Pentecost 2020

I have lost count of the number of times Pentecost has followed right on the heels of a severe Central Texas storm. Late May and early June are a ripe time here for this kind of weather—torrential rain, flooding, tornadoes, hail, and wind. Just this week, my roof and both my cars got beat up by hail, my numerous live oaks lost what seems to be half their volume, and my daughter and I huddled in our dark house as the most powerful wind I can remember tore across our patio and yard.

Ten years ago, I experienced a storm just like this, at this same time of the year. I was preparing for a new ministry role and scared to death, convinced that the jig was up, and I would finally be revealed as an imposter. Late Saturday afternoon before Pentecost, I drove over an hour through a blinding storm to see a parishioner in the hospital. Once I arrived, I thought I had survived the worst. But all the way home, lightning fired through the sky every few seconds, making the night seem as day, for miles and miles. I hoped that what I’d learned as a kid—that my car’s rubber tires would protect me from electrocution—was really true.

I pulled over not far from home at a high spot that normally boasts a spectacular view. I had come to trust that I wouldn’t die on this trip after all, and I began to feel like perhaps the storm was a sign that God and I were headed off on an exciting adventure. I imagined that it might be a big show, but that I would be safe, tucked into the front seat, held by a divine seatbelt. I felt grateful and secure.

I resumed my drive, and when I rounded the final corner for home, what I saw made me catch my breath. Covering the whole road was a thick carpet of brilliant green. Inches deep, the green had been ripped out of the trees that lined the road. I was used to self-pruning live oaks, with wind routinely bringing down dead branches. I was used to raking and sweeping and composting the copious dead leaves that fell from these trees. But this was different. This was fresh, green, living parts of trees, torn and shredded, littering the ground. I remember feeling shocked and saddened—of course this was natural, too, but the sight shook me. Because what I heard in my heart as I turned that corner was that the adventure before me was neither of my choosing nor under my control. I was likely to lose some things along the way, and they might not all be old and dead; some of my loss might involve stuff I wasn’t ready to let go of yet. Rather than riding as co-pilot with God, I saw that I too was a creature of the sovereign Lord of Life, subject to transformation and pruning.

And so it has been. Not always, if I could help or avoid it. But the storms and the trimming have come. The transformation, normally not of my choosing, has come.

We generally celebrate Pentecost as the birthday of the church, the time when Christ’s waiting people received a new baptism, a new energy surge. It’s a story of initiation and power and fresh, full possibility. The church born in that room went on to transform the world, even as its members themselves experienced transformation. They gave up their possessions and shared with the whole. They learned new roles. They taught and listened and argued over the details. And a whole bunch of them had their minds and hearts changed. What was once unclean and cast out became beloved. What had been divided by a wall of history, practice, and belief was brought together with the kiss of peace. Strangers and foreigners and enemies became family.

Now, we know better than to think that any of that was the church folks’ idea. We know better, because the Bible tells us so. They didn’t like it, Paul didn’t like it, Peter didn’t like it. They didn’t pick it. But the Risen Jesus and the Holy Spirit, over and over, came to them and said, “HEY! Get with the program! Here, this way, is the way to life. Choose this. You don’t have to know how, but you have to be willing. Allow me to make you over and change your mind. But you’re gonna have to leave some stuff behind and do some new things instead.” Thanks be to God, they did.

Today, amidst Pentecost, its rushing, violent wind and tongues of fire; amidst the late spring Central Texas wind and hail; and amidst the staying-at-home and the devastation of COVID-19 to people’s lives and livelihoods, there’s another storm that has cut through our nation—the storm of racism. It’s not a new storm, and it’s not one that comes and goes, observing one season over another. It’s a storm that rages all the time, wreaking destruction and devastation every single day. Some of our people might think it’s gotten worse lately, but black people and other people of color know better. As someone wrote, it’s just that now white people have started seeing the videos.

I want to say that the way out of this storm is going to require some pruning and shredding, and not in some way that we get to be in charge of. Especially if you’re a white American, you are going to have to get ready and willing to lose some stuff you’ve never had to consider. It might be your quickness to speak, your trust in your own good intentions, your right to achieve and be first in line, or your assumption that you can have the first idea of what it feels like to be a descendant of 400 years of systematic violence and oppression. (And when I say “you’re” going to have to do these things, what I mean is I’m going to have to do these things.) I don’t know what it will be, but it’s gonna have to be something.

Because we are not going to be an easy nut to crack. This country is evidently very reluctant to offer itself up for the kind of transformation of the heart I believe Jesus asks of Christians. Obviously we’re not all Christians, but can you imagine if all of us who supposedly are starting taking that seriously? Let’s remember—or if you never learned it, go and learn it now—this nation and its supposed freedoms were founded on the backs of black, brutalized people. During our sheltering time, I finally finished the Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton, and in his story, our American DNA shone painfully clear. White people in this country have taken up fists and weapons against each other due to political differences since the very beginning. We started talking about civil war within ten years of the nation’s birth. We have been at this for a very long time, we white folks, and black people have suffered from it the whole time.

While I knew this on some level, reading about the brawling and dirty politics and rowdy armed gangs of white people, in the context of the day we’re now living, sent a chill through me. I know the power of legacy, in families and in churches. A church that starts because a bunch of people got mad and left the old church will find the same thing happening to the new one. Families pass down traditions of abuse and addiction. Nations do the same. Some have tried break those patterns—South Africa and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission comes to mind. Even then, historically oppressed people in those countries continue to suffer. And the civil rights movement and legislation aside, our nation has not begun to be honest about our past and to tell the full truth of what white people have done to black people and other people of color, for centuries.

We will be a hard nut to crack, because patterns and attitudes that old sink in and become privilege that white people do not see and are invested in not seeing.

If we white American Christians want to be agents of reconciliation in this society, if we want to live as people of peace, transformed by the Prince of Peace, we’re going to have to humble ourselves, remove ourselves from the driver’s seat or the front seat, or as our bishop says, make discomfort a spiritual discipline. Our transformation will require a holy storm and a burning flame and a stiff wind. It will have to happen to us, and we will also have to bend over and pick it up. We will have to let ourselves be pruned, and shut up, and listen, and learn how to choose life and not death, first for the suffering, and then for ourselves.

I don’t know how many different themes or storms can pile onto one another, how much sorting we can do in this one moment. My heart breaks for all the heartbroken, angry, exhausted-body-and-spirit people. But if we as people of God have ever found hope in the story of Pentecost, today is the day to claim that hope. I hope today that love can teach me the humility to hold my tongue when I want to justify myself; that I can listen deeply without thinking simultaneously about my response; that I can learn the courage to confront more boldly the injustice I currently observe in silence. May the Spirit of the Living God blow and burn where it must, and may it console and strengthen where the burning has already happened for far too long.

The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl,           
and strips the forest bare;           
and in his temple all say, “Glory!”

Psalm 29:9