Pentecost (June 8, 2025)
“…he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” (John 20:24b)
“Jesus breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit…’” Today we celebrate Jesus’ parting gift, the Holy Spirit, the Breath of God. With this Breath we are truly alive with the life of God present in us. As Jesus completed the mission that the Father gave him, he commended us to take up that mission in our own lives and we do this through the Spirit. It is not a mission separate from our own uniqueness but in that very uniqueness to bring Jesus to our personal worlds.
It is the Holy Spirit as Breath of whom I would like to speak today. Without breath, in and out, moment to moment, we would soon cease to live. In today’s gospel, Jesus bestows the Holy Spirit upon his disciples by breathing on them and telling them to receive the Holy Spirit. The Spirit entered them as breath and became their life-force. There are many ways to describe what breath means so I will look at only one and that is breath as the tender unfolder of life and growth.
Just recently I plucked a special iris bud that I had been nurturing to bring it inside and spare it the destiny of being a deer’s desert. It was the first time this plant had sent up a bud to flower and I was eagerly longing to see it. At first the bud was tight and by the suns’ rays it was beginning to reveal just a little of its color, but it needed more. Next day it was the same and I knew it was time to encourage it to unfurl so I bent down and surrounded it with the warmth of my breath. I did that a few times and the next day I noticed it was responding. It began to unfurl one petal. In two days, it manifested its full beauty. Breath had warmed it into the beautiful creation God meant it to be.
In our own lives the Spirit hovers over each of us and in the warmth of its life-giving love, unfurls us, petal by petal, to become the person God created us to be. We can trustingly yield our being to the Breath of God and know that we are held gently yet powerfully in a love that surpasses all we can ever imagine. On this Pentecost Sunday, may the Spirit bring to fulness of life in us all that we are destined to become.