Sometimes a few words in scripture just grab ahold of you and make you really start to think. I read the gospel for this week and as I finished my dog decided that she needed to go out. So I walked her out to the dog park. While standing and waiting in some pretty oppressive post rain humidity one of those pieces of scripture made me start thinking and wondering. “so that they may be one, as we are one.” Let me give you a warning up front, this may just give you an inside look at how my brain works. That phrase made me think of that great camp song, “We are One in the Spirit”. It opens, “We Are One In The Spirit We Are One In The Lord And We Pray That All Unity May One Day Be Restored And They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love, By Our Love.” The song goes on to talk about walking hand in hand and working side by side. As a former camp counsellor, I used to get those warm marshmellowy, camp fire sentiments when I heard this song, but as I thought about it out there in the dog park, all I could muster was a pessimistic “yeah, right”. Instead of becoming more one we are becoming many ones, individuals or tribes seeking to separate themselves from others that just don’t cut their mustard, or do things their way, or see them exactly eye to eye. I thought, wow I’ve sung that song with a feeling of unity and togetherness, but it turns out to be just a hopeful aspiration.
That’s when I thought about the word aspiration. I thought about the fact that it meant a hope of achieving something and also the term for when you suck anything other than air down into your lungs. Wow, I need to get out of the heat and sun. But it made me wonder. The root of the word is “spirare” or breath just like the word spirit, as in the Holy Spirit. Hmm. If you add an a in front of roots in Latin it makes it mean not or un whatever the root is.
In ancient times the breath was what animated living things, it was what enabled them to be alive, active and to do. As I thought about it it started to make sense. If you are simply aspiring, you are only dreaming and not doing. The song is not saying that everything is OK now but that we are aspiring to unity and people knowing that we are Christians by our love. Let’s face it, we have been aspiring for 2000 years! The Holy Spirit is the breath of God. It is the creative force of the universe! The Holy Spirit is a spirit of action and propulsion, of life and doing.
For a long time the church has been symbolized by a boat. In order for a sailboat to move, to be propelled the sail must be spread out or unfurled. We so often prefer our sails to be furled, to be rolled up tight because we have other desires and directions we would rather go. We fear one another or seek to have power over one another. We work against the wind of the Spirit. We are clever as we tack back and forth seeking another way, a way that preserves our power, our self interests. The boat simile works very well, as the mast looks like the cross and on that cross Jesus, God’s Son, unfurled himself. He unfurled himself against the storm, fearlessly facing the gale of hatred, sin and death. He stretched out his arms and took the full brunt of the storm and God’s Spirit, God’s breath propelled that ship on through, saving us all from the storm. Jesus’ ministry, life and death were not about aspiring or lofty un-doing they were about perspiring. The origin of that word in old times was that the evidence of hard work was hard breathing, breathing hard enough to “breath” through the pores of your skin or perspire. In old English the origin of the word sweat meant to work hard. We see the Holy Spirit’s activity or work clearly in the person of Christ. We see the oneness of Father Son and Holy Spirit from the very beginning of all that is through the cross and resurrection. Christ Con-spired or breathed with the Father and Spirit as one and came to perspire and sweat like “great drops of blood from the work of the cross until he expired or his breath went out, he died and gave up his spirit. At that moment transpiration (from the Latin to breathe across from when breath or vapor crossed a barrier and became known) and the Centurion proclaims that “truly this was the Son of God”.
Jesus breathed on the disciples and they became inspired and shared the breath of God. That wind, that breath, the Holy Spirit was shared with all on Pentecost. The Holy Spirit seeks to make us doers of the word not just hearers and aspirators. He seeks to inspire us to conspire with Christ to perspire to make his kingdom transpire. As we do it over and over, it will become habitual, respiring, one breath after another, laying one brick on top of another until we find ourselves building, building the kingdom of God. Things will be transpiring, we will be Respiring and conspiring all one with another. We must cease our furling and be propelled by the Spirit and change will happen and our dreams, our aspirations, will become realities.
On the 28th of August, in 2023 it will have been 60 years since Dr. Martin Luther King first proclaimed the dream in his “I Have a Dream Speech, and of course it’s been about 2000 years since Jesus first laid the foundations of the dream. Jesus blazed the way forward, and Dr King and many others through time have tried to shepherd us back to the path. It is a crying shame that 2000 years later Dr King still had to call the path to the Kingdom of God a Dream. A crying shame.
Now we are facing our greatest challenge since our last great battle with tyranny where the aspirations of those seeking to destroy others began to transpire because evil went to work. Obviously tyranny and hatred and evil are not afraid to get down to business. They are not afraid to perspire. They unfurl themselves and go to war. We are called to fight, as Martin Luther pointed out that because of Christ we can stand unafraid for this world’s tyrant is doomed to fail for God Himself fights by our side with weapons of the Spirit. We have aspired for too long. Look at us. Are we walking hand in hand or working side by side? Have our aspirations expired. Have we been in an un-doing state so long that we have stopped breathing? The answer is NO. We can see the Holy Spirit work. We can see the Spirit’s power, all happening in different scales each and everyday.
Hal Hinson wrote a piece about “Weapons of the Spirit,” Pierre Sauvage’s documentary about the extraordinary French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon during the Nazi rule in World War II. Hinson writes, ”The movie is presented as a kind of spiritual quest, “a return to hallowed ground,” by its director, who was born among the villagers during the time of their resistance. The question at the heart of this modest, compelling film is this: How in the middle of great evil did a great good take place? The facts are simply this: that 5,000 French Christians, against seemingly insuperable odds, provided food and refuge for nearly 5,000 Jews. Initially only a trickle of Jewish families made their way to Le Chambon. But as the Vichy government increased efforts to collaborate with the Nazis in their solution of the “Jewish problem” and word of the Chambonnais spread, the flow increased until there were nearly as many refugees as villagers. When confronted with their heroism, though, they’re unanimously unimpressed with themselves — the way they see it, they made the only choice available to them: “For us, all that mattered is that they were people.” Though a high moral conscience seemed second nature to these poor farmers, they were led in their resistance by pastor Andre Trocme, an impassioned pacifist who in his response to the French armistice with Germany urged his flock to arm itself with the “weapons of the spirit” against the Nazis. Out of this courageous tolerance and faith, the Chambonnais forged what Sauvage calls “a conspiracy of goodness” that manifested itself in an underground railway to smuggle refugees across the border into Switzerland and turned the city into France’s leading center of the manufacture and distribution of counterfeit documents. Most astounding, though, is the fact that all this activity seemed to take place under the noses of the Germans, who appeared either not to notice or not to care. Still, though everything that Sauvage uncovers leads us to believe that it would have been nearly impossible for the Germans not to have known, he finds nothing to explain their failure to respond. The best he can offer as an explanation is to suggest that whenever goodness is afoot, its influence is spread in unpredictable ways. I think St John had the answer in John 3:8 “ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” Holy Spirit, come! Inspire us to perspire, conspire and respire with your grace along with your Son until that day when your Kingdom, in all of its glory, transpires. Amen
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