Jon Kabat-Zinn has essentially made a career
out of teaching people how to breathe.
He calls it mindfulness,
and describes it as
“actively tuning in to each moment in an effort to remain
awake and aware from one moment to the next.”
It’s a way of bringing our minds into the present moment—
since, as you may have noticed from time to time,
our minds have this habit of wandering.
Instead of noticing the feel of the sun on our faces
or the incredible scent of the newly-mown grass
we fixate on that conversation we had yesterday
with the person who never listens to us the way we want
or we worry about tomorrow
and how we will do what needs to be done by then.
Another way Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it is that
we become “lost” in our thoughts.
So he decided to see what would happen if you took people who were
chronically ill
or in constant pain
or under intense stress
and taught them to pay attention to their breathing
as a way of tuning in to the present moment.
He starts by asking people to just try a little experiment:
Close your eyes
Sit up straight
And become aware of your breathing.
Don’t try to control it
Just let it happen and be aware of it,
feeling how it feels
as it flows in and out.
Now, he knows as well as anyone that just sitting there
watching your breath is likely to make you feel foolish or bored.
If that’s the case, the next thing he suggests is this:
Take the thumb and forefinger of one hand,
pinch your nose shut and keep your mouth closed.
Then notice how long it takes before your breathing becomes
very interesting to you indeed! (1)
The point, of course, is that if we stop breathing
we will die.
And so noticing our breath actually becomes a way of
noticing our life.
Today is Pentecost.
This is the day the apostles—
those called by Jesus to witness to him throughout the earth—
received the Holy Spirit
and became the church.
The word “spirit” in both Hebrew and Greek,
the original languages of the Bible,
actually means “breath” or “wind.”
This wind, this breath, this Holy Spirit
is not just from God
it is God.
It is the third person of the Trinity,
the one who came for us soon after Jesus returned to God
the one who is still with us now.
And just as our breath is necessary for us to have life,
so the Holy Spirit is the very thing that gives life to the church.
If the church does not have the Holy Spirit, it will die.
But like anything else that is with us all the time,
that happens whether we notice it or not,
most of the time we can’t be bothered to notice the Holy Spirit
any more than we bother to notice our own breathing.
If you think about it, the same is also true with language.
Our native tongue, the language we first heard
whispered to us by our mothers and fathers
eventually came from our lips as naturally
(as they say)
as breathing.
Our ability to speak and understand what those around us are saying
is rarely something we notice until we discover
we can no longer summon words at will
or until we are surrounded by people
who do not speak our language.
Certainly the people who built the tower of Babel had no idea
how fortunate they were
that they all
spoke the same language.
After all, they had never known anything different.
“The whole earth had one language and the same words.”
How convenient that must have been.
How it must have simplified their communications and the interaction of one community with another.
And yet even though God had blessed them with this means of unity,
they were afraid of
“being scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
So they built for themselves a city to live in
and a tower that reached up to the heavens
so that they could remain together,
unified by their language and their customs and their God.
It was comfortable.
It was what they had always known.
It was a group of people united by what they had in common.
It was a group of people who had forgotten to notice what
—and WHO—gave them life.
When God saw the city and the tower,
God knew what had to be done.
The people’s worst fears needed to be realized.
And so God gave them many different languages
and “scattered them abroad...over the face of all the earth.”
It was the very thing they had been afraid of in the first place
and it happened because they took their unity,
their one language,
and they used it
to serve themselves instead of God.
You see, when God created human beings
and breathed the breath of life into us
and gave us the gift of language,
it wasn’t just so we could understand each other.
It was also so that we could spread the good news!
Language was the way God intended God’s people
to tell each other about God,
to share their faith stories
and to hear the stories of others,
to witness to God’s work in the world.
But if God’s people just stayed in one place and kept to themselves,
taking turns climbing the tower to heaven
then how would the good news spread abroad
“upon the whole face of the earth”?
In order for God’s people to be united,
they first had to be divided, scattered
spread abroad throughout the earth
so that the earth—the whole earth—could be populated
with people of God who could witness. (2)
And so God took the thing that the people had feared
—being scattered—
and made it something that served God’s purposes.
On that first Pentecost, we have the reversal
of what happened at the tower of Babel,
where everyone could speak but no one could understand.
With the arrival of the Holy Spirit,
as the church breathed its first breath,
what happened was that the apostles could suddenly
speak other languages,
and this was no punishment or party trick;
it meant that they could go out from their hiding place
and preach the gospel.
It meant they could go tell the story of what God had done
in Jesus Christ, and most importantly,
It meant that everyone outside could suddenly
hear the gospel in their own native language.
Suddenly, the truth of the gospel sounded as familiar to them
as the sound of their own breathing.
It was truly a remarkable moment in the history of the church.
The problem is, we tend to remember it as just that—HISTORY—
when in fact the appearance of the Holy Spirit
is no more something that happened only in the past
than your breathing is something that only happened the moment you were born and never since.
The problem is, most of us have
become so accustomed to the presence of the Holy Spirit
—which is God!—
among us that we have stopped noticing it.
But when we stop noticing the Holy Spirit among us,
we stop noticing the life of our church.
It’s like forgetting the fact that we can only
do the things we do each day
because we take air into and out of our lungs
nearly a thousand times an hour.
We breathe in...we breathe out.
We live.
So if we stop for a moment and take time to notice
the breathing of our church,
which is the Holy Spirit giving us life.
tell me: what do you notice?
The church breathes in:
in worship
in Bible study
in choir practice
in times of fellowship
in caring for one another
The church breathes out:
with free movies for our community
by offering food to needy families through our food pantry
through our relationship with Firestone Park Elementary with a global mission initiative to do what we can to eradicate slavery.
The church breathes in...the church breathes out...
The church lives.
When Jon Kabat-Zin teaches people
to pay attention to their breathing
it doesn’t take away their pain,
or their disease
or their stress...
but it changes their relationship to those things.
It changes the way they view and participate in
their lives.
When we notice the Holy Spirit among us
it’s not going to take away our worries
about growth
about money
about whether
“our children will have faith and
“our faith will have children.”
about how exactly we are supposed to witness.
But noticing the Holy Spirit can change
our relationship to those questions,
and the way we view and participate in
the life of our church.
It can literally inspire us
and divide us and scatter us abroad and give us language
to preach the gospel!
When was the last time you breathed? Did you notice it?
Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Bantam Dell, 2005, p. 22-23.
2. In this interpretation, I am indebted to Walter Brueggemann’s analysis of the text. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. WJK Press, 1984.
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