America is out of breath battling two respiratory viruses, COVID-19 and structural racism. Those who can’t breathe can’t speak, and for these vulnerable and oppressed brothers and sisters — disproportionately black and brown bodies — the Church, meaning you and I, must lend our full voice and apply the full weight of her body.
Pentecost is the feast of antiracism. The sending of the Holy Spirit, the life-breath of God, enables believers to speak the universal language of love to renew the face of the earth one household and neighborhood at a time. In John’s Gospel, Jesus breathes this divine life upon his followers, a call to take up their crosses and lay their bodies on the line.
In the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit, rushes through “like a strong driving wind” that “filled the entire house . . . to rest upon each one of them.” At Pentecost, God’s mission becomes our mission. In the incarnation of God in Jesus and his proclamation of the kingdom of heaven, God inaugurates his new creation on earth and announces his victory over death via the resurrection of the broken brown body of Jesus. Henceforth, every Christian awaits in certain hope the day of the Lord when every person in Christ will gain a restored and glorified body like his.
The Church doesn’t “have” a social program. The Church is a social program for the transformation of humankind. This is why both the stereotypical “liberal” mythologizing of the Resurrection cuts off the theological branch it rests on and the “conservative” ridicule of “social justice” Christianity doesn’t bear fruit. Social inaction on behalf of the marginalized and oppressed for fear of “politicizing” or “socializing” a purely otherworldly gospel of the “heavenly” kingdom undercuts the public witness that Pentecost empowers. Moreover, it betrays how we the Church have time and again misunderstood what the resurrection and ascension means for how we are called to live counter-culturally in the present in anticipation of God’s future.
As the first disciples in Acts gathered in this “one place together” and birthed a movement, the Church today can still find her missional blueprint for renewing neighborhoods, a compelling and concrete vision of what society looks like where Christ is king. We have access now to this creative, indwelling Spirit of God, which passes through our towns, cities and neighborhoods leaving a trail of freedom, peace and flourishing in its wake. If we Catholics don’t believe the Spirit of God is the primary driving force of societal transformation then our churches don’t deserve to reopen. They are dead weight. Likewise, if we Catholics do not see ourselves bearing an individual and communal vocation as co-laborers with God called to dismantle structural sin and build for the kingdom (only God builds the kingdom), then our faith is dead without works.
At Pentecost, the apostles receive “power” when the Holy Spirit comes to “rest upon” them. May the unjustly departed rest in power and rise in glory. The Church, in the powerful peace and peaceful power of the Spirit, will get her public witness back when she finds her way again like the first disciples to breathe deep and speak fire. Fire requires oxygen. Jesus lit the match and the Church must keep it burning.
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