The articulacy of breath
A sermon preached on Pentecost Sunday, at St. Michael's Anglican Church, Québec City.
Sermon texts: Acts 2:1-21; Ps 104:25-35, 37; 1 Cor 12:3b-13; Jn 7:37-39
"All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability." (Acts 2:4)
Cours, Coeur, Cor Bu, bout, beau, bain…
Bain, this is my attempt to speak in tongues this morning. For my part, I find vowels in the French language difficult to hear and to speak. But vowels are special, because vowels are said with our breath.
Think about that for a moment.
The articulacy of breath.
Our words are also our breath. And breath in the Hebrew tradition is deeply related to our spirit. It was breath that hovered over the waters of the deep in the beginning. It was breath that was breathed into Adam, bringing his body to life. It was to breath that the prophet Ezekiel is told to prophesy to in order to make the dry bones live. The resurrected Jesus breathed on the disciples wishing them peace. And now, it is breath that God has come to breathe with and in Jesus' disciples, to give new life to, to animate the community of belonging we now call the church.
When we speak, we are literally moving air out from the depths of our bodies, and shaping that breath to give life to meaning. Speaking is a generative act, an act of drawing on our inner life, to share that life with others. Speaking, forming our breath into words, can be an act of joining with others into communion. As the theologian Willie James Jennings writes:
"Some people learn a language out of gut wrenching determination born of necessity. Most, however, who enter a lifetime of fluency, do so because at some point in time they learn to love it.
They fall in love with the sounds. The language sounds beautiful to them. And if that love is complete, they fall in love with its original signifiers. They come to love the people—the food, the faces, the plans, the practices, the songs, the poetry, the happiness, the sadness, the ambiguity, the truth—and they love the place, that is, the circled earth those people call their land, their landscapes, their home. Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak people fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution the Spirit performs." (Jennings, Acts, p. 30)
This is a revolution of joining. Notice that the miracle of Pentecost is not simply a miracle of hearing, it is a miracle of speaking. It is not that the disciples speak their own language, and are heard in another. They take on the vowels of others. They take on their forms of breath, and in so doing, they enter into other people's ways of being. By taking on the words of others, the disciples are entering the worlds of others.
This is the miracle that constitutes the community of belonging we call the Church: we are to be a community that joins with others. And not just with others who are like us, but with unlike others, with those whose ways of life might be different from our own.
Thankfully, for those of us who might struggle with vowels, as St. Paul reminds us in our reading from Corinthians, the speaking of other languages is not the only gift we have been given that can help us to become a community of joining and belonging:
"Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good." (1 Cor 12:4-7)
We have, all of us, been given a gift. Perhaps you have a skill, a talent, a perspective, a way of being in this world that can help you to contribute to the common good of both the church and the world of which the church is a part. Now as Paul notes, there are a variety of services and activities, but these services and activities are not to be in competition with one another—they are to be complementary.
And what is true of our gifts as persons, is also true of our gifts as congregations. No person's and no congregation's gift is their possession. By virtue of being a gift it is a grace, to be received and shared, rather than owned and controlled. We all have our gifts to contribute for the sake of the common good, for there are many activities and services but one Lord, one Creator, one Spirit who animates them all.
So what are your gifts? What are your community's gifts? And how can we use those gifts, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to pursue the common good? How can we use our services and our activities to join with others, even unlike others, to build up a community of belonging where all peoples can find a place, and where every place is honoured?
As Jesus says:
"Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, 'Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.'" (John 7:37b-38)
We live in a world that is thirsty. Thirsty for justice. Thirsty for peace. Thirsty for recognition. Thirsty for identity. Thirsty for belonging.
In Jesus, we find our thirst is quenched. But that is not the end of the story. In Jesus we find our thirst is quenched, but we also become a source of living water for others, to help quench the world's thirst.
The good news this morning is that the same Spirit that hovered over the waters in the beginning, that Jesus breathed upon those first disciples, and that descended upon the Church will equip and empower you with everything you need to take up your gifts in God's life-giving revolution of joining.
