Sermon preached by Rev. Emily Tanis-Likkel,

Eagle Harbor Church,        March 30, 2008

John 20:19-31

Doors and Breath

            It was already dark, but the group of us who had gathered in that room had lost our sense of time, we had been collectively reeling over their emotions over the death of Jesus.  We felt very unsettled from Mary's insistence that she had seen Jesus alive.  What were we to make of that?  Had she seen a ghost, or had her grief made her hysterical? My eyes kept glancing over to the lock on the door – still secure, safe so far. My imagination went wild with stories of the authorities coming in and killing us all.  Even if we weren't killed, surely we would be thrown out of the Synagogue if we were discovered as Jesus' disciples.  I sighed, and my voice trembled from all the tears I had wept.  I had felt helpless when Jesus was tortured and killed, and felt helpless there in that room, but what else was I to do?  I wanted to hunker down and stay in that stale dank room forever.  This time, though, when I looked over at the door, I saw him.  I saw Jesus.  He came and stood among us and said, “Peace be with you,” as if he had never left. My heart leaped into my throat.  Could it be?  Could it really be him?  He showed us his hands and his side. Lord!  We cried. He said to us again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” He walked up to each one of us, and got close enough that we could feel his breath.   “Receive the Holy Spirit. Practice forgiveness.”  I felt Jesus' breath become one with my breath.  I knew in that moment that my life would be forever changed.   Yet, still it didn't completely sink in, and after he left we all began talking one another out of believing what we had just witnessed.   We occasionally toyed with venturing out of the room, but it wasn't until a week later when Jesus reappeared among us that we really got it. 

            After re-reading and re-imagining this story in the book of John, I was drawn to the images of Jesus passing through a door, and of him breathing on the people.   The first image emphasizes the divinity of Jesus – he is not confined to the same laws of science as the rest of us.  He didn't need to be let into a room, because he could permeate doors.  The second image, that of breath, emphasizes his humanity, that his resurrected body was there in that room.  He was not a figment of their imaginations, but was a living, breathing, human being.  Jesus knocked down the door of fear, entered in, bringing peace to a group of unrested souls, breathing the Spirit of God on them, empowering them to follow where God was leading.  Doors and breath.

            With this whirling around in my head, a memoir called to me from my shelf because of it's title: Breathing Space.  I had never cracked it open before last week, having picked it up on a whim at a library book sale recently.  When I turned to the Table of Contents I discovered that it was a book not only about breath, but also about doors. 

            Breathing Space is a memoir by Rev. Heidi Neumark, a Lutheran Pastor who served a church in the South Bronx for nineteen years.   It's hard to find breathing space in the Bronx.  Folks in this area suffer extreme poverty because low-income people were pushed out of Manhattan in the 50s in order to erect middle-class housing.  Hundreds of thousands of people pushed out of their homes, and the poorest of the poor became refugees in the Bronx.  The ensuing overpopulation problems such as violence, prostitution, and drugs were tackled by planned shrinkage, which was the cutting back of hospitals, schools, police and other basic services.  The Bronx also bears the burden of environmental racism, with the majority of New York City's sewage and hospital waste processed in it's backyard.  The pollution renders children in the Bronx as having the highest rate of asthma in the nation, with approximately 20% of kids having the condition. It's hard to breathe – literally.  By the 60s, Transfiguration Lutheran Church, a Hispanic congregation that had once been a vibrant part of the community, had retreated behind locked doors.  Doors were only unlocked momentarily on Sunday mornings to let in the dwindling congregation, and then were quickly re-locked at the beginning of the service, b/c no visitors were expected – or even wanted.  They were afraid of the outside world, of what their neighborhood had become, of what they themselves had become.  I think they were afraid too, about to what God might be calling them.  They had been through a long string of pastors who did not stay, and most of their members had left.  When pastor Neumark began her first call in her twenties at  Transfiguration, she discovered a deep poverty of spirit inside those doors.  She describes her first day on the job, “As I got ready to lead worship for the first time, I noted that under the altar, a box of rat poison was set alongside a box of Communion wafers.  The baptismal font was pushed into a back corner and kept covered.  I lifted the lid to discover a film of dust and the remains of a few dead cockroaches.”   She wondered if she had come just to hold them while they died.

            The congregation had locked themselves away from the rest of the community, and were well on their way to locking their doors for good.  Maybe they felt like those disciples huddled in that Jerusalem room in fear, checking the locks and shrinking in grief.  Locking the door was extremely rare in New Testament times.  It just wasn't done.  It was not a casual fear that caused them to lock the door that first Easter evening.  One scholar notes that they were not only locking the world out, but locking themselves in. Mary Magdelene had told them that morning that she had seen Jesus – and they had not believed her – but still they may have been hiding from God, they may have been ashamed at the remote possibility of coming face to face with the resurrected Christ.  Peter was dealing with the anguish of having denied him.  And at the arrest – no one was innocent.  They all were guilty of fleeing the scene.  As the rat poison and cockroach carcasses gave Neumark a clue that the life had been sucked out of Transfiguration, the life was being sucked out of the room in which the disciples gathered.  Locked up tight, that room would have been smelly and stale.  It wasn't only food and body odor that made for an unpleasant environment - but fear, doubt, mistrust and shame were hanging in the air, and those disciples desperately needed new life blown in.  It's hard to let in new life with the doors locked, but Jesus comes just the same, invited or not.

            The first item on Neumark's to-do list never changed:  re-paint doors.  Every day she painted over obscene grafitti that covered the locked entrance, only to have it defaced by the next morning.  Then one day she decided to take a different tack.  She invited youth from the community to paint the doors.  They painted scenes from the Bible, and scenes of new life and vitality.  Once they painted murals on the doors, the grafitti stopped. People slowed down to look. “Even when closed, the doors now shouted a new word of openness.”   Many stopped and asked about the church.  Then began coming to worship.  Neumark knew that it was time to stop struggling for air, it was time to open the church doors, get out and meet the neighbors.  She went door to door in the Housing Projects, assessing needs and learning a lot.  The church's membership climbed,  they enfolded many African-Americans in the congregation, and added an English-speaking service.  They exchanged peace with their neighbors, and met their struggle for air with a life-giving witness, in the form of a food pantry, an HIV/AIDS ministry, and showing up to love when it mattered most.  Jesus instructed the disciples to open the door, get out, and meet the neighbors.  They were to come out of hiding to spread Jesus' message of peace, and the forgiveness that comes from God.  Resurrection beckoned the disciples to listen to God's call in their lives, a call to new life.

            You may you know what is like to gasp for breath.  If you have experienced an anxiety attack, asthma, or a serious illness, you have had breathing that is so shallow that it scares you.  You may have had asthma of the soul, a constriction that keeps you from being what God intended for you.   Sometimes, in life, we find ourselves hiding out.   One scholar wrote, “We talk about having 'skeletons in the closet.' All of us have closets also in our hearts, little chambers into which we toss the shameful things we've done and the shameful things we think we are that make us unworthy individuals. We toss them all in the closet and lock the door so that what people can see is just the neat and tidy and orderly living rooms of our lives. But ever the . . .  fear is with us that someone might inadvertently open the wrong door, and out our shame will tumble for all to see.”   When we forget about the forgiving life,  shame is allowed a strong-hold.  “Shame on you” can have powerful and devastating effects.  I cringe when I hear someone say this to another human being, beloved of God, even if it is said in jest.  I think we have shame enough.  Let us live a forgiving life.  Let us be for-giving.  As we curl up into our fear, let us glance at the door, and discover that Jesus has been here all along.  God knows us completely, and breathes the sustaining Spirit on us.  Emily Dickinson wrote, “Nature and God—I neither knew—Yet Both so well knew me—They startled, like Executors of My identity.” 

            The breath of God is that which empowers us for ministry.  The mark of that ministry is forgiveness.  It is to bear witness to the love God bestows, and the forgiveness and new life that is given. Forgiveness is like a knot that has been loosened.  Unwanted knots cause problems, and can be hard to get out.  Whether a tangled rope, or a delicate necklace chain, it may seem like a hopeless cause, and then suddenly it is smooth again, restored.   Or realizing that our shoulders are tensed up to our ears, and letting them drop.  Or feeling our knotted up muscles relax with a nice massage.  Loosening a tough knot often is accompanied by a relieved sigh.  Forgiveness is like that.  Lewis Smedes wrote, "When you forgive you set a prisoner free. And then you discover that the prisoner was you." Forgiveness is about giving – it is wanting the one who has wounded us to be well, seeing them as a beloved child of God.  The renewing and vital life in God's Spirit gives us what we need to live the forgiving life.  The breath of God, intimate and holy, infuses us with peace for this kind of life.  Jesus had to get close to breathe on the disciples.  Imagine what it feels like, sounds like, and smells like, when someone you love leans over and whispers in your ear, when a child or lover embraces you and you can feel their warm breath.  Breath is life.  Heidi Neumark commented on the story of Jesus appearing to the disciples, “It was breath that set them free to open breathing space for others.”   This Greek word,“Breathe on” is the same meaning as the word used for God created humanity – breathing on Adam.  It is life-giving breath.

            Ancient mystic Hildegard of Bingen wrote, “Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God.”  God bears us along.  God's presence with us, God's communion with us, gives us the grace we need to open the door.

            Neumark tells this story: At the sixth floor, I knocked on Ruby's door.  I could hear her movements inside, and then there was some tense silence as a shadow passed over the peephole.  I knew she was considering whether or not to open that door, her door.  Then locks clicked open as ruby made her decision and invited me inside . . .It was dark in the windowless living room, since her electricity had been cut off, but it was not so dark that Ruby and I couldn't see the accumulated garbage; old cartons of Chinese takeout on top of the silent TV, paper plates crusted iwht dried macaroni and cheese, soda-streaked glasses, Styrofoam boxes heaped with old chicken bones, cigarette butts, and balled up napkins.  A small kitten busied herself by pouncing on roaches while a rat, easily twice her size, scuttled along one wall and disappeared in the back of the couch. . . I knew that I would never, ever have had the courage to open that door.  Ruby did.  It was bold courage, not sloth that stood up and welcomed me.  She pushed aside a pile of clothes on her sofa to make room for me to sit, and after another moment of decision, Ruby opened one more door.  Out spilled the story of her depression, her battle with crack, her ex-husband's abuse, her mother's rejection, and worries over her daughter . . . and her recent HIV positive test results . . . Then Ruby, ever courageous, took my hands and pulled me through the final door, way past the locks, the mess, the rats and the rags, into her pure cry for mercy . . . her prayer—rare and radiant in the dingy shadows of the room—Lord, have mercy . . . mercy . . . mercy!” 

            Neumark never knew what became of Ruby, having returned sometime later to find her apartment boarded up.   But it demonstrated the power of opening our doors and bearing our souls to one another and to God.  You don't have to go to the Bronx to find people locked away in shame.  Antidote?  Letting God breathe God's Spirit on us. Let God blow away shame.  God sees us as worthy.  We are to see God, others and ourselves as worthy, as beloved.  At times we may feel filled with muck with no space to breathe.  Overwhelmed, knotted up.  Huddled together in fear. When you find yourself imprisoned by fear, choking on the stagnant air, open the door of your heart and breathe in the breath of God, the spirit of peace.   We can imagine Jesus coming to us--close enough that we can feel his breath.  Hearing him speak to us: “Receive the Holy Spirit.  Be at peace.  Bear witness to God's forgiveness, forgiving one another and yourselves.”

      Heidi B. Neumark.  Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

      p. 9-10.

      p. 11.

      http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/thisWeek/index.php

            39.