University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Pentecost    May 31, 2009

            One morning last week I stopped by the Harris Teeter to pick up just one item while on my way to an appointment.  I was running a little behind schedule, so I dashed into the store, found the item and hurried on to the check-out.  There were lines at all the check-out counters, so I chose one of the self- check-out scanners.  I was in enough of a hurry that I didn’t even scan my VIC card…just scanned my first and only item and put it in the bag, as instructed.  After a moment the computer said again, “Please scan your first item and place it in the bag.”  “I did already,” I said to no one in particular, but then I noticed the purchase wasn’t showing on the screen, so I scanned it again.  Nothing.  I heard again, “Please scan your first item and place it in the bag.” So I scanned it again, and again… until at last the purchase showed up on the screen… six times.  It was at that point, I think, that I just let out an audible sigh… whereupon the woman who was overseeing the operation walked over and said, “That’s all right, honey. Just let it out. Just let it all out.”  Then she did something to clear the scanner; I started over, and this time it worked fine…and I was grateful…and mortified.

            I thought to myself on the way to my appointment that I had probably been sighing a lot that morning.  Audible sighs, I suspect.  I know a few things about sighs.  I once lived with a teenager I dubbed the “queen of sighs,” so dramatic were her deep breaths. Sighs can be overly histrionic at times. But at another level, sighs can simply be the body’s way of compensating for stress… its way of making us breathe deeply when we are so hard at it we forget to breathe.  Apparently, when we experience deep stress, we breathe very shallow breaths. And, so, our bodies compensate for the lack of oxygen by making us sigh. Our bodies force us to take a deep breath.[1]

            We sigh…when?  When the stressful pace gets to us.  When the last paper is finished, the last test taken, and graduation and the big next step loom before us.  When we sit at the hospital bedside with a loved one who is struggling so and we find ourselves unable to help.  When we sit before the headlines of the day and find weariness and a measure of despair creeping in. When the toll of life together makes us question the promises we made to one another.  In all such moments, our sighs may be our bodies’ way of forcing us to take a deep breath, but they may also express more about our interior lives than words alone can express. Many of our sighs, I believe, are prayers without words, prayers we breathe instead of say.

            So, I found myself this week weighing the claim of the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans that God helps us in our weakness, at the very point where we find ourselves breathless, and intercedes with sighs too deep for words.  It is a remarkable thing to say and, whatever it means exactly, a profound word of comfort and hope.  It is such because of the way it echoes and responds to Paul’s language a couple of verses earlier about the groaning of creation: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves….”

            The entire creation is groaning, says Paul, in labor pains... and then he connects that groaning with the groaning of the Spirit (in the Greek, groaning and sighing are the same word).  Anyone who has experienced labor pains knows that groaning is the better word choice.  The Lutheran pastor Heidi Neumark once said that when she was in labor, there were no sweet, little sighs coming out of her.[2]  Paul is not speaking of sweet sighs here either.  Biblical scholar N.T. Wright says:

The groaning of the church, in the midst of the groaning world, is sustained and even inspired by the groaning of the Spirit….Those who cannot see that for which they eagerly hope need assistance to peer into the darkness ahead and to pray God’s future into the present. It is that assistance that the Spirit provides….

The point Paul is making… is that the Spirit’s own very self intercedes within the Christian precisely at the point where he or she, faced with the ruin and misery of the world, finds that there are no words left to express in God’s presence the sense of futility and the longing for redemption. It is not (as some early scribes added to the text…) that the Spirit intercedes “for us;” that misses the point… What Paul is saying is that the Spirit, active within the innermost being of the Christian, is doing the very interceding the Christian longs to do, even though the only evidence that can be produced is inarticulate groanings.[3]

            The Spirit’s sighs and groaning thus collaborate with our own; in solidarity with us the Spirit voices our own deep longings for redemption, encompassing both the painful reality of the present and the hopeful future that lies beyond that reality. Our own Paul Meyer says that the gift of the Spirit confirms just such a gap between present reality and our future hope, but at the same time grounds our hope in confidence.[4] 

            That gap didn’t begin with us; it was clearly part of the experience of the first disciples, too.  Anna’s friend Shannon Kershner, a pastor in Texas, got me thinking about ways the Spirit took up the sighs and groaning of the disciples, too, as they eyed the gap between what they all saw and what they yet hoped for – feeling something less than confidence as that day of Pentecost arrived so long ago.

By this point in their journey, the disciples were probably quite breathless themselves. Remember all that has happened in the last 50 days for them. Jesus' goodbye. His arrest and crucifixion - an event itself accompanied by loud sighs and long wails of grief. But, then, his resurrection and continued ministry with them. Their shallow, grief-laden breathing must have become full and robust again as Jesus resumed teaching them about the kingdom of God.

And, yet, just as the disciples caught their breath, Jesus did as he said he would - he left. He was taken out of their sight and returned to the One from whom he came. It must have been heart-wrenching. The wind was simply knocked out of them [again]. I bet they sighed loudly with stress and fear, the web of chaos winding around their throats.

And so the disciples did what all church people do in times of fear and chaos - they had a meeting. They busily began to try and get their game plan together. There was so much to do. They needed to get organized. They needed to choose more apostles to help them with all the work Jesus had left in their trembling hands. After all, they were now supposed to tell other people about what God had done in Jesus. It was a daunting mission. Loud sighing must have filled the room and you know anxious looks etched their faces. They could not believe they were now the ones in charge of continuing Jesus' ministry to the outcast, to the poor, to the powerful, to the sick - all without his physical presence. It was enough to make them scared and breathless.

But before the disciples knew what was happening, out of the blue, they heard a mighty wind heading their way. The wind blew through the entire house, filling each of them with a breath that came from somewhere else, Someone Else. The wind, the breath, filled them with a power they did not understand. They had not asked for this breath nor expected it. This power, this breath, this courage just swooped into the room and filled them up in a way they could have never predicted. And with it, they discovered a reserve of strength they did not know they possessed. They came face to face, lung to lung, with the gift of God's Holy Spirit, God's holy breath.[5]

            “The Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words,” says the apostle. That holy breath makes it clear, as David Bartlett says, that our prayers to God really begin with God and end with God… which ties to a larger truth in Romans: that our lives begin with God and end with God.[6]  God’s holy breath, which we have known in more subtle ways, perhaps, was experienced dramatically on that Pentecost in Jerusalem.

            That first wave of apostles felt directly a great “reserve of strength”, which was then amplified and compounded by the inspired energy of the community, which is to say it became a combined strength in those days, as it is today.  Heidi Neumark, whose experience with the groans of childbirth I mentioned earlier, remembers something else about that experience. 

I remember the importance of my husband’s hands during my … two labors.  I held on tightly the entire time.  I recall my horror when a nurse suggested that, after about ten hours of labor, it might be good for Gregorio to get himself a cup of coffee.  Good?  Was she insane?  It was terrible to release his hand for even a moment.  By the end, his hand was colored with slight bruises as evidence of my grip and his steadfast love entwined with mine . . .

In a larger sense, of course, the same is true for most any important labor…for any act of love in this groaning world. Indeed, as Neumark says, the labor required for us to be Christ’s ambassadors of healing and wholeness in this world requires “the steadfast grasp of many hands willing to stretch out, touch, and bear the bruises of struggle.  It is hard work.  The contractions that enlarge our hearts and minds and stretch open our systems and structures for new life produce groaning and pain….  Yet, says Paul, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”[7]

            It is confidence and hope in that glory and in the redemption of our own lives and of God’s creation that keeps Christ’s church moving forward.  The ground of such confidence and hope is the gift of the Holy Spirit, the transforming power from God that enables us to see new life coming to birth where others see only disaster and decay… that enables us to see resurrection where others see only the triumph of darkness and death.[8]

            A friend and colleague of mine suggests that in light of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and Paul’s testimony of the Spirit’s solidarity with us, maybe this Pentecost it would be best to leave all the tongues-of-fire banners, all the red balloons and pinwheels in the storage closet… that as odd as it seems, maybe the better thing to do this year might be to pull the advent wreath out of the closet and light once again the candle of hope.

Paul makes no mention of Pentecost… or Advent, for that matter… but Paul does make it clear that the community created by God’s Spirit is an advent community.  We are defined by what is yet to be, [by] a hope for that which is unseen.[9]

            Of course, in this wrinkle of time between now and then, along with the whole creation we still groan… we still sigh… we still ache for the day of wholeness and peace and redemption.  We struggle toward that day.  But we are not alone.  We are not alone. For as the apostle says,

the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.