Pentecost, Year B | Acts 2:1-21
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
May 19, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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As we talked about last week with the Ascension, humans haven’t always looked at the world the way we do today. We know that modern science and its resulting technologies have rewritten our understanding of the universe, but they’ve remade parts of our lives so thoroughly that we can’t even remember things that were completely normal—even instinctual—for a majority of human existence.
Back in the 1990’s, someone reviewing documents from around 1700 found a strange comment in a child’s court testimony.[1] Their mom had left the house with some other people after “first sleep” and never returned.
Not familiar with “first sleep”? You aren’t alone! The modern world—at least those areas with access to electrical lighting—has pretty much forgotten about this formerly standard human activity. It turns out that without easy access to bright enough light, humans tend to sleep for a few hours in the evening, get up and resume activity for a couple hours during the night, and then go back to sleep for a few more before getting up in the morning. Even though societies around the planet functioned this way for most of history, with less than 150 years of access to lightbulbs, the modern world has completely forgotten about—and trained itself to ignore—this basic human practice.
But I’m pretty sure we’ve forgotten a good bit more in our day than just sleep habits.
If you look at either the Apostle’s Creed or the Nicene Creed, you’ll notice a brief section dedicated to God the Father, quite a longer portion detailing God the Son, and the shortest bit of all regarding God the Holy Spirit. The explanation I’ve heard for this disparity is that people were already familiar with the idea of a Creator God, so there wasn’t a need to say much apart from establishing the basics. Since there was significant controversy over Jesus as the Christ, it took a lot of detail and arguing to come to an agreement on exactly who and what he was. As for the Spirit, nobody has ever really known what to do or say about them—they’ve always been too wild and unpredictable to try to put into words. However, I’m starting to think that they didn’t explain much about the Holy Spirit because, like “first sleep,” it didn’t need further definition—everybody already understood exactly what it was.
In the modern world, we talk about ourselves in terms of body and soul or sometimes body, soul, and spirit. We don’t need to say much about bodies, apart from establishing the basics: the body is our physical aspect—the part of us that allows us to perceive and interact with three-dimensional space. But distinguishing soul and spirit isn’t easy. We think of the soul as sort of the real or inner “me.” It’s more or less the individual consciousness that inhabits the body, the self that humans have historically presumed persists beyond the body’s death. But for us that isn’t much different from spirit—which we might also describe as the part of the self that persists after death. We can play a lot of semantic games and come to different technical understandings of the terms, but for most us, the two are largely indistinguishable. Back in Jesus’ day, however, people would have recognized a clear difference.
In the ancient world, “spirit” was essentially the part of the self that animated the body. Although largely invisible, it was always present and moving: filling the lungs, allowing the limbs to move, infusing vitality throughout each living being. However, there was more to spirit than what we would consider to be “spiritual.” Spirit was a physical reality. It might not be easy to see, but it is completely tangible.
Hold up your hand in front of your face. Now blow on it. What you just felt pushing against your skin was precisely what the ancient world knew as “spirit”— breath or wind—essentially any sort of pressure exerted through air. On cold days, you might be able see your own spirit and the spirits of those around you. When someone sneezed people would offer blessings because, with the rush of air, they thought your spirit may have disconnected itself from your body. The blessing was a prayer to reunite and stabilize these composite parts.
The soul, then, was what came into being when the two parts combined—the individual conscious self made possible through the union of a body and its breath. A body without breath was simply a bag of meat and bones. A breath without a body had little or no way of interacting with or affecting the world. A body infused with breath created something far greater than either of the two parts could alone—a self-aware being capable of experiencing, interacting with, and altering physical reality.
Back in Genesis 2 we read about God forming a body out of dirt and then blowing in a spirit—breath—to create Adam, who only after this union is described as “a living soul.”[2] I have to wonder if that isn’t what we’re seeing reflected in the story of Pentecost. Jesus, the Bread of Heaven, was born into the Earthly Realm as God Incarnate. Over the course of his life, and as others joined the celebration of his Body and Blood, he formed a larger body from people scattered like dust throughout the land. After his first sleep, Jesus awoke to continue to prepare that body. With the Ascension, though, the apparent loss of its heart, that new body lay silent—continuing to exist in the physical world but without any sign of vitality or even the means to move from where Jesus had left it. Lying abandoned, as if in a grave, God once again came near “and breathed into [its] nostrils the Breath of Life,”[3] creating something entirely new within the inanimate form the body had been. Body and breath united, we the Church rose as something greater than either part ever could be alone: we became a New Creation, a living soul.
God gave God’s self two thousand years ago in Christ, and God continues to give God’s self today—God’s full self—not simply in us as separate individuals but among us as a whole—God’s soul present in the union of Body and Spirit. We gather today because we are one Body and Breath. We sing together and read together and pray together and eat together because we are one Body and Breath. We leave together and serve together and weep together and celebrate together—one Body and Breath. We are not a body left abandoned. We are not a spirit that cannot interact with or affect reality. We, the Church, are the Body of Christ infused with and animated by God’s own Breath. We have more in common than what joins us externally: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.”[4] We are, in fact, One Living Soul. This inherent unity is why we forgive one another, why we reject the divisions the world attempts to throw at us, why we choose to welcome all and offer God’s love to all. Jesus Christ may have ascended from our Realm, but God has not abandoned the Earth. God is still incarnate, and we—one Body and Breath—can remake the world.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep
[2] Genesis 2:7 | KJV | Capitalization mine.
[3] Ibid
[4] Ephesians 4:5 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.