PENTECOST (John 20:19-23, Acts 2:1-21)

"What the Fire Brings" ©Jan Richardson

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on The Day of Pentecost, May 24 2026. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here (sermon begins at 35:45). The sermon with captions may be viewed here or below . 

Scripture texts: 
John 20:19-23, Acts 2:1-21

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Good morning, Beloved of God! And what a Good morning it is. Today we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the Birthday of Christ’s Church by the Power of Mother Spirit, and the Third in a Trinity of High Holy Days in the Christian Liturgical Year. With the Holy Mother and the Midwives, we witnessed the Very Good Love of Eternal God born in flesh at Christmas. With Mary Magdalene and the women who stayed, we tasted the everlasting goodness of the Bread of Life, the Living Water who is Christ, Resurrected at Easter. And today, with the 12 Apostles, a few other men, and at least a hundred Women, according to Acts 1, we are Born anew of Breath and Fire, formed into One Body — the Body of Christ, and His Second Coming— by the Indwelling of God’s Eternally Hovering Holy Spirit. Our Beginning, Our Brother, Our Breath: One God, now and forever. And so I pray: 

Holy Spirit you are welcome here
Come flood this place and fill the atmosphere
Your glory, God, is what our hearts long for
To be overcome by your presence, Lord (1)

As many of you know, I traveled down to San Antonio, TX at the end of April for a gathering of almost 200 visual artists and musicians by invitation of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. We spent three intense days together, teaching and learning and learning how to teach and write Songs in the Key of Resistance: That is, new songs for a new generation of human and civil rights organizers, activists, and marchers for peace and justice. Since returning, I’ve gotten to teach and lead a number of those songs both here and at broader public actions like MayDay down in Salem, and will continue to do so. 

But for today, I want to tell you more about the last thing we did as a gathered mass of cultural organizers. We left before dawn on our final morning and headed up to the South Texas ICE Processing Center in San Antonio which detains, processes, and traffics thousands of people each month to other for-profit detention centers, which are really concentration camps for our disappeared siblings. We were invited there by a local pastor whose congregants have made daily presence at the facility a sacred act of worship, who asked to come not as agitators or protestors, but as family called in to offer presence, bear witness, and testify to who and what we saw, and to the power of testimony in itself. 

When we arrived around 9:30 that morning, we marched in silence from our buses to the facility about a quarter mile away and arranged ourselves in a wide horseshoe around the facility. We occupied every sidewalk to the end of the street so that every single one of our stolen siblings who entered the valley of the shadow of death could know:

No están solos, No están solos
Juntos hacemos la liberación (2)

“You are not alone, you are not alone, together we bring about liberation.” We prayed, we chanted, We raised our fists in solidarity with the detained, and looked in the eyes of every driver that came and went, filling and emptying their vans of God’s Beloved, not to shame them but to proclaim that we would not let them hide behind the blacked out windows of their 21st century death trains, and to plead with them by the Divine Power of Spirit humming and thrumming between us, to un-bury and resurrect their humanity from this cemetery of hate. And we sang. Over and over, we sang our songs of Freedom.
 
We were only supposed to be there for 30 or 45 minutes, but having heard and seen our convocation, someone from inside came out to tell us a man set for deportation would be in front of the judge soon, and if we could stay just a little longer it might save his life, so we stayed. And we sang. 

At some point, our body of witnesses contracted from a wide arc to a tight, small circle surrounding the driveway into the building’s underground garage, and as we did, the literal vibration of holy energy intensified, the sparks of creation crackled, and new songs were born. A couple of our youngest leaders -- two kids from Atlanta -- started a stomp and clap rhythm, another woman, a Black sister, started singing a simple descant: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom. As others joined in the rhythm and harmony, new bass notes bellowing to anchor the hymn, a second canticle blossomed from our Latiné sisters, “Liberación, Liberación, Liberación,” and we became a symphony on the street. It went on like this for 5 or 10 minutes, more and more voices weaving new harmonies and descants into and around that Declaration of freedom. But then, as that song faded to its natural end while the energy stayed hot like a livewire, another song rose from the center, led by a brother with a deep, booming voice, and it went like this:

They tried to bury us
They tried to bury us
They didn't know
That we were seeds (3)

Our chorus ascended, voices weaving in and out, over and around, as our voices and bodies became one triumphant murmuration, moving to the rhythm and pulse of freedom. 

I wish I could convey the gravity and grandeur of our collective experience so you could experience it yourself, but I can’t. It’s too much, and much too holy for words. Which is why, I suspect, to some passers by who witnessed us Witnessing that day, and maybe even a few listening to my testimony this day, we looked like an intoxicated horde of weirdos and crazies who ought to be detained right alongside the disappeared. Kind of like how the Church in Acts sounded drunk on something as each person spoke and was spoken to, understood and was understood in their own and other languages. We might have looked or sounded like that.

But the Truth is that Spirit fell upon us and we were filled, And I mean filled with Her power -- a power beyond our making or manipulation, which could not be contained or controlled, but only conspired with. And so we did -- conspire that is. She filled our lungs with her breath and we breathed liberation, She gave us tongues of truth and we declared it on that street. And God became incarnate in and among us, transforming that place of terror into Holy Ground. If only for a moment. 

And the reason I know it was the Spirit of God and not some other spirit of drunkenness or disorder, is this: Those who came to that building not knowing when or how or if they’d ever leave, entered not with a spirit of fear or timidity, but filled with the sustaining Breath of Peace, the bolstering presence of our host of witnesses, and the knowing that if nothing else they were not alone but surrounded in the Love of Christ that casts out all Fear. 

Listen: We did not dismantle any systems that day. We did not defeat fascism. We didn’t confront any of the powers or people whose complicity preserves and protects those systems or even that particular ICE center. 

Which is not to say that agitation and strategic escalation through direct action is never warranted or necessary -- it most certainly is, especially as those powers escalate their violence and increase their stranglehold on all of us. Indeed, sometimes the Spirit falls in fire and fury, empowering us to burn down and raze to the ground systems of oppression lest they bury more of God’s Beloved.

We have seen that many times! We’ve seen Her fire called down by prophets of old who delivered God’s people through fire and sea, and we’ve seen Her turn to ash literal buildings like the first White House and Minneapolis’s 3rd precinct -- buildings built on the backs of the marginalized, demonized, ostracized, pathologized, criminalized, and economically pauperized, whose bodies Empire steals to then produce their profits and pay their bills. 

Over and over we’ve seen her fill the people who fill the streets with a Word of Truth to Power for the liberation of their neighbors in every city where the powers and principalities of this dark age trample on people and crush our spirits.

It is no small or particularly unique thing when Spirit shows up in a violent rush of wind like She did in Acts 2.

But this day down in San Antonio wasn’t about fire or fury… It was just about presence. All we did was show up. Bear witness. Sing. Surround. Send our siblings in to a tomb with the fullness of our resurrection hope. And, yes, we got to see one man walk free from that building instead of being deported to parts and places unknown as he and his lawyers had expected, when they walked in.

So even though our singing swelled with the fullness of Spirit’s presence into a momentary piercing of the cosmic veil, during which we all felt and saw and experienced God’s eternity, the day itself felt a lot more like the Johannine Pentecost in the Upper Room where Jesus’ disciples were huddled behind locked doors, tormented by the State’s torture of their brother, utterly terrified of what was coming for them next. Those disciples are who I think of when I consider the State-imposed paralysis of our Trans siblings who cannot travel without fear of beatings or worse; of our siblings forced to travel in secret to neighboring states for the reproductive care they need but are denied and even criminalized for seeking. 

And they’re who I remembered as I watched some of our snatched siblings taken into that locked building while others chose to surrender themselves to a fascist regime rather than hiding in fear of its deputized Thieves.

Because Back in the upper room on the night of his resurrection, Jesus came to them as he had before, present in his own very-real, still-wounded flesh and blood body, for them to touch and hold and smell and see -- because God is not and has never been something to be thought or intellectualized or spiritualized, but someOne who is always, always, incarnate among us. He invoked the Peace he left them with the last the they gathered in this very room just three days prior.

And He called on Holy Spirit -- the very same Paraclete he promised them at the end of that supper in John 14: Spirit of comfort and consolation, Spirit of Truth, their Helper and Advocate who would be within and beside them through all that was to come. When he called on Her, she came less like a Consuming Fire and more like a Breeze. He breathed her into them, the way She breathed life over the formless void at the dawn of all Creation, the way She breathed resurrection into that Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel, the way a Mother breathes calm into her wailing child by drawing them near to share her own deep, long, steady and steadying breaths and offering the safety of her heartbeat in rhythm with theirs. 

That’s a real thing, you know? You probably already know that when you pull an anxious person into your own calm embrace or are pulled into the calm embrace of another when you’re all pins and needles, that calm spreads. Indeed, it’s a scientifically studied and sustained phenomenon that if you hold that hug for 20 seconds or longer, it triggers the release of oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone” that nurtures your sense of safety, bonding, and trust, which in turn literally lowers your heartbeat and enables the body to reduce and metabolize the stress hormone, cortisol. 

Doctors and Practitioners call this powerfully healing exchange of body and breath co-regulation. I call it Pentecost. 

For this is Spirit still among us; moving among us, filling our lungs, swirling in our songs, pulsing in rhythm alongside our writhing and dancing and hugging and holding bodies, to sustain us as we sustain others with Her peace that surpasses all understanding and Her power that cannot be contained or controlled by any empire or enemy. She is here, she is here, Beloved of God She is still here. 

And so, Beloved, let this be our prayer of Pentecost: May She fill our lungs with Her breath, stir our souls with Her song, and come alive in us as flesh on dry bones, this day and all days that we may be woven into One Body in Christ Jesus, one humming murmuration, One Song of Liberation resounding across our land, to the praise and glory of our Still-Creating Creator: Amen, Àshe, Ahó, Lord let this be so.

(1) Holy Spirit performed by JesusCulture. © Bryan Torwalt/Katie Torwalt. Used with permission. 
(2) No Están Solos written by Francisco Herrera, Emma’s Revolution and The Peace Poets. This song was written in collaboration with migrant justice and anti-militarism organizers from the School of the America’s Watch in front of Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. Always powerful song to sing to those who are inside and to each other as we bravely speak out and act for justice. Learn more at https://kairoscenter.org
(3) They Tried to Bury Us. Shared and learned at SKOR San Antonio in April 2026. This song was based on a quote often attributed to Mexican migrants but originated in ancient Greece by a man (ironically) criminalized for homosexuality.