A Sermon for Pentecost Sunday 2020 amid Covid-19 and civil unrest

Sunday, May 31, 2020 – 10:22 a.m. – 73 degrees

Today is Pentecost Sunday.  It is the day we celebrate the “birth” of the church.  It is supposed to be a joyous occasion.  I ask you, how can we celebrate when around us our neighbors of color are being murdered before our eyes? 

How can we celebrate when over 100,000 people have died from Covid-19, while Trump plays politics on Twitter?

People of color are being murdered, while Trump advocates violence from the safety of the White House.  People are dying from a deadly disease, while Trump urges states to reopen, in the hopes of saving his presidency.

Our country is in the midst of a pandemic of violence, but this pandemic is not new.  It does not attack the body.  It attacks the soul. 

This country has a long, long history of systemic racism.  From slavery, to the civil rights movement, to the “We shall overcome” songs of the sixties, to the internment of Japanese Americans during the war, to the demonization of the Irish, and the Chinese, and Native Americans, to watching a black man be murdered on television by a white police officer, we seem to be stuck in a never-ending circle of hate.

What is wrong with us?  Why do we continue to allow such things to happen?

I’m a white woman.  I mean, look at me.  I’m just about as white as you can get.  And with my skin color comes privilege.  I’ll tell you a story…

A few years ago I was running an errand, delivering groceries to a posh neighborhood in Montecito.  I was given the gate code, and the code for the front door, but I didn’t know there was a house alarm as well.  When I entered, the alarm began to go off, and I didn’t have the codes to turn it off.  Well, what could I do?  I just continued to bring the groceries in the house.  Just about the time I finished, I saw the faces of two white police officers looking over the fence.  I let them in through the gate, showed them my paperwork, and all was well.  How different might that encounter have been if I had been a young black man on the same mission?  It might have ended very differently.

I cannot begin to speak from the experience of a person of color, and what it must feel like to be afraid every time you leave the house.  I don’t know how it feels to be watched whenever I go into a store, or to have people cross the street to avoid me, or to have someone call the police on me because I’ve asked someone to leash up their dog.  I don’t know those things.  I cannot truly comprehend the rage, fear, and sorrow that people of color must live with every day.

But I do know this:  This has to stop.  It has to stop here, and it has to stop now.

But how?  It seems we are fighting the same fight over and over and over again. 

Now, I’m not here to give you a “peace and love will conquer all” speech.  While I believe that may be true, I also know that peace and love are not passive.  They are active, they are vibrant, and they are powerful. Standing around singing “kumbya” doesn’t accomplish much expect to make us white folks feel better.  Love must be active to be useful.

The Quakers talk about being “in the power of the Lord.”  So, I ask you, who is in the power of the Lord now?  The white supremacists who have co-opted the outrage of the community of the people of color, inciting violence?  Or the black people who surrounded and protected a white police officer when he became separated from his unit?  Who was in the power of the Lord back in the sixties?  The governor of Alabama who unleashed the fury of the National Guard, or Martin Luther King, Jr., who joined arms with people of all colors to walk across that bridge in Selma?  Who was in the power of the Lord when people in India had their own government beat them for the crime of getting salt, or Gandhi who begged for peace and went on a hunger strike?

Who is in the power of the Lord now?  Trump, who calls protestors “thugs” and threatens to unleash the dogs on them? Or the white police officers who are kneeling in silent solidarity with their black constituents?   

I watched a few church services on the internet today, and I was dismayed at how many went on as if this were simply an ordinary Pentecost Sunday.  It’s not. The fire you see on television is not Holy fire.  It is the fire of people who just can’t take it anymore.  I ask you:  Would Jesus have settled for three songs and a sermon today?  I think not. 

The church MUST not be silent.  WE must not be silent.  To be silent is to be complicit, and it is just that complicity that has brought us to this terrible, terrible place.   

So, I ask you, I beg you…stand up!  Let your voice be counted!  Let the cry of ENOUGH!  Be heard throughout the land!  Not with violence, but with the active voice of love.  You cannot counteract violence and hatred with more violence and hatred.  True change can only be achieved through peaceful means. 

If you are black, stand up!  If you are brown, stand up!  If you are white…speak up! Speak up and say NO, this is NOT okay, and I will not be silent in the face of injustice any longer. 

If you are a person of color, I say this to you today:  I see you.  I hear you.  I will stand with you. 

And let all the people say Amen.