Weekly Devotions for 6/7

Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. – Genesis 2:7-8 (NRSV)

This past Sunday we celebrated the Day of Pentecost. It is a day of recognizing the work of the Holy Spirit. One of the central understandings of the Spirit is that it is breathe. The Hebrew word for the Spirit, ruach, is also the word for “breath.” The Spirit is what gives breath to the world, and breath is the fundamental sign of life. Breath, theologically, is what distinguishes inanimate objects from living ones. All matter, from electrons to stars, are God’s creation and so precious, but the breath of the Spirit is what animates matter. To be filled with breath is to be filled with the Spirit, is to engage in a relationship with God.

In the beginning, God creates through Word and Spirit. In Genesis 1:2 the Spirit moves over the deep to bring form out of the primordial chaos, and then in Genesis 1:3 God speaks, saying “Let there be light.” Thus before God creates through words God is already at work creating through the movement of the Spirit over the world. The Holy Spirit, then, is the creative power of God moving within the world. Creation is not simply a onetime event. God may have only said “Let there be light” and created light once, but the Spirit is perpetually moving over the world and bringing forth newness and structure out of the chaos of life in this world. Theologically this is known as creatio continua, or continual creation. That is, God is at work each and every day in the world allowing existence to occur. Without God’s continual presence, the world would cease to be. Rocks, sea, plants, animals, buildings, and societies all require the presence of God to exist. Without God they would return to the formless nothingness of Genesis 1:2. God continually brings life to the world through the presence of the Holy Spirit. To have life means to be connected to God. This is the Holy Spirit’s universal work. The Spirit also has particular work in the lives of believers, but it is built on this universal work.

This breath of God is particularly on my mind as I get over the effects of my tangling with Covid. One of the characteristic features of Covid is shortness of breath. In my case this was mild and not problematic, but I can certainly feel the limitation. If breath is the presence of the Holy Spirit, and Covid diminishes the capacity to breath, does this mean that Covid is something that overpowers the Holy Spirit? I’m not sure that I want to be so literal about it, but certainly to have Covid is to have one’s ability to live fully diminished, and so in a sense it may be true. More generally, I think we can recognize all of the ways that we diminish our capacity to breathe deeply of the Holy Spirit, and so our lives and our experiences of God are lesser for it. We don’t even notice the air we are failing to breathe in, and yet we slowly suffocate ourselves. We fail to breathe in the depths of God’s universal work and settle for limited concerns that distract us from the fullness of life that God offers. We call this settling for less “sin,” and sin is often understood as a sickness that affects us. I think it can be a helpful image to think of it as being unable to use our lungs fully. May God in Christ grant us the ability to breathe deeply of God’s work in the world.