Just Breathe

Just Breathe

Genesis 2:4-7

When I was in eighth grade, we got a new track coach.  On our first day of practice, the coach had us sit in the bleachers.  He stood in front of us, just staring us all down.  Then, he spoke:  “All of you have been running since you learned how to walk.  The problem, though, is not one of you really knows how to run.  There is a right way to run that I can teach you.  However, you’re going to have to start from square one.”  I remember thinking at the time, “That’s the dumbest thing that I’ve ever heard!”  (Remember, I was in eighth grade and knew everything already!). Then, he proceeded to actually teach us how to run.  Everyone ran more efficiently and faster and longer than we’d ever run before.  Who knew?

That experience has been repeated in my life in almost everything that I’ve taken seriously.  I had thrown a lot of baseballs but then someone showed me how to pitch.  I had shot a lot of baskets but then I learned correct shooting form.  In drama, I was pretty sure that I knew how to speak but then my teacher showed me how to become a speaker.  In college, I had been reading forever but learned how to slow down and be a critical reader.  The list could go on and on…

I’m sure that you’ve had this experience, too.  There’s something that you’ve done for a long time.  Then, one day, you meet someone—a teacher—who challenges you to grow, to rethink, to unlearn what you’ve learned and practice something new.  You might be too distracted or too stubborn to accept that invitation.  However, some of the very best days of our lives are the ones when the teacher appears and without hesitation we say, “So, show me!  I’m dying to learn…”

In some ways, the case that I want to make today is even more fundamental than, “You don’t know how to run.” What’s the one thing that we’ve all been doing since the day we were born?  We have been breathing.  I’m convinced that we need to rethink and relearn how we breathe.  Hearing that, you may well join my eighth grade self and think to yourself, “Now that…that…is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!”  All I ask is that you bear with me…

Our life begins when we take our first breath and scream out into the world.  The people who love us are so relieved at the sound.  Our life ends when we take our final breath.  The people who love us hover beside us in that moment and hold our hand because the world as they know it has just changed.  Between those two breaths is a lifetime of breathing.  I preached a sermon a while ago that was inspired by a writer who made the case that the name of God—“Jehovah” or “Yahweh”—mimics the sound of a breath.  So, the first thing we say when we enter this world is the name of God and the last thing we say is God’s name:  “Jehovah,” “Yahweh.”  I like that thought a lot, not as some churchy concept but as an expression of how imminent God’s name is—as an expression of the God in whom we live and move and have our being, whether we’ve ever darkened the door of a church or not.

Our text from Genesis goes a step further than that.  As I enjoy pointing out to my Biblical literalist friends, our reading is from the second creation story in Genesis.  Two different, conflicting accouts. The two stories are sharing different meanings and speaking to different aspects of life.  The first creation story is about how God brings order out of chaos.  The second creation story addresses the conflicted relationship between God and human beings.  Of course, these stories were never presented as “documentary” films of the begining of time.  That notion only arose centuries later.

For our purposes this morning, I simply want you to hear that in the vision of this second story, human life begins when God scoops up dust and breathes life into it.  That creature is named Adam which literally could be translated as “dirt man” or “earthling.” (The Hebrew word, “Adamah” means ground.)  One writer I enjoy suggested, “Dirt bag.” The point is that we are dust until life is breathed into us, until God breathes into us, and then we draw our first breath.  God’s breath made a human being a living being.

Now, don’t worry about Eve this morning.  She’s as misunderstood as almost everything else in this story, to the detriment of women for the rest of history.  There was no apple (just unspecified fruit).  And, of course, the notion that a human being could be tempted into doing the one thing that we knew we shouldn’t do?  Well…none of us are even vaguely familiar with that notion, right?  All of those things, though, are for other sermons on another day.

Today, it’s enough if you will just think about how intimate the relationship is between God and human beings in this story.  It’s not cardio pulmonary resuscitation. This is cardio pulmonary animation.  In the first creation story, the breath of God moves across the face of the earth.  In this story, the breath of God fills our lungs.  Like two people who bring love to life with a kiss, God brings us to life, lovingly, with this one breath.

Again, don’t take this literally or tell me that there’s no truth here unless the truth is literal.  Some of the very best of what I’ve learned has been inspired by a well crafted story that brings deep truth to life.  That deep truth is that before we ever began to separate from God, we were this close, this intimate, first.  That intimacy rested in the act of breathing.  And, I want to argue, every breath, if we pay attention, is an invitation to feel that closeness again.  

Let’s put the point in as few words as we can.  Life was God’s gift to us from the start.  Every breath that we take is an invitation to renew our sense of that gift.  I take a breath in and think, “No matter what else is happening right now, no matter what I think of what’s going on, I’m alive!  Thank you, God for this gift.”  Inhale and exhale.  “Jehovah.”  “Yahweh.”

Here’s the challenge, breathing can, of course, like everything else in this life, be taken for granted.  We can pay no attention whatsoever to how we are breathing.  (Remember…in eighth grade, I was sure that I knew how to run!).  Maybe you don’t really pay attention to how you’re breathing until one day you feel short of breath.  That gets our attention!  Maybe you get to your sacred spot that you’ve been waiting to get to and suddenly, without any thought whatsoever, you take in a huge breath—as if you were trying to suck that sacred place, itself, into your lungs.  You think to yourself, “My God, how long has it been since I took a breath like that?”  Or maybe, you just happen to remember that day when you were a kid and you fell from the tree you were climbing and had “the wind knocked out of you.”  You remember what it was like to come up gasping for air.  All of which seems like a kid thing until you receive news of a serious loss in your life and the wind is gone and you are gasping once again.

Here’s the thing:  you get to choose how to breathe.  And you know what it would take to breathe better.  You need to take in a big breath and really fill your lungs.  Breathe from your diaphragm.  Feel your lungs expand.  Then, hold that breath for an extra beat or two.  Start to release that breath slowly.   Don’t be in a rush to finish that exhalation.  Clear out your lungs.  Let that breath go.  As James Stewart, our resident breathing expert pointed out to me, it may only take two minutes of deep regular breathing to make real change in our lives.  Your heart rate slows.  Your blood pressure drops.  You stop secreting adrenaline and cortisol.  Different parts of you brain start to activate.  

Or, of course, you can breath shallowly and quickly without ever really fully exhaling.  Do this for a few minutes and your body’s flight/fight system will be activated.  You’ll become more aggressive.  You’ll disconnect from the world and from your deeper sense.  You’ll turn on the alarm system and most of the time there will be absolutely nothing alarming actually going on.  You’ll just keep preparing for battle and then wondering what in the world you’re supposed to do with all that energy when the battle never materializes.

For all the lip-service that so many people pay to wanting to be in control of things and themselves, to take charge in life, there’s nothing that we have more control over than how we choose to breathe.  Of course, we have to practice but there are so many ways to do this.  If you’re a runner, you’re paying attention to your breathing while you move.  If you swim, it’s the same thing. You find your rhythm.  You can not move at all and meditate in a thousand different ways but sooner or later, you’ll be sitting there focussing on your breathing.  You can turn the music up loud and raise your heart rate and your respiration.  Or, you can turn the music down and slow yourself down in the process.  When you close your eyes to sleep, you can try to process everything that happened today and anticipate everything coming tomorrow or…you can let go and breathe.  Move or be still.  Raise the volume or quiet things down.  No matter what else you do, you’re going to breathe or, well, your life’s over.  What if you were disciplined enough to choose to breathe in a way that brings you more peace and lets you be more present to the things in this life that are worth living?

Breathing well grounds us.  After all, the original recipe, according to the story, was one part dirt and one part breath of God.  We can and should be grateful every time it dawns on us, “Hey, I’m still breathing here!” Life gets interesting, though, when we remember to ask ourselves, “What if I just slow my breathing down?” What if the experience of being alive in that moment starts to include more peace, more presence, and more connection to the God who is present for our every breath?