Holy Breathing.

What if the Holy Spirit is a hypostasis of the Godhead… 

and a practice?  

What if she is not just a doctrine, someone we are required to believe in, a Trinitarian “person” — and not just a living, dynamic, presence, permeating the creation, but a physical, embodied action?  What if she is holy breathing, literally a way of inhaling and exhaling, a kind of third element of communion along with the bread and wine of the Eucharist, which is to say, a Way to realize and become one with God?  Bodies require food, and breath.  Maybe prayer in the Name and Spirit of God does that.   

In both of the languages of Scripture, Hebrew and Greek, the word that gets translated as “spirit” has more basic meanings as “wind” and “breath.”  Our word “spirit” has acquired technical religious and even supernatural connotations, in addition to other more ambiguous meanings, which can distract us from the more original physical senses of both ruach and pneuma.  Spirit originally simply refers to a movement of air.

What if conscious breathing is (literally) the font of spirituality from which everything else flows?  What if we moved away from thinking that we are the ones doing the breathing to a realization that there is a sense in which God in creation breathes in us?  Breathing is our integration into creation and Creator, it weaves us together with all of life, sharing in respiration the same air.

The integration of breathing into a Jesus Prayer practice is one way to see how our breathing can be an intentional spiritual discipline, not just a reflexive physical activity to obtain oxygen and release carbon dioxide.  The method is to say interiorly the first part of the prayer while inhaling: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and the second part while exhaling: "Have mercy on me, a sinner.”  

Thus we take in the Name, the identity, indeed the mission of Jesus Christ, and we give out whatever in us is separating us from him.  We breathe in our Essence, we breath out our ego.  We receive the flow of pure, clear, energized, oxygenated air, and we relinquish defiled, soiled, poisonous air (which is nevertheless beneficial to other life forms, like plants).  And over time, under this slow air-blasting, our calcified and stubborn egotism flakes off and blows away, revealing the Image of God that is always within us.

The body is not just aerated for its own sake.  Connecting breathing to the Name shows that we are used by that Spirit energy to do the work of mission in the world: living in the Kingdom, spreading God’s love, compassion, justice, and peace.  Divine respiration feeds the mission of the Church: we are Christ-in-the-world.  That mission is also at the same time what demands ever more continual respiration to support it.  Breathing that has no outlet is just debilitating spiritual hyperventilation.  Attempting to do mission without Holy Spirit is like trying to run a marathon without, well, breathing.

Holy Spirit then, is not just something to think about and affirm.  Just observing the work of the Spirit is insufficient.  Maybe Holy Spirit is also something we do, a practice, something — someone — in which we participate.  Maybe prayer in Jesus’ Name provides the spiritual oxygen that enables a body fed in the eucharist to come truly and fully to life!

 

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How Church Growth Is Important.

Nothing would make me happier than if increasing numbers of people lived the life of prayer, simplicity, compassion, justice, non-violence, humility, and thanksgiving that Jesus teaches.  Indeed, nothing is more important than that people actually follow Jesus, in their lifestyle and actions.  The future of the planet literally depends on it.  It is a matter of existential urgency.

Therefore, I do want churches to grow in numbers.  Numerical growth in the church is authentic when it is a by-product of people becoming disciples of Jesus Christ.  For what is a church, a gospel community, than a gathering of people seeking to follow Jesus?  Growth is not a necessary by-product, it doesn’t happen automatically.  But it is something that can happen as a result of the church’s faithful discipleship.  

Sadly, it might be very difficult for disciple-making churches to grow.  In a particularly difficult context, people may avoid the church and be deaf to its message.  Often this is because Christianity has such a bad, but unfortunately often deserved, reputation among many people as a religion of judgment, condemnation, hypocrisy, and self-righteousness.  It has been historically the religion of colonizers and conquerors, of cruelty and exclusion.  Even today, in the minds of many, churches are associated with the politics of racism, privilege, and self-serving lies.  

And sometimes people are conditioned by society to imagine that discipleship is pointless.  Especially in a capitalist economy which has managed to sell sins — like greed, gluttony, lust, envy, and vanity — as virtues, and define success purely in terms of money, discipleship looks insane or subversive.  People may realize that discipleship is difficult, costly, and necessarily demands that they change.  Who does that?

At the same time, too many main-line Christians react to the recent half-century of church membership collapse by rather sanctimoniously congratulating themselves for refusing to sink to giving people “easy answers” or “slick productions.”  As if it were somehow more spiritually demanding and authentic to stick to traditional (if not moribund) worship forms and a heady (if not elitist) theology.  This would make some sense were they proficient at actually making disciples, which they’re not.  At best they make charitable donations and compose grandiose, even radical, statements.  Neither of these approaches change much of anything.  Discipleship is about solidarity, not charity, and action, not just talk. 

And, conversely, the fact that a church is growing numerically does not necessarily mean disciples are being made there.  Churches that tell people only what they want to hear, appealing to their egocentricity and desires, or stoking their fear and anger, even their hatred, shame, and bigotry, or gives them easy comfort or an entertaining show, may, and often do, grow numerically.  Growth based on these factors is not an indication of discipleship.  It just means they figured out how to manipulate the market.  Jesus doesn’t have anything good to say about markets.  In short, it doesn’t matter how fast a church grows if it preaches white supremacy, homophobia, nationalism or other things which are antithetical to Jesus’ radically inclusive teachings.

Jesus doesn’t say, “get people to become members of my religious institution by any means necessary.”  He says “Go and make disciples of all nations teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.”  On the one hand, we make disciples by being disciples ourselves.  We need to be living examples and models of discipleship.  On the other hand, discipleship means making disciples.  We can’t claim to be following Jesus if we aren’t putting our energy into attracting and inviting others into the life of discipleship.  How are we doing that?  How are we a light to the world?  How are we salt or leaven permeating society and influencing those around us?

I suspect that if we took discipleship seriously we would not care that much about numbers… and then maybe our numbers would actually start to increase.

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Why the Cross Is the Center of Christian Faith.

One of the reasons why the gospel spread so fast and so far in the early days of the Church was simply the message of the cross.  What the Christians were preaching was more than cosmic myths and psychological mysteries.  The fact that Jesus was executed on a Roman cross and nevertheless somehow still lives was the main factor making the gospel so powerful to other subjects of the Roman Empire.  It is precisely why the Apostle Paul insisted on the cross as the center of faith, even though it was “a stumbling block for Jews and folly to Gentiles.”  

The cross was a problem for Jews because, well, a crucified Messiah was not part of the expectation.  But also, in Paul’s time, the Jewish authorities were still imagining that they had some special relationship with the Romans, indicated in their exemption from emperor-worship.  Crucifixion was a punishment reserved almost exclusively for people convicted of sedition against the Empire.  To admit that Rome killed the Messiah would automatically make Rome the enemy of all Jews.  The establishment could not say that publicly even if they believed it. 

Paul’s big epiphany is that his people, the Jews, are not that special but just a conquered nation like all the others, no less oppressed or victimized by Rome.  But the Jews were different in being the sole stewards of the biblical story, and the nation from whom the Messiah, the deliverer of all people, emerges.

The cross therefore became the centerpiece of Paul’s teaching and one reason for the explosive growth of the gospel gatherings he founded across the Empire.  The cross was, for people at that time, a loaded, highly political image.  It was intended and utilized by Rome to strike terror into colonized populations.  But the early Church uses it to unite those same oppressed, exploited people across ethnic, national, religious, economic, and racial lines, in a new, alternative society.  Paul understood the cross to be the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures, which are at heart the story of a band of liberated slaves and their descendants.  Christ had finally come to deliver us, not just from Rome, but from bondage to “sin,” the pervasive, demonic power that infected everyone with toxic self-interest, the concentration and application of which Rome was the worst example.  

Similarly for Gentiles or “Greeks,” the fact that Jesus was crucified meant that he got himself in the way of Roman power in what could have been considered a foolish and self-destructive way.  He said and did things that earned him the punishment everyone knew he would receive.  Some would have thought that he should have kept his head down and stayed under the radar, as it were, and made sure he did not do anything to annoy the Romans.  That’s what everyone else had learned to do.  If somebody got themselves crucified it was often their own damn fault (not that Rome was shy about crucifying innocent people if it got their point across).  

The difference between Jesus and the countless others who were murdered by Rome was the resurrection.  Jesus’ uprising to a new and continued life with and within his disciples, even after enduing Rome’s worst legal sentence, was understood as at least an implicit defeat of Rome.  It would have appealed to people who had Rome’s knee on their necks for generations.  People joined the Church to participate in Christ’s victory over Rome, and the formation of a new kind of community in his Name.

The writings of the New Testament show the Church reflecting on the meaning of the cross.  Their understanding gets expanded and widened metaphorically and spiritually, so that it reveals both cosmic and psychological dimensions.  Representing the death of our old selves, the cross becomes God’s way of liberating each individual soul.  At the same time, the cross depicts the liberation and renewal of the whole creation.  Thus, through trusting in Jesus Christ people find deliverance from the consequences of their own sin as well as emancipation from the principalities and powers dominating the world.

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