EASTER | BREATH | KNOWING
Sermon: “Mary…”
The vibration of our name, entrained in God’s own breath*
Alleluia! Christ is Risen! [The Lord is Risen Indeed, alleluia!]
Let’s take a breath together.
Let’s take another one.
The Breath of Life
How does that feel to you? How does it feel to draw and release breath? How does it feel when your richly oxygenated blood leaves the lungs, carrying fuel throughout your body to the very farthest capillaries? It feels like life. It feels like what we have felt since the very first breath we drew when we were born.
Breathing is so common and automatic throughout our lives that we forget about it most of the time. If we live to be 80, we will easily have breathed nearly 600 million times—that’s 600 million prayers over our lives.³ How is breath prayer?
In Hebrew, the name of God is a four-letter sequence Y-H-W-H, four consonants with the vowels missing between them. God first revealed the divine name to Moses at the burning bush. By Jewish tradition, no one is to speak that name, except during the temple periods, when the High Priest spoke it in the Holy of Holies on the Day of the Atonement, Yom Kippur. Even in modern Bibles, the word “Lord” is a substitution for the divine name or its equivalents everywhere you see it.
Christians generally pronounce the divine name as “Yahweh,” but many assert that it is best spoken as a breath… as the sound of breathing. When we draw breath in, it sounds like “Yah”, and when we exhale, it sounds like “Weh”… try it yourself… yah… weh… yah… weh…. Literally, the divine name of God is the very breath we take. Over a lifetime, we invoke that name maybe 600 million times. And if that is prayer, and I think it is, then we humans are in continuous prayer from the first breath we draw to the last exhale we release.
And notice, when humans breathe, it does not matter what their religious beliefs or practices are… it does not matter what their language is or what country they come from. It does not matter whether they are rich or poor. All of us invoke the divine name when we breathe. And we’re not the only ones either. All animals with lungs invoke the divine name. It may be that even trees and plants, wheat fields and vineyards, breathe in some way that pray the name of God. I wonder about rocks, glaciers, and continents. I wonder if the earth doesn’t breathe like this. I think that is pretty remarkable when you think about it.
yah… weh… yah… weh… If your prayer life consisted of pausing a couple of times a day to focus on your breath as the manifestation of God within you, you would have an incredibly rich prayer practice. You might not have to pray in any other way other than to be focused on the fullness of the Breath of God within you for a few minutes each day.
Breathing the Divine Name
Why am I so focused on breathing the divine name this morning? Well, when we left Jesus during the passion narrative on Good Friday, his last act of earthy existence was this, according to John; “When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit”. In other words, Jesus expelled his last breath and ceased to invoke the divine name. He died.
Sometime in the dark tomb on Easter morning, the first day of the week, Christ suddenly began to pray the divine name once again… YAH! Weh…. Once again, the Breath of God began to animate something in the universe. But this time, there was something new…. Something more fully human and more fully divine than there was in this body before. And it wasn’t exactly “this body” anymore, but something different. The resurrected Christ was now able to DO things that Jesus was never able to do; to cross the veil between heaven and Earth… to come and go where he willed. But at least ONE thing seems unchanged… a practice that we all share; “yah… weh… yah… weh…” the continuous prayer of the divine name.
Later that morning, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and got an unexpected shock heaped onto the shocks she had already endured since Friday. The stone in front of the tomb is removed, and Jesus’ body is gone. We might imagine that, for a moment, Mary stops breathing. She cannot believe what she sees… the tomb is open, and the body is gone. What does that mean? She doesn’t look any further. Instead, she runs. Can you feel her beating heart, ready to explode inside her? Can you feel her racing breath, burning in her lungs, as she runs straight for the other disciples?
Peter and the unnamed disciple sprint back to the tomb, with Mary not far behind. While they do what they do in the tomb, Mary’s breath recovers from the run, but now her lungs heave in great gulps of sorrow and grief as she stands weeping and powerless outside, streams of tears tracking down her cheeks. She seems to fight with God for air.
Grief cuts us…
I know what this is like… I have seen the husbands, wives, sons, and daughters of dying ones fighting with God for their breath as they try to talk about the one barely alive in the bed before them, whose last prayer is fast approaching. Their words come out in fits and starts… shaky voices, almost barely intelligible, as they try to regain control of their grief, and they can’t.
Grief hurts… it cuts us… we feel like our bodies are not our own anymore, and our breath won’t work. The grieving of a beloved one is a breath-prayer of profound loss. It breaks our hearts and our lungs. Many of you have felt this… all of you will. We like to think of Easter morning as a day of joy and gladness. And it is… but that’s not the whole story… joy is not the only emotion to wash over us on this day; Mary Madeline is certainly feeling broken during her Easter morning.
Mary is so broken that she looks inside the tomb after the men leave. She is completely unphased by two angels sitting where Jesus had been laid. “Woman, why are you weeping?” they ask. “Angels… for heaven’s sake… they never do quite get the whole human emotion thing.” Maybe with a little tinge of irritation, she answers them with as much breath control as she can muster, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Can it be any more obvious why I am crying?
Then, she feels the presence of someone behind her. I wonder what it was that caught her attention? A footfall? A rustling of cloth? A breath is taken? Yah… Weh…
The gardener… he’ll know where the body is. She is so task-oriented at this moment… and it’s the only way to be in her grief… focus on one thing: finding that body. He says, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” “Oh, good grief!” she must be thinking to herself. Exasperated and exhausted, she replies, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Just… HOW she is going to do that doesn’t even enter her mind. Jesus’ body must weigh 160 lbs at least. How would she take his heavy body away?
A new kind of prayer…
And then… a miracle happens, one of the most poignant and beautiful moments in the entire Bible. Jesus draws a new breath, Yah… but on the exhale, a different vibration comes out… a new kind of prayer… “Mary”…
Mary hears her own name resonate through her body… it echoes around the tomb like it was bounced off mountain cliffs… she hears her name like she is hearing it for the very first time. Like she is feeling the vibration of her name, entrained in the Breath of God, which is precisely what she does hear. It takes her breath away.
For a moment, she stands there, not daring to breathe… and she knows… she knows a thing that seems impossible to know. She saw him whipped… she saw him hanging… she saw the last prayer leave his body…, and she saw the blood on her hands as she helped to wrap his body… she knew what death looked like. And now, she sees him standing in front of her… alive… beautiful…unrecognizable… breathing… she hears him draw a breath and release it… she leaps into his arms.
She holds Jesus for a long while, weeping on his chest, releasing all her pain, all her suffering onto him… her tears wet the front of his shirt. It seems like she’s there forever, feeling the rise and fall of his chest under her cheek and listening to the sound of his breath while she rests on him. “yah… weh… yah… weh…”
The experience of “with”…
We have a word in English to describe what is going on between Mary and Jesus; “conspire”… to “breathe together.” And I think this really gets to the very heart of the Easter experience. Mary isn’t blaming anyone for what happened to Jesus… she’s not calling down God’s wrath to smite her enemies… she isn’t telling God that her enemies are God’s enemies… she isn’t dividing the world into “saved” and “unsaved.” Rather, she is resting her cheek on Jesus’ chest… breathing with him… loving his presence with her. And with is the whole experience. God with us. And nothing… nothing in all of the universe can separate us from the love of God. Not even death on a cross.
Think this through with me. On the cross, God is weak and powerless. The only thing he can do is to be with those around him while he hangs nailed there. Here… now… in this resurrected moment, God is weak and powerless also. The only thing he can do is be with Mary as she purges the tears of her grief and joy on his chest.
The God we worship is weak and powerless in this world. When God is with us… with our tears soaking his shirt… only then do we feel what Mary felt… only then do we experience the incredible, impossible depth of God’s love for us. And it is only then… when we have come to know God’s love like Mary has, that God moves us toward something else… stretching us toward more love… always toward love.
Let’s take a breath together.
Let’s take another one.
God breathes the vibration of our name into our heart space, entrained in God’s own breath, wrapped in the Holy One’s own love. When we quiet our minds and focus on our breathing, we can hear our name in our hearts as a prayer, like Mary did… like we’re hearing it for the first time. And hearing our name breathed like that… we know something… something impossible. We know that the Lord is risen indeed.
*This sermon was delivered at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Madison, CT, on Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024. Taken from John 20:1–18 (NRSV):
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes. But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
3. Themes for this sermon are derived in part from Rohr, R. (2021, November 27). The Breath — The Name of God. YouTube. https://youtu.be/hAvkORdXj_s?si=
If this resonated, there are more:
The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.
Top Writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, Refresh the Soul Weekly, and Episcopal Church.
