Acts 2.1-21

John 20.19-23

Last week I found myself bombarded with science and chemistry jokes, the ones with clever use of chemical symbols in them. Like the one where a scientist goes into a bar and orders H 2 O, and his friend orders H2O too and drinks it and dies because H202 is hydrogen peroxide, there were other jokes in a similar vein, but the one which struck me most was the one about the half glass of water. A pessimist says the glass is half empty, the optimist says that the glass is half full, the chemist says that the glass is full, half with water, half with air.

So why do I think this joke is to do with Pentecost?

Pentecost is about many things, but one of the things it’s about is Jesus keeping his promise that God will be with us all wherever we are, whatever we are doing.

And sometimes we forget that, just as we forget that the other half of the glass is full of air.

The image of the spirit of God as breath or wind is so important to us, but we can start to take it for granted. We take all sorts of things like breathing and gravity for granted.

It is incredible (well not at all) that in most science fiction space ships that go wrong we accept that there will be a problem with the air supply, however difficulties in film budgets mean that almost never does the artificial gravity system fail as the air supply runs out.

Sometimes we forget that the image God wants to use of how close he is to us is the air that we breathe.

There is a classic episode of Father Ted, where Ted is trying to teach Dougal the difference between a small thing close, and a large thing far away. They are sitting in a caravan in a field somewhere and Ted has a little toy cow, he holds it up to Dougal, the classic idiot, and says this is small and close, and those, pointing to the cows in the distance, are far away, Dougal struggles to get it.

The challenge for us at Pentecost is about close and far away.

God is as close to us as the air we breathe, as close to us as the air we breathe.

That’s remarkably close. That air, which is the other half of the glass of water which we ignore, the air is taken into our bodies, and becomes us. It gives us what we need to sustain us. The oxygen we breathe in the air is so important biochemically, that we cannot sustain our bodies without it.

God is close to us, his spirit intertwined in us. Jesus came to show us what it would mean to be truly human, and truly God. The Spirit comes to bear this image of God into our souls and bodies, Jesus has reconciled us to God, and God’s spirit doesn’t only breathe on us, he breathes in us.

This is where I want us to think about an experiment, which if it is sunny outside you will be able to try. You need to look up into blue, blue sky and kind of try to unfocus your eyes. Then you will be able to see the Blue Field Entoptic Phenomenon. There will be little bright flashes, and perhaps some little dark shadows. What you see when you see these are actually the blood cells moving through the capillaries, the tiny blood vessels in your eyes. The little light flashes are white blood cells, the little darker shadows are clumps of red blood cells. You might have some floaters in your eye as well, they tend to be bigger and darker.

What happens when we look out to the blue sky is an amazing opportunity to think about God and the Holy Spirit.

God is closer to us than we can comprehend, the air that we breathe, his spirit is travelling through us like those white and red blood cells that we can see. And God’s Spirit, which was present at the beginning of creation is as far away as we can think about beyond the sky right to the edge of the universe and beyond.

God who created the universe inhabits us his creations. Inhabits us through love, closer to us than our blood, the essence of our life.

God is both close and far away, and sometimes we forget that, and take that for granted, but it is the most remarkable thing. The glass is not half empty, it contains water and the breath of God.