Pentecost: The Inbreaking the Empire Didn’t Plan For

*Readings can also be found here.

I. Ezekiel 37:1-14, The Valley of the Discarded

The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he led me out in the spirit of the LORD and set me in the center of the plain, which was now filled with bones. He made me walk among the bones in every direction so that I saw how many they were on the surface of the plain. How dry they were! He asked me: Son of man, can these bones come to life? I answered, “Lord GOD, you alone know that.” Then he said to me: Prophesy over these bones, and say to them: Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: See! I will bring spirit into you, that you may come to life. I will put sinews upon you, make flesh grow over you, cover you with skin, and put spirit in you so that you may come to life and know that I am the LORD. I, Ezekiel, prophesied as I had been told, and even as I was prophesying I heard a noise; it was a rattling as the bones came together, bone joining bone. I saw the sinews and the flesh come upon them, and the skin cover them, but there was no spirit in them. Then the LORD said to me: Prophesy to the spirit, prophesy, son of man, and say to the spirit: Thus says the Lord GOD: From the four winds come, O spirit, and breathe into these slain that they may come to life. I prophesied as he told me, and the spirit came into them; they came alive and stood upright, a vast army. Then he said to me: Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They have been saying, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, and we are cut off.” Therefore, prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord GOD: O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them, and bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and have you rise from them, O my people! I will put my spirit in you that you may live, and I will settle you upon your land; thus you shall know that I am the LORD. I have promised, and I will do it, says the LORD.

Ezekiel is not a chaplain. Ezekiel is a refugee. He is writing in a foreign land to a people whose city has been burned, whose leaders have been executed, whose children have been taken, whose land has been seized, whose neighbors have given up. They are not saying we are sad. They are saying, our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, we are cut off. That is the language of a people the empire has finished off and walked away from.

And this is the vision God gives him. Not a vision of warriors. Not a vision of armies and chariots. A vision of bones. Discarded bodies on a plain. The leftovers of imperial violence. The ones the powerful never even bothered to bury.

The valley is the migrant trail through the desert, lined with the belongings of people who did not make it. The valley is the prison yard full of men and women warehoused by a country that calls itself free. The valley is the neighborhood the city promised to redevelop forty years ago, then redlined, then forgot. The valley is the reservation. The valley is Gaza. The valley is Sudan. The valley is the homeless encampment under the bridge they keep sweeping. The valley is the river the factory poisoned. The valley is the lungs of the kid with asthma who lives next to the refinery.

Can these bones live?

The prophet does not lie. He does not say of course they can. He says, Lord, you alone know. Because anyone who has actually stood in the valley knows that easy hope is a kind of insult to the dead. You do not stand among the bones, clapping and chirping about silver linings. You stand there in honest grief and tell the truth: I do not know. I do not know if these communities can come back. I do not know if these systems can be undone. I do not know if my own people will live.

And then God says, Prophesy.

That is the calling. Not certainty. Not optimism. Prophesy. Speak life over the communities the empire has written off. Refuse the obituary the powerful keep publishing about the poor. The bones say we are cut off…and the prophet is told to speak a different word into the air until the rattling starts, until the joining begins, until the sinews come, until the breath enters, until what the empire said was finished stands up a vast army.

The Spirit’s first work is to make the discarded rise.

II. John 7:37-39, The Carpenter Cries Out

Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. As Scripture says: Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me. He said this in reference to the Spirit that those who came to believe in him were to receive. There was, of course, no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

A brown-skinned, colonized Jewish laborer, standing in a temple compromised by collaboration with the Roman occupiers, addressing a crowd full of country pilgrims who had walked for days to get there. He is not in a palace. He is not on television. He is a working-class man with calluses on his hands, shouting in the street that anyone who is thirsty can come.

And he means thirsty.

He means the day laborers waiting in the square because the rent is due. He means the women drawing water at noon to avoid being seen. He means the lepers no one will touch. He means the tax collectors his society despises. He means the foreign women, the disabled men, the children no one is making room for. He means the ones the temple system has been charging for access to God. To them he says, come. Drink. There is a river for you.

And then the Gospel writer tells us this strange line: there was no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

In this Gospel, the glorification of Jesus is the cross. The moment of his glory is the moment he is lifted up…not on a throne but on a Roman execution stake, between two more condemned men, under a sign mocking him as a king. The Spirit pours from there. From the body of a colonized worker executed by the state. From the side that the imperial spear opens. From the blood that runs into the dirt of an occupied country.

The rivers of living water flow from the wounds of the executed.

They flow from the lynched. They flow from the disappeared. They flow from the body of the asylum seeker who died in custody. They flow from the trans woman murdered in the alley. They flow from the journalist shot in the press vest. They flow from the doctor pulled from her hospital. They flow from every body the empire has thrown away.

Wherever the church kneels with those bodies, the rivers are running. Wherever the church takes the side of the powerful instead, the rivers have dried up and we are drinking sand.

III. John 20:19-23, The Locked Room of the Terrorized

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

The doors were locked. For fear.

This is not a prayer meeting. This is a safe house. This is a small group of frightened country people, hiding from the religious authorities who had collaborated with the imperial power that had just publicly tortured their friend to death. They are sure they are next. They are not wrong to be sure.

Every marginalized community knows this room. The undocumented family that closes the blinds when the unmarked van rolls down the street knows this room. The Black mother coaching her son on how to survive a traffic stop knows this room. The Palestinian family waiting through another night of bombing knows this room. The queer kid in a country that just criminalized them knows this room. The synagogue and the mosque hiring private security after another threat know this room. Anyone who has ever wondered if today is the day the state comes for them…knows this room.

And into this room, with the doors locked and the people shaking, the risen Christ walks. Not somewhere safer. Not somewhere more respectable. Here. And the first thing he shows them is his wounds.

He does not pretend the violence did not happen. The empire did this to him. The marks are still on his body. He shows them. Resurrection in this Gospel is not the erasure of state violence. It is its defeat. The wounds are still there, but they are no longer the end of the story.

And then he breathes on them. The same breath that moved over the waters at the beginning. The same breath that filled the lungs of the first human. The same breath that swept into Ezekiel’s valley and stood the bones upright as a vast army. That breath. Into the lungs of a frightened, hiding, marginalized little community.

The breath is not given so they can stay in the room. The breath is given to send them out. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Out through the door that fear had locked. Out into the streets the empire owns. Out to the people the system forgot.

And then this word, often misread: whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained.

This is not a private confessional rule. This is a prophetic authority. The Spirit-filled community has been given the power to name what is sin and to refuse to call it anything else. The authority to refuse to bless the war. To refuse to absolve the unrepentant landlord. To refuse to give comfort to the system that grinds the poor. To declare healed, held, forgiven those whom the world has condemned and discarded.

Forgiveness in the Spirit is never neutral. The Spirit forgives the trespassed-against and refuses to dismiss the trespasses of the powerful as everyone’s general fault.

IV. Romans 8:22-27, The Groaning of the Whole World

We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that sees is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance. In the same way, the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings. And the one who searches hearts knows what is the intention of the Spirit, because he intercedes for the holy ones according to God’s will.

All creation is groaning in labor pains.

Not whimpering. Not complaining. Not mildly disappointed. Labor pains. The cry of the wounded world is not the rattle of death. It is the howl of a body bringing something into being.

The mother sleeping with her children on the cold curb groans. The child in the cage at the border groans. The miner with black lungs groans. The river choking on chemicals groans. The forest burning in the summer groans. The mother burying her son groans. The teenager hiding from the bombs groans. The widow staring at the medical bill groans. The farmworker bent over in the field groans. The earth herself groans.

Those groans are prayer. When the oppressed do not know how to pray, the Spirit prays in them, with them, beneath them, with groanings that have no words. The Spirit is not embarrassed by the rage of the poor. The Spirit is not embarrassed by the wail of the bereaved mother. The Spirit does not ask the suffering to be polite or to soften their tone for the comfort of the comfortable. The Spirit takes the wordless cry of the crushed and carries it into the throne room of God as the most articulate prayer that has ever been prayed.

Anyone who tells the poor to stop groaning has never met the Holy Spirit.

Anyone who tells the protester to be quiet, who tells the grieving mother to forgive faster, who tells the prophet to soften the message…has never met the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the advocate of the silenced. The Spirit is the translator of the inarticulate. The Spirit reaches down to the bottom of the chest, grabs the groan, carries it straight to the heart of God.

God is not in the high tower watching the contractions from a safe distance. God is in the labor room. God is on the floor. God is at the bedside. God is groaning with us. The Spirit is in the pain, doing the work of bringing a new world to birth.

V. Acts 2:1-11, Pentecost and the Whole World Made Right

When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together. And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were. Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem. At this sound, they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language. They were astounded, and in amazement they asked, “Are not all these people who are speaking Galileans? Then how does each of us hear them in his native language? We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God.”

Galileans. Country people. Rural laborers. The kind of people the urban elites of the capital mocked for their accents. The kind of people the powerful had already dismissed as ignorant peasants from a backwater. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? That was the joke. These are the people on whom the Spirit falls first.

Pentecost begins among the people the powerful had already written off as nobody.

The wind comes. A driving wind. A wind that does not ask permission. A wind that fills the whole house and does not stay where anyone wants to keep it. The fire comes. Fire that comes to rest on each one of them. Not on the bishop only. Not on the credentialed only. Not on the men only. Not on the documented only. On each one of them. Every old woman. Every immigrant worker. Every enslaved daughter. Every refugee. Every body the world had ranked low. The fire falls on every single head.

This is the democratization of the Spirit. The end of the system where God only spoke through the powerful. The beginning of a community where every voice carries the word.

And then the tongues.

Pentecost is the undoing of every empire that has ever tried to force a people to abandon their language. The Spirit does not give the apostles one imperial tongue to broadcast in. The Spirit gives the crowd the miracle. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians. Cappadocians, Phrygians, Egyptians. Libyans, Romans, Cretans, Arabs…every one of them hearing the mighty acts of God in their own native language.

Every. Native. Language.

Every grandmother’s prayer in the tongue the colonizer tried to beat out of her grandchildren. Every lullaby in the language the boarding school punished. Every word from every village the maps forgot. Every dialect the powerful mocked. Every immigrant accent the citizenship test tried to erase. Every one of them, on Pentecost, becomes a vessel of the mighty acts of God.

The Spirit refuses to flatten the peoples into one. The Spirit refuses to require the marginalized to assimilate before they can be saved. The Spirit refuses the empire’s terms. The Spirit honors what the empire tried to destroy.

This is how all things will be made right.

Not by one nation absorbing the others. Not by one church flattening every culture. Not by the strong silencing the weak. Not by the rich teaching the poor to be patient. But by every people, in every body, in every language, on every street and every shore, rising. Rising like the vast army from the valley. Rising like the rivers from the wounded side of the executed Christ. Rising like a child being born from the labor of the whole creation.

Pentecost people are the discarded bones standing back up. They are the locked door the empire could not keep shut. They are the wind that does not ask permission. They are the fire on every head, regardless of papers, regardless of class, regardless of who the world said deserved it. They are the tongues honoring every language the powerful tried to erase. They are the labor pains of the new creation.

The Spirit gives power. Not power over. Power with and power for. Power to walk into the valley and refuse to call the bones dead. Power to break the door fear built. Power to name the violence as violence and refuse to bless it. Power to forgive what the world will not forgive and to retain what the world has been forgiving too easily for too long. Power to groan with all creation until the new world is born.

Power to give life to all that we touch.

Can these bones live?

By the Spirit, they live. Every one of them.