Kindle Notes & Highlights
[E]very human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become. —James Baldwin1
It is a raced question, one in which a human is viewed as object, a color, rather than a human being, bolstering and reflecting our “encasement in racial logics.”
Dr. King] was killed in one sense because [hu]mankind is not quite human yet. May he live because all of us in America are closer to becoming human than ever before.”
They are raced by a lust for power and control, rather than affirmed as human and holy by the Spirit’s breath.
however, while race is neither biologically nor ontologically real, it is socially real.
But I adhere to the insightful perspective and teaching of Willie Jennings, who writes that it “does not refer to people of European descent but to a way of being in the world and seeing the world that forms cognitive and affective structures able to seduce people into its habitation and its meaning making.”
It is time for the church to remember that while we are human or at least becoming human, we can never be fully human as long as racialized violence still pervades the land, denying and destroying otherness.
The Spirit is a wind, the breath (ruach) of God. She is a holy wind that woos us together rather than break us apart, because this breath blows in all human bodies. This common breath is critical for confronting racialization for a more fruitful future as human beings. Plus, breath cannot be raced. It has no color, but it moves in all flesh, all bodies, even raced ones.
The Spirit can help us reclaim our humanity with all of its rich particularity of culture, language, and ethnicity.
the Spirit helps one to get outside oneself, out of self-interests, in order to see others’ views and to get a wider perspective on God and life.
is vital to stand outside oneself, as a means to make space for others to enter one’s life.
because their dehumanized Black flesh is also the glory of God in human flesh.
that you will see the need to move beyond rhetoric to an ethic that embodies the fullness of the Spirit of Christ, to reclaim our humanity, and to become human with each other as the holy gift of God.
Racialization must die in order for something new to rise from the Spirit in our hearts and lives.
about humanity, human difference, and race in particular, perhaps toward something more fruitful, more spiritual, and even more Christian.
Race is not biology but is most certainly sociology.
How might the day of Pentecost and the work of the Spirit on that day in particular help us think constructively about and resist racialized hierarchies and dehumanization?
A critical aspect of a pneumatology rooted in Pentecost is the notion of breath as a divine gift to all human beings. Note that even the coming of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost is a gift, that is, the result of divine intention and forethought.
This breath is what Howard Thurman calls “the givenness of God” that validates the worth of every human being.
But God’s breath blows broadly and expansively across humanity and opens up the borders of human hearts toward each other. What we have at Pentecost is an “insurgency of the Spirit”4 where a wind breathes on all people freely and generously.
Therefore, no human group is self-made, nor is breath reserved solely for any particular human being. Breath is not raced or in a color; it is for all flesh and in all flesh.
In this way, the Spirit of Pentecost is egalitarian, not hierarchical, in that all human beings have the same breath flowing in and through their bodies.
What is most striking is how the Spirit enables multilingual speech. Those speaking with this gift are not speaking in their native language but the language of the other. The Spirit causes the mother tongues of those who are different to be on the tongues of the other.
The egalitarianism of the Spirit’s movement at Pentecost, particularly through the gift of breath or wind, is an implicit affirmation of the diversity of humanity, which confronts the dehumanization of racialization.
In truth, it is the gospel of God, a Pentecost ecology, a reflection of the beauty of God on earth or what Dr. King called the “world house.”
“Difference is God’s work and God’s intention,”14 whether it be linguistic diversity, geographical diversity, or racial-ethnic diversity. The Spirit embraces diversity in all its forms. One might say that “the celebration of difference [is] a hallmark of Christianity.”15 Through the lens of Pentecost, there is no room for racialization and dehumanization. But there is much fertile space for the embrace of all human beings in their wide diversity.
Some think Pentecost or diversity is about divisiveness, but there can be genuine unity only if the members are diverse.
Sameness is actually more problematic than diversity, because diversity is a gift of God in the power of the Spirit, whereas sameness suggests humans are in charge.
As Thurman teaches, each life in the hands of God is an authentic sacrament.22 The Spirit, pneuma, hovers over human particularities and diversity as a gift of God.
In God’s hands, the makeup of the church and the nature of the world are diverse. God’s dream is “a house of prayer for all the nations”
It is important to emphasize that the Spirit embraces Black flesh, Black tongues, Black bodies, and Black gifts. Blacks were the humans most often dehumanized through racialization, and the Spirit hugs them and all flesh with holiness, fire, and power in their particularity, and inspires all to breathe, speak, understand, and dance in joy within community. The Spirit humanizes by filling every human being and unleashing spiritual dynamite (dynamis) into every human life, that all might be baptized with breath and power.
That the Spirit fills all and rests on all, not just some bodies, is the affirmation needed in the face of historical dehumanization and provides an opportunity for those deemed nonhuman to reclaim their humanity in God. Pentecost shows us that the spiritual is linked to the material, and thus that all human bodies matter to the life of faith. The glory of God is revealed through all human flesh and is “the sign of special favor from the spirit.”41 At Pentecost, each body and ethnicity is affirmed as sacred and of worth, a human being loved by God.
Tongues are loosed when there is a fire in the Spirit, revealing otherwise movements of God in the world and the church.
This Spirit breaks boundaries and crosses borders of racialized hierarchies to move all into the expansive heart of a loving God.
Humans, regardless of ethnicity or race, speak a multiplicity of languages to reveal the diversity of God from the beginning, which is the vision of the end. The multilingual tongues and multiethnic bodies at Pentecost reveal that the future present of God is the “great world house.”
When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge which is provided for us by a Pacific islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a European. Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half of the world. In a real sense, all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s
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Pentecost not only opens up a new speech and a new way of being in the multicolored world of God, but it creates a new world. It is a new creation ignited by the Spirit. The Spirit may be “unsought” or “unwanted” but is “intent on making all things new.”
The turn to the Spirit, as I have argued, turns us to the human, with all of our beautiful diversity, in resistance to the dehumanizing racialization of people.
Life in the Spirit is broad, but because of the love of God “the route along which we travel the spiritual life is neither that of blind mystery nor dogmatic knowledge, but of worship.”4 If
This means a preacher’s prayer should be: “Lord, make me fully present as myself. Make this an incarnational moment. Ignite my own idiom.” The Spirit nudges us to embrace our whole human selves in public, not to fade away or be erased, even in the face of acts of dehumanization. Preaching is sacramental, and the cost of such a performance “is being exposed as human.”
To be human is to breathe, to receive breath from Holy Breath, and to love this breath, because without it there is only death, spiritual and physical.
The potential of communing with the Spirit through breathing, voicing, singing, is a truly unexplored gift to humanity.
One day, Naomi rubbed Gladys’ right arm up and down, stared into her eyes, and then began to sing, “Jesus loves me, this I know.” As Naomi continued to sing, Gladys began to keep tempo with her right hand. When that song was finished, Naomi rubbed both of Gladys’ cheeks with her hands as she began to sing, “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” Something amazing happened when Naomi started to sing the verse, “He’s got the mothers and the fathers in his hands.” Naomi sang, “He’s got the mothers and the fathers,” and Gladys, who could not speak, responded antiphonally, “in his hands.” After
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Furthermore, to be human is to have not only breath and a voice, but a body. Thomas Troeger gives an apt definition of homiletics as “theology processed through the body.”
All of this love shown to bodies through the Spirit of love is the human work of the divine Spirit. It is a work of healing, resistance, and redemption.
Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 15, italics mine.
According to Thurman, this has occurred because the church “is not wide open to the Spirit of the living God.”4 Openness to the Spirit should open us to new ways of being, thinking, and doing in the world as it relates to the history of racialized inhumanity.
Openness to the Spirit should also open us up to one another as fellow human beings, not racialized objects, because through the Spirit, it is possible to move through and beyond racialization toward humanization.
I call it a revival, a renaissance, a rebirth of our humanness for the glory of God in the power of the Spirit.
We get a glimpse of Thurman’s strivings and calling in the Spirit in his memorial for Dr. King at the time of King’s death. He said, “[Dr. King] was killed in one sense because [hu]mankind is not quite human yet. May he live because all of us in America are closer to becoming human than ever before.”8 We are not quite human yet, but we are becoming human.
