Just Breathe

Genesis 1:26-31

Do you know how to breathe?

Take a deep breath in, fill your lungs, let your chest expand. Exhale slowly.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Breathe in, breathe out.

We all learned to breathe very quickly.

With our first cry as a baby our lungs expanded with air and we breathed, we lived, and we have been breathing ever since. 99.99999 percent of the time we don’t even think about it. We just breathe.

But do we breathe well?

We might often take short, shallow breaths instead of good deep breaths.

The American Lung Association teaches that: “Proper breathing starts in the nose and then moves to the stomach as your diaphragm contracts, the belly expands and your lungs fill with air. “It is the most efficient way to breathe, as it pulls down on the lungs, creating negative pressure in the chest, resulting in air flowing into your lungs.”

Obviously, breath is essential to life.

But for people of faith, to breathe is not just a biological statement describing how air flows through the body; it is a theological statement of the movement of God’s Spirit with us.

The first sentence of the Bible says: the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 

In the Bible, the word for wind, breath, spirit are all the same. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word is ruach; in the New Testament the Greek word is pneuma. These words mean that God’s breath, God’s Spirit is the very thing that gives us life.

In Genesis, Chapter 2, it says: 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.

God could’ve just sent a wind to fill Adam’s nostrils. God could’ve spanked Adam to life like a doctor to a baby. But God does something much more intimate. God forms ha’adam from the dust of the ground and then personally breathes in to his nostrils the breath of life.

In the book of Exodus, it is the ruach, the breath of God that separates the waters of the Red Sea leading people from slavery toward freedom. Job says it is the ruach, the breath of life, that gives him life.

In a few weeks we will celebrated Pentecost when a rush of wind, the pneuma, the breath of God, gives birth to the church.

The air we breath, the breath we take, is the work of God, is the spirit of God. We are sacred, divine beings that reflect the glory of God. Every time we breathe, we breathe the breath of life. We are sustained by God. Each breath is from God and a gift of God.

In the book of Ecclesiastes it says that when we die “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.”

The air we breathe is a sacred gift and in the scripture that was just read for us, we are responsible for taking care of all that God made.

For the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, and everything on the earth. God made this beautiful and complex and diverse creation. And then God does the most amazing thing of all and says—it is your responsibility now.

Nurture it, make it grow, make it multiply, bring it to life. Just as I have breathed life in to you, plant, grow, flourish, breathe life in to what I have given you.

Our first job is to be responsible for all creation. So how are we doing? Not well.

God said you are responsible for the fish in the sea, but we have filled the sea with poison and killed the fish.

God said you are responsible for everything on the land, and we have stripped and fracked and dumped on the land until all the nutrients have been robbed from the soil.

God said you are responsible for the birds of the air and we have pumped the air and we have filled the air with smoke and soot and particles until we have gotten to the point where we can’t breathe.

We have polluted the very breath of God, the air we breathe.

And we are in one of the worst places in the country and the world for air quality.

In 2023, Columbus was ranked as the worst big city in the United States for air quality. In a survey of the 100 worst cities in the world for air quality, 99 of the cities were in Asia and Columbus, Ohio.

To be fair, some of this is because of the smoke that settled here last year from the Canadian wildfires.

But the South Side of Columbus in particular has historically bad air quality. This community is surrounded by highways, has been where factories are placed, and the tree cover east of parsons is shockingly less than the tree cover west of parsons avenue.

Rates of respiratory disease on the South Side of Columbus are 73 percent higher than the rest of Franklin County.

This is the area we breathe.

Instead of caring for God’s creation, we have contaminated the very breath of God.

Now, it would be easy to say, it wasn’t me. Wasn’t me.

We didn’t choose to have highways divide our neighborhoods.

We didn’t put the factories here.

We didn’t cut the trees down.

And all of that is accurate. Things have been to us that are not just or fair.

But this is our community. God has given it to us. Throughout this month I will be preaching about hearing God’s call for us to care for what God has given us. And so part of what we have to do is take the power back.

To say this is our neighborhood.

We have done it before and we can do it again.

Ten years ago we began our First Birthday program that has grown in to Thrive to Five. People woke up one day to the historical fact that low income families of color experience infant mortality rates similar to people in developing nations. And we said, that ain’t right. Every mother deserves to celebrate the first birthday of their child. The survival of a baby should not be dependent on race, class, and zip code.

In the last 10 years we have celebrated the first birthdays of over 1,000 babies in our community—and of all the families we have accompanied none have had a baby die before day 365.

We have proven we can do this.

We have shared healthy food, we have built safe, affordable housing figuring it out as we stumbled through it.

If we can do all those things, there is no reason we can’t take care of what God has given us.

We can’t depend on someone else to come and clean the air we breathe, it has to start with us.

God gave us this little corner of creation and is our responsibility to clean it up and make it right.

Andy isn’t going to come walk with us and do it for us, it is on us.

What can we do? I am glad you asked.

There is a list of things we can do to clean our air in the bulletin:

1. Eat plant based foods; Reduce consumption of red meat
2. Use house plants like the Snake plant to clean indoor air
3. Compost both vegetable and fruit scraps as well as cooked food waste (at the drop-off sites in the city (https://www.columbus.gov/foodwaste or schedule free home pickup at https://www.thecompostexchange.com/
4. Bike: see Bikes for All People. Earn bike opportunities: work for 10 hours and get $100 credit on a bike. https://www.bikes4allpeople.com/
5. Use public transportation or walk when possible
6. Plant a tree (signup to get a tree on April 28)
7. Grow your own food at community gardens

When we make choices to clean the air around us, we make room for the very breath of God to move in us, through us, amongst us.

When we choke the air with smoke, we smother the very breath of God. God gasps like Eric Garner or George Floyd saying, I can’t breathe.

We are the one’s responsible. We are called to go and share the good news. It is God who gives us the breath of life so that we can go and breathe love in to the world.