We are tired of violence, tired of trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. And we didn’t begin with much in our emotional reserves, because we are tired of the coronavirus, tired of quarantining and the social disruption we have endured these past 2½ months.
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| George Floyd Photo: WTAP-TV |
It will be hard for us to shake the images of our cities burning, of shattered glass and neighborhoods overtaken and freeways closed and the angry shouts emanating from Minneapolis all across this nation.
But I have been called into accountability this week by being reminded the image that matters most is the one that began it all: an officer’s knee pressed for minutes on end upon George Floyd’s neck, which ended with the death of a 46-year-old black man who was being apprehended for reportedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill.
Listen to the words of former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak:
“Sleepless and mortified, my heart melts in real-time as parts of the city I love so deeply burn away. Knowing these neighborhoods as I do I see way too clearly what is going up in smoke. ...
“It is nearly impossible to get these horrifying images out of our heads, but we must, because right now our eyes have to stay focused on one single image:
“A human being, staring calmly off into the middle distance, while his knee suffocates another human being. Our repulsion should boil over as we see this is a white police officer, who took an oath to protect and serve that person on the ground, who is a black man, who we know would not be treated like that if he was white.”
The complexities of the protest and civil unrest that have followed Floyd’s death are beyond what we can address in these few minutes this morning. They are worth our attention, our conversation, our sorting out.
It should be noted that what we have seen the past several nights are not just the protests of disenfranchised people of color who have viscerally experienced the death of an unarmed black man. The violence has, by credible accounts, been stoked by random trouble-makers as well as right-wing agitators, many of them white, who have driven to our city centers to literally ignite the flames of racial conflict with senseless looting. They have helped destroy, in fact, small businesses and livelihoods of the very persons of color who have already been sickened by George Floyd’s death.
A former St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter, Linda Owen, remarked: “In one week we've gone from flyover country to the center of some kind of existential battleground, and we're not even sure who the combatants are.”
The confusion of recent days ought not diminish the genuine anguish crying out to be heard. For those of us who are white, it is perhaps a time to listen more than speak.
How fitting that today in the Christian church is Pentecost Sunday. In the early church, Pentecost was once the second greatest celebration of the Christian year, following Easter. It was the day to commemorate the Holy Spirit coming down upon God’s people.
It is the story of the 2nd chapter of Acts. Not long after Jesus’ resurrection, the people had gathered in one place for the spring harvest festival, when suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit. The Bible, in fact, says the Spirit appeared as tongues of fire. The image of Pentecost Sunday is often fire, and songs are often sung on Pentecost of the church being on fire for the Lord.
Maybe our normal celebrations of Pentecost are too tame. Maybe today we see that fire is not a docile symbol of some warm and fuzzy feeling but is the presence of something that easily escapes our control. Fire that can both warm our hearts as well as express the rage that lies within.
After the incomprehensible killing of a black man and the violence that follows, it's cliche for a white preacher to invoke the words of Martin Luther King Jr. King would have understood Pentecost. He was an ordained preacher who earned his Ph.D. at a Methodist seminary.
The images of this past week don't look much different than they did in 1967 when King wrote in The Other America:
"I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? ... It has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention."
To be black in America, to be a person of color amidst the privilege of whiteness, is to be gasping for a language in which to be heard. The miracle of Pentecost becomes that those upon whom the Spirit landed as tongues of fire began to understand each other, though they came from different places and spoke different languages. It was a miracle of hearing. Lord, in your mercy, we ask again for the miracle of hearing.
I will venture that many people hearing my voice share the same privilege I do. We go through each day giving little thought to our personal safety based on the color of our skin.
If I had walked into a store and for some reason was suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, and if I became scared and ran, it is a near certainty that my pursuit and capture would not end with me gasping for life.
As George Floyd gasped the words, “I can’t breathe.”
The same words Eric Garner gasped while in an officer’s choke hold before his death on New York’s Staten Island in 2014.
As Parker Palmer writes, “I can’t breathe” are words that thousands of lynching victims in this country might have said as they died, words that freedom-seekers now living in limbo south of our border could say as they watch their dreams and sometimes their children die.
“I can’t breathe,” Parker continued, might have been the dying words of the 100,000 + American victims of COVID-19 just before they were intubated, deaths that have hit communities of color the hardest.
Palmer concludes by saying, if you or I walked down the street and heard a stranger say, “I can’t breathe,” we’d dial 911. We’d stay with the stranger until help arrived and do anything we could, the Heimlich maneuver, or CPR, or a hand to hold. We would NOT walk on by as if nothing were happening.
We can’t walk by now. The church considers its birth to have occurred on the first Pentecost. The church’s source of life is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is also known through Scripture by its Hebrew name: Ruach. It means breath.
To all who gasp for breath, let us all, you and I, listen to anyone who says, “I can’t breathe,” and be whom Christ calls us to be to them.
Let us pray, for:
The family of George Floyd, as they grieve privately, even as their loved one’s death has incited a public mourning across this nation.
The complex and bewildering tangle of racism, the evil weed sown long ago in the garden of humanity, that entwines and entraps us.
White privilege, which is so prevalent that we take it for granted and don’t even think about it.
Institutionalized racism, that although laws ended segregation and discrimination in the 1960s, these changes did not go to sufficient death to transform the systems and institutional structures that are responsible for the misuse of power.
Recognizing that conflict is inevitable when diverse peoples come together, and that it is not conflict that is our greatest problem but our inability to resolve it as people of God.
That dismantling racism is about tearing down and building up. That there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven, as Ecclesiastes tells us.
It is exhausting work, O God. Give us the will, give us strength, give us breath. The breath of your Holy Spirit. Amen.
This message was preached on Pentecost Sunday, May 31, 2020, to the online community from Milton (Wis.) United Methodist Church, after a week of rioting across the U.S. following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
Thank you to the Rev. Allie Scott for sharing the words of Parker Palmer. Prayer adapted from Understanding & Dismantling Racism by Joseph Barndt, © 2007 Fortress Press.
Thank you to the Rev. Allie Scott for sharing the words of Parker Palmer. Prayer adapted from Understanding & Dismantling Racism by Joseph Barndt, © 2007 Fortress Press.
