In the shadow of this Memorial Day weekend, we passed a terrible milestone. More than 100,000 coronavirus deaths in the US. A staggering figure. More so when you consider that the first US coronavirus death only occurred in mid-February. That’s just a little more than three months ago.
The heart strains under the weight of these lives lost in the figurative blink of an eye. More than 30,000 deaths every month! That’s more American lives lost than in the years of the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined.
Now we grieve these precious lives. We offer love and prayers to their families and to those they loved. The people who knew the names and the faces behind the impersonal number that inadequately attempts to tally the human cost.
We mourn their passing and we prayerfully commend them and ourselves to the God for whom the very hairs on our heads are numbered. Who knows us and calls us each by name.
I believe we have a particular responsibility as the people of God to honor those lives lost, by protecting and caring for each other in love. That means wearing masks in public. Maintaining safe distances.
That means not rushing back to in-person worship or opening our church buildings until it is safe to do so.
Jesus calls us to BE the church. BEING the church means exactly this: caring for the least and the most vulnerable among us. Acting with their interests in mind and putting our trust in God.
But, this week saw another milestone death. George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, his hands cuffed behind his back, laid out on the macadam street in police custody, died as a white police officer pressed his knee against the back of his neck for over seven minutes.
Three of his fellow officers did nothing while Mr. Floyd pleaded that he could not breathe, pleaded for his life and then went horribly quiet.
Bystanders stood by helplessly, filming with their cell phones, shouting at the officer to get up. Stop. Enough.
This single death looms unspeakably large, the way 100,000 deaths cast a long shadow. The death of George Floyd represents the anonymous parade of Black lives who have been killed pleading in almost the exact same words (“I can’t breathe”) and serves to unite us in a single human family, if we are willing to see it. If finally, we would see what is hiding in plain sight.
The pleading of George Floyd calls us to see the inequities, the sin of prejudice and white supremacy that also hides in plain sight. To name that sin for what it is and join those helpless bystanders who witnessed the death of George Floyd, to shout into the void of prejudice and hatred: Enough! No more! Stop!
This Sunday is Pentecost. Fifty Days after Easter, the Holy Spirit came in a rush of wind. In cloven tongues of fire. Wind and flame. Powerful, destructive forces that carry within them the seeds of renewal and rebirth.
On Pentecost, barriers fell. People heard the reality of God in their own language. As the Apostles proclaimed the Gospel, those who heard them stood united in a new order, a new reality. God’s dream for us became suddenly visible in the blink of an eye, and we were found to be right in the middle of it.
The bystanders were disoriented by the sudden nearness of God, speaking in their own language. From out of their own experience. God welling up from their very lives.
But some rejected what they saw with their own eyes. Ridiculed the message they heard with their own ears. They turned their backs on the new reality God had flung into their midst with a rush of wind and flame.
They mocked the apostles as pathetic drunks. Their vision the result of too much wine. No, there was no God in it, not for them.
I am struck by how much this Pentecost mirrors that first Pentecost. All around us, the mighty wind of the Spirit still rushes through our world, wreaking havoc on an established order, a status quo, that shows itself to be more hollow and empty every day.
Clearing it away for something holier and truer to emerge, replacing the inequities that have constituted our lives and shaped our realities.
The notes of a new song are beginning to sound. Its melody taking shape beneath the shouting and rancor. The fear and suspicion.
Yes, many still mock God’s Spirit. Insist on their rights above all else. Bend their knee to subdue a Black man rather than to pray for the Spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Who try their best to snuff out the flame of the Spirit, rather than behold the dream of God visible in its flickering light.
Despite them though, like that first Pentecost, the wind still rushes and the Spirit still burns. God’s dream continues to shine forth in every heart filled with an irrepressible hope.
God is still dreaming us into being. We belong to a new reality. We possess a renewed hope. And God’s dream will not let us go until it is realized in each and every one of us.
Charles Oberkehr 