I Can’t Breathe!
He said it eleven times on his journey to death… “I can’t breathe!”
During the course of an arrest, Eric Garner was fatally placed in a chokehold by a New York City police officer. As his breath left his body, it is reported that he mustered, “I can’t breathe!” Finally, he lay motionless on the city sidewalk with no breath in him.
Ironically, Eric Garner was being arrested for selling loose cigarettes without proper authorization. And though he did not deserve to die for the “crime,” it is ironic that the product he sold chokes millions in its own right. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that approximately 480,000 Americans die each year from smoking related illnesses. With a life expectancy ten years shorter than non-smokers, those with an insurmountable tobacco addiction walk a long journey toward breathlessness. Aided in later years by oxygen tanks and tubes, their steps grow weary and when tobacco finally perfects its work, there is no breath in them.
Many communities, both Black and White and stricken by poverty, suffer disproportionately from asthma. More an allergic reaction than an independent disease, asthma constricts the bronchial tubes leaving sufferers short of breath, a feeling which has been described as breathing through a pillow. Stimulated by environmental factors producing allergic reaction, asthma works its restrictive magic in communities with little resources to stave off pollution, mold, rats and insects, toxic paints, and dust. Today, more than a few persons checked into emergency rooms, reporting to the nurse on duty, “I can’t breathe.” Some did not check out of the hospital because once again, there was no breath in them.
Stress exacerbates asthma by affecting the auto-immune system, reducing the body’s ability to ward of toxins and allergens, making its carrier more susceptible to an asthmatic attack. Stress is unbiased, physically impairing anyone lacking the capacity to be calm in fear evoking situations. Finance and family, illness and importunity, fear of the future, and problems with the past all subcontract stress in a uniformed effort to restrict life by constricting breathing. Panic and anxiety render victims short of breath as the brain responds with adrenalin, wearying the body to match the soul. Now choked by “the cares of this world” and unable to experience “life, and that more abundantly,” the stressed one dies a soul death and
…there is no breath in them.
Inmates in solitary confinement must remain in their cells for 23 out of 24 hours a day. The promise of one hour out of the cell to receive “fresh air” often degenerates into time in the day room, if anything. 23 hours of recirculated air, chilled to 50 degrees if air-conditioned, warmed and humidified to sweltering proportions if not, has led many to respiratory failures matching the pain of failing to engage in vital human contact and community validation. They lie on the floors of narrow cells in prisons across America with no breath in them.
As preachers, delivering messages about the breath of life, the question now becomes, “How do we preach to those who have little to no breath? How do we preach to the Eric Garners on the corner, the asthmatics in the hospital, the poor battling unhealthy environments, the stressed worried souls, the prisoners breathing recycled air and unrecycled hope?
This was Ezekiel’s dilemma, standing in the Valley of the Dry Bones, facing a congregation who, through his preaching, moved from a scattered, dry, skeletal existence to a position of organization structure. He stood watching those who had been “cut off” come together. He marveled at the seeming resurrection of his congregation in the place where he was led. They went from strewn about to standing erect, just as the Negro Spiritual says, “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, now hear the word of the Lord!” They had heard the word by his preaching, they stand erect, sinew and tissue covering their dryness, verticality replacing horizontality, connection ending separateness. Yet something was wrong; the task was incomplete…there was no breath in them.
God tells Ezekiel that the audience of his next sermon will not be the congregation. They have no breath in them. His next oration he directs to the Breath itself, the Wind, the Spirit, the Ruach awaits a Word to bring true activation for the congregation. When was the last time you preached to the Breath?
In a recent prayer time, God showed me that my preaching lacked Breath. My preaching lacked Breath because I had reduced the Bible to rational principles of good, rather than accepting it as a “God-Breathed Living Word.” The Bible had become part of my “tool-kit” as I ascended lectern after pulpit to provide guidance to God’s people on how to live. Like the manual in the glove compartment, the Bible had become informational and instructional. Principles of living to be gleaned overrode an encounter with the Living God. When I reduced the God-Breathed truth to a flat road map to desired behavior, instead of bringing life to those whose organizational reality was imitating life, the “Divine Breath” asthmatically crept through the narrowed windpipes of rationality, thus not fulfilling its abundant purpose and given a full inhale and exhale.
Truthfully, we preach to Eric Garner every week. His family sits with him, mourning the life choking which prophesies his death. We preach to asthma sufferers regularly, cursed by genetics, environment, and stress in a world that lacks the resources to comfort. Sadly, we seldom preach to prisoners, preferring to send eager volunteers into the makeshift pulpits of the local jail or nearby prison as we readily preach to their families, cut off by walls and wires, policies and bureaucracy, driving distance, and lack of money for collect calls from their sons, daughters, grandchildren, parent, siblings, friends, and community. They sit in the pews. They are organized, upright, and dressed in cloth sinews covering a “skeletal spirituality.” There is no breath in them, but they are candidates for life if they encounter the Divine Breath.
We preach to smokers every week. A habit formed in search of adulthood and acceptance which has become an addiction masquerading as relaxation, whereby they seek release and relief. They seek life. Deep down within, they know their slow suicide lives as a poor substitute for the “peace that passes all understanding.” They too need the Divine Breath to replace the smoke tinged air passing through increasingly diseased respiratory systems.
Each Sunday worshippers cry out in silence for healing, the access and quality of which is unfortunately currently embedded in their standing in the socio-economic system. The Divine Breath does not require Medicare, Medicaid, Blue Cross nor CIGNA, just a preacher who will “Prophecy to the wind and cry, ‘Breath upon these slain!’”
Though bumper sticker faith shouts “Too Blessed to be Stressed,” the adage adheres to a stressed out vehicle whose most recent paint job of prosperity theology fades under the hot sum of daily living. Recitations with televangelists fail to cover the dents and scratches, medicinal repairs prove mercurial, and spiritual engines leak the oil of life, leaving slick puddles of despair on driveways of the soul. The gasping worshipper opens their Bible seeking mechanical relief, missing its offering of a spirit rebuilt by the Divine Breath.
In a real sense, if we answer the question “How do we preach to them,” we run the risk of developing a formulaic response itself devoid of the Divine Breath. The answer lies not in a formula, but in an encounter with that Breath itself. Our encounter with that Breath as preachers gives freer passageway for the Breath to enter the places in congregants’ souls deprived of spiritual oxygen. We must face the Breath directly, in order to prophesy to the Wind…that it may breathe on them, and they become an “exceedingly great army.”
