Breath and Fire: Pentecost 2020
#GeorgeFloyd
#AhmaudArbury
#BreonnaTaylor
Pentecost: When the spirit and breath of God showed up and rested as flames upon the heads of the disciples worshipping in the temple. It’s a story we read every year and it’s a story about diversity, tongues, fire, and breath.
This year Pentecost is hitting me in a way that it never has before.
As a white guy, I don’t know what it feels like, or what it could feel like to have the breath of life choked out of me because of the color of my skin. When I protest, and when I have celebrated in ways that would seem riot-like (Burning stuff after Duke won the national championship in 2010 in Durham, NC), I was not afraid that tear gas would choke me, rendering me breathless. If I go running outside, I don’t get scared that my presence is unwanted and that I might be followed by racist white dudes in a truck and shot dead. I will never know these fears.
What I do know is that I am privileged, and I must speak up and out in a way that might make some people uncomfortable. However, the Holy Spirit did not come to us to make us comfortable, but the spirit came to bring life anew, to shake things up, to move from what has been to what could and should be!
The same breath that God poured out over creation, and the same breath that the followers of Jesus felt on Pentecost, is the same breath that was choked out of George Floyd. It is and was the same breath that was extinguished when Ahmaud Arbury and Breonna Taylor were shot to death. It is the breath that continues to be snuffed out every time a person of color is shot to death, lynched, choked to death, and killed by those who are threatened by the very presence of blackness and brownness.
This same breath of God is the breath that was choked out of the protesters when they we were tear gassed and provoked by the police in Columbus, Minneapolis, Atlanta.
The fires that were started, whether right or wrong, are the fires of a people who have long been told to be peaceful, only to see black and brown person after black and brown person put to death for doing things like running, going to the store, carrying skittles and a tea.
Martin Luther King Jr said it best in a speech in 1967,
“Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
A speech that was given 53 years ago at Stanford still speaks loudly today.
The Fires of Pentecost are the same fires that are trying to decimate structures of white supremacy. You can’t have fire without breath. Breath and Fire. They are linked.
In Pentecost, God showed up in a new and radical way by doing something new. By showing that difference is not only okay, but it is to be celebrated not feared. The problem with many of us Christians is that we seem to think Pentecost should make us colorblind and turn us all into one great people; or that Pentecost means we should celebrate diversity. The problem is, colorblindness and diversity through the lens of white Christianity is still white supremacy. Racial reconciliation, when instigated by white people, for white people to feel better about themselves, is still white supremacy.
The Holy Spirit did not come in Pentecost to uphold our structures that pit whiteness against blackness. Or to say, “We have it right, you have it wrong.” The Holy Spirit did not show up at Pentecost to make the Jewish Christians feel comfortable, or the Gentile Christians to feel comfortable. The Holy Spirit did not show up at Pentecost to say, hey, you can hear all these cool new languages! NO! The Holy Spirit showed up to point towards a GOD whose breath is for everyone, but especially for the marginalized, the left out, the unheard, the down trodden, the exiled. the lynched.
If the Holy Spirit is part of the Trinity and God’s self-revelation, then we can look at Jesus as a part of the Spirit of God breathed into life form. Jesus: A brown outsider, who was from an occupied place that was not his own, who was seen as a dirty Nazarene from that dirty shithole called Nazareth, who broke the rules, who got mad and rioted in the temple, and who himself was lynched unjustly by the status quo.
If we want to follow Jesus, we need to know who we are following and why. You can’t divorce the Spirit of God from Jesus, they are wrapped up together.
We too often want to hold on to God’s spirit as our own, personal reward, and that is sinful.
The Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, showed up to help the early Christians know how best to live like Christ, and how best to be like Christ.
Maybe the fires of Minneapolis, Columbus, and Atlanta are the new fires of Pentecost awakening us to a new reality where the status quo and the structures of white supremacy are burning to the ground and being torn down so that justice and the reign of God is no longer a myth that we long for, but a reality that we live in to. When God showed up at Pentecost, it was not proper or domestic. It was not Tame. It was riotous!
Mary Pezzulo, a catholic activist it much better than I can.
“The Holy Spirit is not a domestic bird. The Holy Spirit does not belong to us. The Holy Ghost is not the Spirit of the United States of America, or of Europe, or of this or that jurisdiction, this or that battle, this or that war. The Holy Ghost is the Spirit of God. God stands eternally with the oppressed, against their oppressors. The oppressors can appropriate God all they want, but God does not change. God remains the God of Justice who became incarnate as a Victim of their violence.”
Thanks be to God that God does not change and that God remains the God of Justice who became incarnate as Jesus, the liberator, the bringer of the spirit, the rioter in the temple, the rebel rouser, the brown, Palestinian jew from occupied Nazareth.
This Pentecost, if I have learned anything, it is that the Spirit of God rests more in the fires of the unheard, than the self-righteousness of white Christians proclaiming Peace, when there is no Peace.
In the Name of God the Creator, Christ the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit, our Sustainer, the breath of life, the fire of heaven, Amen.
