On Monday, federal agents and immigration authorities with assault rifles and armored vehicles invaded our community. As they swarmed Lake Street, a crowd of concerned citizens showed up to serve as legal witnesses. In a social media post, City Council member Jason Chavez described his experience on the scene:
If it feels like you are being gaslit when leadership tells you not to worry about immigration enforcement, I am right there with you. I was on the ground alongside the people who came out in the rain and some of the worst air quality in the country to stand up for our neighbors. I saw firsthand a number of law enforcement personnel with ICE badges. I saw firsthand the disregard that many of those personnel held for the safety and wellbeing of our neighbors. And I saw firsthand the trauma and fear that a militarized law enforcement presence triggered for our community, which is still searching for answers that remain after the 2020 uprising. From my perspective, it felt like fear and intimidation were the point. It felt like the Trump administration was sending a message to Minneapolis and the Phillips and Powderhorn communities. And to see MPD right there alongside those federal agents felt like the ultimate betrayal.[1]
Today’s Pentecost narrative describes a disruptive moment that prompted the followers of Jesus to show up differently than they ever had before. Listen again to the language the writer uses to describe the way the Spirit appears. “There came a sound like the rush of a violent wind and it filled the entire house.” I’m hearing the freight train roar of a tornado. I’m seeing trees bend and break. I’m shielding my eyes from debris. “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them and a tongue rested on each of them.” I’m feeling the wildness of fire. I’m sweating. And I’m hearing an explosion of voices. Familiar voices speaking in foreign tongues. My own tongue setting loose sounds I don’t understand.
In the first chapter of Acts, Luke depicts Jesus anticipating this Pentecost scene, offering his disciples a way to understand what is going to happen next. His words hearken back to the very beginning of the Gospel: “For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” (Acts 1:5) The unsettling intensity of this “baptism of the Holy Spirit” marks a hinge moment, like a storm, or an uprising, a global pandemic or an election. In Jewish tradition, Pentecost, or Shavuot, carries multi-layered meaning. It was originally an agricultural observance. At Passover the harvesting of barley began. Seven weeks, or fifty days later, on Shavuot, the barley harvest concluded at the same time as the wheat was planted. Later on, Shavuot also became a yearly remembrance of God’s giving of the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai. So Pentecost was a moment of creative disruption that was also deeply rooted in the enduring cycles of Jewish life—in which harvest coincides with planting, and gratitude for gifts accompanies the reaffirmation of commitments.
Amid all the flashy pyrotechnics, the essence of the Spirit’s gift on Pentecost could get a bit lost. Earlier verses of Acts tell us that the community to that point numbered about 120 people from one particular ethnic group (Galileans). These followers of Jesus “began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” The “tongues” that rested on them reached out like wildfire across the city of Jerusalem gathering a crowd of faithful Jews from every nation in the known world, drawn to listen because “each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” The text doesn’t divulge the content of the message. It focuses on the experience of immigrants hearing the sound of home in a foreign land. Shavuot, as described in the book of Deuteronomy, had always been an intentionally diverse festival, involving everyone in the community: “Rejoice before the Lord your God—you and your sons and your daughters, your male and female slaves, the Levites resident in your towns, as well as the strangers, the orphans, and the widows who are among you.” (Deuteronomy 16:11) It seems that the cacophony of language that swept through the Jesus movement, though bewildering and amazing, was also firmly grounded in this inheritance of hospitality and connection across differences of culture, religious practice and social status.
I’ve been telling everyone who will listen about this book I’m reading. It’s simply titled Community. The author, Peter Block, is a consultant in the areas of organizational development and civic engagement. One of the key insights he seeks to share in the book is about context. The dominant context, he argues, is “retributive”; stuck in fear and fault, driven by scarcity, rooted in individualism and the violent enforcement of compliance. In this retributive context, we are obsessed with problem-solving, with needs and deficiencies. We are looking for leaders who have solutions and answers. “The future,” Block writes
Is controlled by a small number of wealthy and powerful people, commonly lumped into the category we call “they.” (p.39) And the most vulnerable among us become a special category of people, defined by what they cannot do. . . . Despite our care for them, we do not welcome them into our midst; we service them. They become objects. (p. 63)
The retributive context is fueled by projection, which Block defines as “the belief that something or someone else is the problem and that someone else needs to do something different before anything can get profoundly better.” (p. 60)
In a restorative context, on the other hand, we engage in true citizenship. We stop showing up as “critics and consumers” of elected officials and we exercise agency through our associational life. Block writes,
Choosing to be accountable for the whole, creating a context of hospitality and collective possibility, acting to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center—these are some of the ways we begin to create a community of citizens. (p. 67)
“Communal transformation” he explains,
Occurs when people connect with those who were previously strangers, and when we invite people into conversations that ask them to act as creators or owners of community. [The key question in a restorative context is] what can we create together? (p. 64, 50)
In Romans, Paul writes: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor.” We are, in every way—politically, economically, environmentally, spiritually—in a time of change. We are, like the church of Acts, in the chaotic throes of the last days of a dying order. Something is trying to get born. While some are desperate to prevent this emergence, others are acting as midwives. It’s hard to be more specific or clear but I think you know what I mean. It’s in the streets, as people show up for each other, rejecting the narrative that says our community must be policed by weapons of war; it’s in our bones; it’s tugging at our souls—this intense struggle. What’s unfolding is new and ancient; it’s like harvest and seedtime all at once. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by these times, to feel only a sense of catastrophe or disaster, to get mired in problems that have no solutions, to become isolated, to collapse and resign our agency. According to Romans, however, our true context is creative and empowering. We are relatives with all creation, groaning together with our diverse gifts, laboring toward the birth of true freedom. As we groan, the Spirit groans along with us, uniting us with divine intention using a language too deep, and too powerful for words. Peter Block writes:
We can begin to think of our communities as nothing more or less than a conversation. If we can accept the idea that all real change is a shift in narrative—a new story, as opposed to the received dominant story—then the function of citizenship, or leadership, is to invite a new narrative into existence. (p. 55)
The disruption of Pentecost shifts the context, reframes the conversation. It brings new ways of speaking and understanding. A new language for community. New possibilities and new commitments to be accountable. All people, all together, in the giftedness of our diversity, are prophets. All people are Spirit-filled dreamers, visionaries, truth-tellers, collectively and collaboratively creating the future for which we hope. Amen.