May 30, 2023
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on Pentecost Sunday, May 28, 2023, at The Paulist Center in Boston, MA. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; and John 20:19-23.
It’s Pentecost! Today, more than any other day of the year, we celebrate how the Holy Spirit continually breaks into our lives in new and unexpected ways. As a community especially attentive to the Spirit, we at the Paulist Center try to open ourselves to all the gifts that the Spirit offers us, individually and corporately.
As we sing the ancient Pentecost sequence today, let’s pay attention to the qualities that the Church attributed to the Holy Spirit in the Middle Ages, qualities we rarely speak about today. According to the sequence, the Holy Spirit accompanies those who are downtrodden. The Spirit thaws our frozen hearts to make us more flexible and loving. As one of my professors liked to say: “When the Holy Spirit shows up, watch out! Anything is possible!”
On this day when we celebrate diverse people with diverse talents being united by the Holy Spirit, we pray more fervently for the Spirit to renew the face of the earth. In a time when the world has become so polarized, we remember that our baptism calls us to be agents of healing, reconciliation, and justice!
Mobile phone videos captured two terrible events that shook the nation on May 25, 2020. First, a white woman in New York City’s Central Park falsely claimed to police that Christian Cooper, a black man, was threatening to assault her. Second, a white police officer in Minneapolis took a series of brutal actions that led to the murder of the black man George Floyd. Events like this have happened – and continue to happen – in the United States, but those videos captured the world’s attention in a new way.
Racism is a spectrum of thoughts, beliefs, and actions by individuals, groups, and systems. Most of the overtly racist policies of past eras have been eradicated. Slavery was abolished in 1865; the Ku Klux Klan is no longer the powerful behemoth it once was; most Jim Crow laws have been overturned; the redlining practices that segregated neighborhoods are no longer allowed. But there are countless other policies that affect people of color disproportionately, even if those policies do not explicitly mention race. One example is the 1986 federal law that treated the possession of crack cocaine, used mostly by black Americans, much more harshly than the possession of powder cocaine, a form favored by white users.1 promotes unwarranted disparities based on race.” https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-federal-crack-cocaine-law.]
I don’t mean to paint an overly simplistic picture that all white people are overtly racist or that all people of color should be canonized. But systemic racism endures, even while some people claim that they cannot see evidence of the remaining racial inequities.
Many white Americans responded to the videos of May 25, 2020 as they had responded to previous gross injustices against people of color. They expected people of color to help them process their shock, anger, and grief, and to give them step-by-step instructions on how to respond. But in the decades, even in the entire century, before the death of George Floyd, people of color had produced plenty of articles, books, and videos on how white people could assist in overturning the inequities our society has created through systemic racism.
[Pause.] Many miraculous things happened at that first Christian Pentecost, but perhaps the greatest of all wasn’t that people were speaking in multiple languages; it was that people were able to listen to one another. [Pause.] Before the death of George Floyd, I had assured myself that I wasn’t contributing to the racial injustices in the United States. But the events of May 25, 2020 – and the Holy Spirit – revealed that I had a lot of listening and learning to do. We need to continually educate ourselves about the financial, political, and cultural obstacles that American society places in front of people of color. In the first year after George Floyd’s death, I facilitated two book discussions,2 watched a great documentary,3 listened to some black preachers,4 5 and read a “definitive history of racist ideas in America.”6 And here at the Paulist Center, you did even more, culminating in the creation of our Racial Justice Advocacy Group, or RJAG.
RJAG is made up of passionate people who think big. They were the impetus behind the intergenerational religious education programs on racial justice that we did this past year. RJAG keeps pushing me to make public pronouncements about our commitment to racial justice and to dedicate large amounts of money to projects that promote racial justice. Honestly, I think that’s short-circuiting the hard work that all the individual white members of this community need to continue to do. It is a long journey to become a committed anti-racist, and I hope RJAG can inspire each of us as individuals to keep learning about the inequities in government and organizational policies, to keep examining our consciences for unconscious biases, and to keep praying for the Holy Spirit to renew the face of the earth.
Frankly, since that first year after George Floyd’s murder, I’ve become complacent. I say that I’m too busy to do more reading or to take on more projects. But at some level, that’s just an excuse, especially considering how gravely white supremacy threatens our nation. It’s easy for me to point to government entities in other parts of the country, saying that the voters and politicians there need to change policies. Maybe some of you have also succumbed to being complacent, to expecting others to do the work of anti-racism, or to feeling hopeless that you can’t make a difference alone.
Usually, when I hear Jesus’ instruction to the apostles that “whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained,” I tend to focus on Jesus’ empowerment of us to forgive one another. But today, I feel compelled to explore how Jesus also gives us the responsibility to hold ourselves – and one another – accountable for sins we have left unacknowledged.
I am definitely not a segregationist, but I’ve not been nearly as anti-racist as I claim to have been. Often, my views have come from an assimilationist mindset – in other words, I expect people of color to live by norms established by white, Eurocentric culture.7
But if I am not willing to welcome and advocate for others who are different from me, am I really living out the Spirit of Pentecost?
[Pray:] I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned through my fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do.
In the past three years, perhaps you’ve realized some things that you’ve failed to do, too. [Pause.] When we do not acknowledge our sins, they retain their damaging power. It is only in bringing them to the light that we can seek forgiveness. [Pray:] Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
The Spirit is in our midst to build the reign of God. The Holy Spirit compels us to act, and to act now!
Let us pray:
Come, Holy Spirit!
Bend our stubborn hearts and will; melt the frozen, warm the chill.
Continue to work in our hearts.
Continue to soften them and make us more compassionate towards others.
Amen.
Notes:
- From the executive summary of a 2006 report from the American Civil Liberties Union: “The United States Sentencing Commission… concluded that crack is not appreciably different from powder cocaine in either its chemical composition or the physical reactions of its users…. [The law ↩
- Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad. https://www.meandwhitesupremacybook.com I recommend reading this book very slowly with a group of white and white-passing people who are willing to introspectively examine their own biases. It’s hard work! ↩
- Ava DuVerney’s 13th, about the racist mass incarceration movement of the last 40 years. It is currently available to watch for free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 ↩
- Austin Channing Brown’s sermon at the 2018 Evolving Faith Conference, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsfXn2BrBp8. ↩
- Holy Cross Catholic Church in Austin hosts “Courageous Conversations,” a monthly discussion forum for white people to learn about the experiences of their black neighbors. Contact Holy Cross for more details: https://holycrossaustin.org. ↩
- Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi. https://www.ibramxkendi.com/stamped. ↩
- Stamped, p. 2. ↩