two daily essentials of life- bathing and eating. The United Methodist Church has two official Sacraments – baptism which is a bathing ritual and communion which is an eating and drinking ritual.
Part of the meaning of these sacred rituals is to say that every time we bath, we can remember that we are spiritually made clean by the forgiving grace of God in Jesus Christ. Every time we eat and drink with one another, we can remember that we are spiritually feed and nurtured by God and by the communities of grace and acceptance that we are part of.
While we only have two official Sacraments, there are many aspects of our ordinary daily lives that are sacrament-like or sacramental. They are ordinary, mundane activities of life through which the grace of God can flow into our lives.
We’ve come up with a list of 7 of these to focus on in sermons for Lent and Easter Sunday. Our staff actually brainstormed a longer list but these are the ones that we decided to focus on. Breathing, eating, sleeping, bathing, exercising, crying and laughing.
We want to start out with one of the most elemental, basic elements of life …. Breathing.
To get us started on thinking about how breathing can be an experience of divine grace, Pastor Dawn is going to have a conversation with Candice Audrey who is a teacher of Kundalini yoga, a form of yoga that includes a lot of breath work to release spiritual energy within us.
[Dawn interviews Candice who leads the congregation in simple breathing exercises.]
Some of the ideas I am going to share this morning are from a video by Rob Bell called Breathe. I encourage you to watch it. Google Rob Bell Breathe and you will find it.
There is a story in the Bible about when God called Moses from a burning bush to send him to lead the Israelites from slavery to freedom. During the conversation between Moses and God, Moses asked God “If I am asked, who should I say sent me? Basically, he asked God “What is your name.”
God answered by saying four letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In English they would be the letters YHVH. This is an unpronounceable name because there are no vowels in it. Scholars have added vowels and so we pronounce it Yahweh. And we add some other words often to translate it “I am who I am.”
Some ancient rabbis believed that vowels and extra words should not be added. They said that the four Hebrew letters would be pronounced “Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh” and that this was actually meant to represent the sound of breathing. They argued that the name of God was the sound of our breath.[i]
What if the old rabbis were right? What would it mean if the name of God is the sound of us breathing?
Now go to Genesis. The book of Genesis begins with this statement: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:1-2
The Hebrew word translated “Wind from God” is the word Ruwach which has more than one meaning. It can be translated legitimately as either wind, spirit or breath. The New Revised Version says a wind from God swept over the waters of chaos. The King James version said the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters. The Knox translation says that “over the waters already stirred the breath of God.”
If K nox was right about the writer’s intent, is it possible that creation began by God breathing and that the “Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh” of God is what began to bring order out of chaos?
Now jump ahead in Genesis a chapter of two. Our first Scripture reading for today from Genesis says that God fashioned adam (the Hebrew word for human being) out of the dust of the earth and then breathed into adam’s nostrils the breath of life; and adam became a living being.
It is the breath or spirit or wind of God entering into the pile of dust that is adam that gives adam life.
What if God is somehow intimately related to your breath and my breath? Psalm 150 says “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” What if God is somehow in the breath of all life?
In our second reading from the Gospel of John, the risen Christ walks through the locked door of the room where the disciples were hiding for fear they might be crucified too and Jesus breathes on them and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
What if the Holy Spirit comes into us and goes forth from us like our breath? What if the way the Holy Spirit is passed on is when someone who is filled with the spirit breathes it on me and I breathe in the Holy Spirit and then breathe it into someone else?
It is fascinating to read about breathing. Apparently most of us are shallow breathers. We breathe air into our lungs instead of into our stomachs. We hardly ever become really full of fresh air.
One of the reasons for this is because to become full of fresh air we need to exhale all of the air inside of us. We can’t take in what we will not let go of.
And apparently the more anxious we become the more we want to hold on to the air already inside of us and our breathing becomes more and more shallow. The cure sometimes to anxiety is to pause and focus on taking deep breaths. Letting go and trusting it we let go there will be new air, fresher air, to take its place.
We can’t take in fresh air without letting go of the old air.
Which is almost like saying that we cannot take in new life unless we are willing to die to our old lives.
I think the breath of God, the Spirit of God, may be like breathing. From the moment we enter this world from our mothers’ womb and breathe our first breath, God’s spirit is entering us to give us life and life abundant. I think the spirit of God dwells in everyone who has breath. I think God wants us to breathe God’s spirit in deeper and deeper and deeper.
In physics and engineering there is a kind of problem students are asked to solve that is called a Fermi problem. Fermi problems are problems about probability. One of the most famous of Fermi problems students get assigned to solve is called “Caesar’s breath.” Has anyone heard of this?
The problem is to determine how many molecules of Julius Caesar’s last breath you and I are in all probability breathing right now. A long complicated mathematical process is used to determine this. The answer is that each of us is breathing at least one molecule of Julius Caesar’s last breath right now.
Apparently if the physicists are right, we are all breathing the same molecules that every living being has breather throughout all of history. We breathe the same molecules every living being before us has breathed --- from Jesus Christ to Hitler..
And we breathe the same molecules of air that every other human being alive today on planet earth breathes. If you have someone that you have such strong feelings about that you don’t want to breathe the same air they do, you are going to have to stop breathing to accomplish that. We all breathe the same air – not in a general sense but concretely. .
And those who follow us here on earth after we have stopped breathing will breathe the very same molecules that are giving us life right now.
And the stories of the Bible say that God is somewhere in this. It is God who gives us breath and who gives breath to all life. Breathing is sacramental. It is a means of grace. With every breath we receive grace. Each breath is a way grace enters our lives.
I want to encourage you this week to take one, two, three minutes each day this week – maybe at the beginning of end of your day, maybe at the most stressful time of your day, to be conscious of your breath. To breathe deeply.
And to maybe recite in your mind as you breath the words: “Breathe on me breath of God. Fill me with love divine.”
[i] Referenced by Rob Bell in a video at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3d5q6_nooma-breathe-014_creation
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