As we are looking for a frame within which to fit this week's tragedy, I submit to you a sermon by Rev. Dr. Charlie Dates from Chicago's Progressive Baptist Church. Thanks Dr. Darcel Brady for passing along this recommendation.
While the whole sermon is worth careful attention, I found one passage particularly powerful. My nine-year-old daughter and I typed out this passage, which starts at 49:50.
I can’t breathe.
What a striking thought. Given the unique intimate relationships that human beings carry with the one true God the concept of breath and breathing throughout the scripture is strikingly theological. As we come to Genesis chapter 2, verse 7 God breathes the breath of life to make of a lump clay a living soul. Genesis chapter 2 verse 7 is a clue for every searching heart, every wandering spirit who hears the words of Eric Garner; sees George Floyd trapped under the knee of state-sanctioned violence; who watches and reads the pitiful sentiments of a president sympathetic with oppression. Genesis chapter 2 verse 7 is a clue as to why the words, “I can’t breathe” are strikingly important. And why human life is so sacred.
Because we human beings do not have a borrowed dignity. We do not have a conjured or manufactured significance. No. We are not the inferior work of creation, or the subjects of human power. We are not a creation of our imagination. Nor are we the constructs of depraved imagination. We human beings are something else: something more wonderful, something more striking, Something more glorious. We are the works of Gods own hands. Think about that. Like a sculptor, God kneeled down, and he shaped us. He bent our curves and he shaped our nostrils, and he framed our throats, and he built our chests. He formed us. Like an engineer he designed us, and then refined us. And then he breathed into us so that we bear the fingerprint and the imprimatur and the signature of God himself. And if that wasn’t enough, the clue to our significance is the importance is seen in the distinction and the content of our physical composition. Yes, we are made of dust. Yes, we are made of clay. Yes, one day these bodies will lay back down in the ground. We are not just dust. We are not just clay, formed in complex and majestic patterns. Read closely a line about how we came to life.
As Adam’s body lay there lifeless in all of its glory and intricacy it still was lifeless until it was directly animated by its creator. Ca you see Adam laying there? Perfect in composition. Can you see Adam laying there wonderful in his own glory? And yet lifeless.
But there he goes! Here it comes! The wind of God is about to be blown into the nostrils of Adam. Can you see Adam, a lifeless malador corpse, as the wind of God comes inside of him, and he sits up! Turns his head. His eyes begin to blink. No birth canal. No incubation. No gestation. He rises to a living perpendicular. That’s why breath is a powerful thing. Now he starts breathing. His very existence--his every movement--is tied to the life that is put in him.And Moses put it this way: “He became a living soul.”
A house of clay became an independent breathing creature. Maybe that’s why when under the oppressive knee of another human being, the thought, or the declaration, “I can’t breathe” is such an emotionally and psychologically violent crime. Who are we, to stamp out that breath that only God can put in the body?
This is why, when I heard George Floyd eek out the words of his 46-year-old body in a forced whisper, “I can’t breathe” my mind went traveling beyond Eric Garner. It kept moving through the 1960s. It went past 1619. Skipped over the Protestant Reformation. It danced past the African church fathers. It went beyond the Apostle Paul and the Ephesian Church. It leapt over hundreds of years and of prophets and judges, until it landed in Genesis chapter 2.
When I watched another video, of another unarmed black man put to death by the sanctioned violence of officer Derek Chauvin, I considered the fact that such a cry as “I can’t breathe” is not merely anthropological, but it is theological. The problem with white supremacy: killing of black women and black women in America is an error of theology. It is a failure of the white mind and the white power structure to remember from where breath really comes.
