Three years ago, I preached on Pentecost Sunday at my church.
In the week preceding that Sunday, a terrorist attack in London wounded or killed some 35 people; at least 90 women and children died in a terrorist attack in Kabul and several more killed at a funeral; two men were stabbed to death by a white supremacist in Oregon for defending young Muslim women, and African-American college student Richard Collins III was fatally stabbed by a white supremacist on his college campus.
And once again, in the week before Pentecost, George Floyd’s breath was quite literally taken from him in a brazen murder committed by police.
Many commentators have noted the tragic relationship between those who are dying of COVID-19 who cannot breathe and Mr. Floyd’s death by asphyxiation. The vast majority of the nearly 110,000 citizens who have died would not have died if not for the criminally inept non-action of the so-called president. Mr. Floyd need not have died either, but for the criminally inept policing of the Minneapolis police.
For many priests and pastors, the other tragic irony is that Pentecost is a celebration of the giving of holy breath to the disciples, which turned them into apostles.
And even more ironic, tongues of flame appeared above their heads in the room in which they had been hiding. This emboldened Peter to address the crowd who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate Shavuot, and as he did, everyone in the crowd, no matter what language they spoke, could HEAR and UNDERSTAND each other.
In the Greek, the Holy Spirit is called “pneuma,” which literally means breath. It came in the form of a great wind, which rushed through the dwelling, clearing away the disciples’ fear and anxiety about when the advocate that Jesus had promised was going to come.
In our 2020 case, wind created by military helicopters hovering over protestors brought down branches that hit some of them and drowned out their pleas for understanding that black lives matter.
It also deafened the cowardly General Mark Milley, who strutted around Washington, DC, in his fatigues checking on his “soldiers” when, in effect, martial law was imposed on the city this week. Of all people, he should have known best about Posse Comitatis Law, which forbids the US Army and Air Force from acts of war on US soil.
And here is yet another tragic irony in this most devastating week. The Law of Posse Comitatis was signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878, supposedly at the “end of Reconstruction.” In fact, Reconstruction was nipped in the bud because the law gave an easy out to secessionist states from having to be held accountable for slavery and the post-Civil War uprising of vigilante groups not just limited to the Ku Klux Klan. President US Grant had allowed a military presence in the South and had virtually destroyed the Klan and its ilk. Hayes was elected as Southerners who had signed the oath of allegiance to the Union were regaining political offices and influence.
So a law that helped to re-create the Ku Klux Klan and other “night riders” and ushered in the Jim Crow era, which still has not ended, is now being breached to quell the descendants of those newly freed people who were in effect re-enslaved when Reconstruction failed.
For Christians, Pentecost symbolizes a holding to account of those in the Jesus Movement to follow Jesus’s words and actions to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth by raising up the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, binding the wounds of the soul-sick and the physically sick, and living in communion with one another by acknowledging all of us as brothers and sisters.
But on the day after Pentecost, the wannabe dictator in the White House declared war on all of us and then defaced a church by going into, taking a Bible and using it for a photo opportunity.
The Moral Universe 