“He breathed on them and said to them,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”
The Spirit of life, whose very name means “breath,”
is given by means of breath from the risen Jesus to his disciples.
Given the past few months of pandemic,
when we have masked our faces and kept our distance,
my initial response to this is a sense of dis-ease
at Jesus’ casual and indiscriminate breathing on people.
But, given the past week,
the reference to breath also puts me in mind
of George Floyd with a policeman’s knee on his neck
for over eight minutes,
who moaned and cried “I can’t breathe,”
until he fell silent, the spirit gone out of him.
During the pandemic shutdown I have tried
to focus on the acts of generosity and creativity
that these difficult days have elicited from people.
Despite the increasing fraying of the fabric of solidarity
in the past few weeks,
I had hoped that perhaps the pandemic
could bring out the best in us,
could point us toward a better future.
But the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis,
following swiftly on the killing
of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia
and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky,
makes such hopes seem like idle dreams,
returning us to the old nightmare
of the persistent racism that has stained our history
as Americans, as a Church, and as a human race.
But what does all of this have to do with Pentecost?
And what does the word of God have to say to us this day?
Today we are offered both a positive vision
of the new world that the Spirit is creating
and a mandate from Christ to live in such a way
as to let God’s Spirit work through God’s people.
The descent of the Spirit in the book of Acts
depicts the power of God
overcoming the divisions sin has created,
as people of different lands and cultures
each hear the good news of God
proclaimed to them in their own native tongues.
Paul, writing to the Corinthians,
reaffirms the power of the Spirit
to forge unity where there had been division:
“in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body,
whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons,
and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.”
The good news of salvation is not simply
that our sins have been forgiven
or that death has been overcome,
but it is also that God has once more
breathed his Spirit into human clay
and brought to life a new humanity,
overcoming the divisions of race and sex and class
that have structured the world in which sin has reigned.
To be saved is not to be plucked
from this disaster of a world,
but it is to live now a transformed life
in the new world made by the Spirit.
But to say that the Spirit has called forth
a new humanity into a new world
is clearly not enough.
We who claim the name Christian
live with one foot in God’s new world of grace
and one foot in the old world of sin;
we are not yet fully that new humanity
that God’s Spirit would make us.
I am struck how the risen Jesus,
appearing to his disciples,
both speaks the words, “Peace be with you”
and also shows them the wounds of his torture,
as if to say, “The old world of sin is passing
and I have come with forgiveness and mercy,
but don’t forget the cost of following me,
don’t forget the blood and pain through which
this new world must be born.”
To believe truly in Christ’s message
of peace and forgiveness
we must also see the wounds
of torture and oppression.
We can focus so much
on Jesus’ message of mercy and love
that we forget his call to costly repentance.
He says to his followers not only,
“Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them”
but also, “whose sins you retain are retained.”
To retain someone’s sin is to hold them accountable.
The ministry of forgiveness
is crucial to the life of the Church,
but so is the ministry of accountability,
the ministry of not glossing over sin
when it shows itself,
the ministry of calling to repentance
so that forgiveness might become possible.
The Spirit consoles,
but the Spirit also convicts and converts.
To receive the breath of the Spirit
people have to be free to breathe it in.
And it is hard to breathe it in
with someone’s knee is pressing on your neck.
It is a testimony to our black brothers and sisters
that they have over the years managed to find ways
to breathe the Spirit in despite the knees on their necks.
And it is a testimony against us who are white
that we so persistently turn a blind eye
to the wounds inflicted on the body of Christ
by the violence of racism.
The too-often repeated cry, “I can’t breathe,”
is a prophetic call to see the ways in which
the Spirit who consoles
is also convicting and calling us to conversion.
May the Spirit whom we receive this day
liberate us all,
and lead us to a more just world
in which all God’s children
are free to breathe the Spirit in.
And may God have mercy on us all.
