Series: April 2026
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
“Breath of the Creator – Spirit Series”
Breath of the Creator – Spirit Series
Is God involved in the world? It’s a fundamental question, is it not? In search of a believable answer, some believers as well as those who simply aren’t ready to dispense with God entirely, turn to the watchmaker analogy. Coined by William Paley in 1802, it pictures God as the one who puts the parts of the universe together, sets it in motion, and then sits back and watches, no pun intended. The watchmaker analogy makes room for freewill and explains evil. It evolved out of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, influenced by figures such as Newton and Descartes. It was embraced by Deism, whose ranks included Edward Herbert, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine. Many of Thomas Jefferson’s convictions more closely align with Deism than Christianity. The Christianity of our forebearers is often overstated and misunderstood.
Apropos to what we’ve been talking about in here the past couple of months, Deism notably rejects the miraculous, God’s intervention. In our series on miracles, we left the matter open as to exactly what happened that gave birth to the accounts of miracles, but we didn’t deny the human experiences that led to their conception. The watchmaker analogy doesn’t adequately explain people’s experience of God, their sense of God’s presence, guidance, and even love, God’s activity. Indeed, the subtitle of biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson’s book on the miracles was God’s Presence and Power in Creation.
Today, we start a series on the Spirit, or Holy Spirit, which the tradition attests is indeed active in the world. It’s an appropriate series for this, the Easter season, the time between the Resurrection of the Lord Sunday and Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends on the gathered disciples in the wake of the resurrection. We mark it with the color red to signify Pentecost, recalling the tongues of flame that rested upon their heads empowering people to understand one another speaking in other languages. The Holy Spirit connects people deeply across boundaries. Remember, “We are one in the Spirit…”? Early Christians took this so seriously, the Book of Acts describes them as holding all material goods in common. The Spirit also connects the believers powerfully to God, who enables them to do signs and wonders, in other words to collaborate with God.
From now until Pentecost, we will explore how the Spirit is described in scripture so that we might become more conscious of it in our lives. We’ll try and answer why this matters, what it enables and unlocks for us. Today, Spirit as “Breath of the Creator.” You may recall that the word for spirit in Hebrew, ruach, is the same as wind or breath. In the first creation story, Genesis 1:1-2, God swoops down over creation in a wind and forms order out of chaos. Listen to what that wind, spirit, breath of God does in the second creation story…
Genesis 2:4b-7
In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground, 6 but a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground— 7 then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
First, “man” is a bit misleading of a translation, not grammatically, but descriptively. That first being seems to have no sexual designation or gender. The first human in the story may be the compliment of the sexes, only later divided into Adam and Eve, man and woman. Adam is a masculine word, but it just means “soil being”, “dirt one”, or “earthling” you could say.
God’s breath or spirit is what gives the first human life in this mythological account. As the scriptures say elsewhere, everything that breathes has life. Psalm 104:29-30, “…when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.”
In the Gospel of John, the risen Jesus appears to his disciples and what does he do? He breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” (John 20:22), which gives them a new and new kind of life.
It’s pretty clear, then, one way the Spirit acts is as a vessel of life come from heaven, pretty amazing. Amid all the vastness of space, at least of what we can presently see, we’re pretty much it. Wow. If there are others out there, double wow. Awe is also a sign of God’s presence by the way.
All life, even the kind that doesn’t breathe the way we do, is teeming with the Spirit of God. Last week, we went to visit some friends in Washington state and right now it’s the tulip festival. Fields upon fields are painted with colors from across the botanical palette. Standing in the midst of their brightness, you could feel your mood tangibly uplifted. It was heavenly, just as were the calming green of the surrounding fields. Maybe there’s evolutionary purpose for this energizing boost from color—though why would evolution be a case against God rather than a sign of God’s ongoing creativity? Maybe even that which isn’t alive by our measures is also teeming with God’s Spirit. Certainly, they evoke awe—canyons, mountains, stars. A rock can be as awesome as a flower.
The biblical accounts concur with what many of us would say, that we find God flowing through creation, on the move, and having an effect on us, even if we do not always catch it or correctly interpret it. People speak with confidence of there being a plan, of having a calling, of being accompanied. And, it’s not merely a neutral force to be harnessed. It has a character. Richard Rohr calls it benevolence, Matthew Fox describes it as compassionate. That’s how you can sense and distinguish it from other forces available or at work. Our ancestors called those “unclean spirits” or personified it as “Satan” which means the adversary. Being of faith is about learning to tap into one flow and turn off the other.
We saw an incredible example of what it can look like to step into the right kind of spirit recently in the excursion to the moon, the literal heavens. In Greek the word for heavens just means skies. This is in stark contrast to the excursion in Iran which is illustrative of a path to hell. Many, I know, were taken by the Artemis II mission to the moon. I wasn’t…at first. Been there, done that, right? Yet, as the mission got underway, I was drawn in. While packing for a trip to see friends and tulips, we livestreamed the moon pass on PBS. We thought we would see live video, but it was instead only audio of the astronauts describing what they say, testifying you might say. They needed to give description the cameras can’t quite yet capture. In addition, because of the times, these astronauts clearly felt license to include what all of they were experiencing made them feel.
When they came back to earth, there was a part of them clearly still in the heavens. I’d going to read to you a few comments from their press conference less than 24 hours later as they wrestled with making sense of it all. I encourage you to watch it. They didn’t speak so much of scientific discovery, nor of technical accomplishments, though those were clearly drivers of the mission. Instead, they tried to give voice to this other, ineffable thing they’d experienced. Moreover, in another sign they were connected to something deeper, their conclusions were not, “Look what we did, what I did, what set us apart.” No, it was “It means something to be connected.”
Reid Wiseman, Commander:
It’s a special thing to be a human and a special thing to be on planet earth.”
Belonging, to species and place…
Victor Glover, Pilot:
When this started on April 3rd, I wanted to thank God in public, and I want to thank God again, because even bigger than my challenge trying to describe what we went through, the gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did and being with who I was with, it's too big to just be in one body.
Gratitude, the beginning of faith. Too big for one body, that’s mysticism.
Mission Specialist Christina Koch recounted struggling to explain what a crew was before the mission, speaking only superficially. Upon her return she offered this definition:
A crew is people or a group that is in it all of the time no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable.
This is a description of community you could find in the gospels and the letters of Paul, grace and accountability. We’re living in a moment in which we’ve given up on both.
Koch continued:
A crew has the same cares and the same needs. And a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked.
“We are one body,” Paul said. Tell me, why is religion making so many arrogant, foolish, and disconnected, and science is making people humble, connected, and wise. Oh, how we have forgotten our mission.
In the final reflection, Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen offered three takeaways:
…you haven't heard us talk a lot about the science, the things we've learned, and that's because they're there and they're incredible, but it's the human experience that is extraordinary for us, and it sounds like maybe for you, too. And so, I think I’ll start with gratitude…
He offers his thanksgivings for the many who helped, from family to institutions to countries, and continues,
The next one is joy. We have a term in our crew that we coined a long time ago, the joy train. And I think you saw, sounds like you saw, a lot of joy up there. There was a lot of joy. We're not always on the joy train, this crew. There are many times we're not on the joy train, but we are committed to getting back on the joy train as soon as we can, and that is a useful life skill for any team trying to get something done.
The last one is love. What you saw was a group of people who loved contributing, having meaningful contribution, and extracting joy out of that, and what we've been hearing is that was something special for you to witness.” At this point, Hansen has invited them to stand arms around each other. “And the reason I had them form up here with me is because I would suggest to you that when you look up here, you're not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you, and if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.
We mirror one another and what good you see in me is in you. You might as well just say we each bear the image of God, which is what Genesis says later in the book.
This is what standing in the right spirit unleashes in us. I don’t know the religion of the astronauts, but I God this is what God is up to in the world. Our mission is to join up with it. Imagine if everyone operated in this space.
Finally, for those of you who watched the press conference, did you notice how they began it? By syncing their watches, which they said they did every time they needed to reset, reconnect. We have to develop practices that help us reset, get back in touch with the Holy Spirit, the One who flows through all things and is as close as our next and every breath.
Amen.