NOTE: This piece was originally published at our Substack newsletter A Public Witness.
Church services around the world yesterday (June 8) included a reading from Acts 2 to commemorate the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended on the early followers of Jesus.
“Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”
Violent gusts, dancing fires, a babble of languages. A holy day.
Glancing at my phone while at church, I saw the stream of live news pouring in from downtown Los Angeles. Tear gas and pepper spray violently filled the air. Blasts from flashbang grenades danced across the streets. Voices shouted out, mixing chants, cries, and curses. An unholy moment.
For the third straight day, protesters had taken to the streets Sunday morning to challenge raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. In the city of “the angels” the incense of the Sabbath Day was replaced with toxins banned from use in war but allowed against peaceful protesters. People were accosted on Pentecost, including those peacefully protesting or practicing their First Amendment right to report on the events.
Officers in a cloud of smoke and tear gas they deployed to disperse protesters in Los Angeles, California, on June 8, 2025. (Jill Connelly/ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy)
On Friday, masked agents raided an apparel manufacturer, a Home Depot, and other businesses. Crowds of people quickly emerged to protest the immigration raids. The mostly peaceful crowd was quickly pushed back by militarized police officers. Some people responded to such force with violence, throwing things at police or lighting cars on fire.
In addition to people who clashed with officers, many peaceful protesters have also been arrested. Union leader David Huerta, who was nonviolently protesting the immigration arrests, was tased and shoved to the ground, requiring hospitalization while under arrest. Reporters have also been hit by tear gas, including a CBS reporter who was temporarily blinded and an Australian reporter who was deliberately shot at close range with a rubber bullet. California has strong legal protections safeguarding the rights of reporters to cover protests and civil demonstrations.
As the arrests and protests grew, Los Angeles United Methodist Bishop Dottie Escobedo-Frank on Saturday urged people to stand with targeted immigrants.
“I am calling on all Christ-following people, and on all tenderhearted people, to stand with those who are being ripped apart from their families. Speak to your politicians. March in peaceful protest. While you are there, make sure everyone is safe and responds in peace. Be witnesses on the streets so that the horror does not happen under cover. Pray for those whose cries you hear. Pray for the ICE agents to lay down their weapons,” she wrote. “I am calling for those in power to remove their weapons of warfare from our loving neighborhoods, our peaceful cities, and our welcoming states. Use your power for good, and not for evil.”
A protester holds a sign in front of a line of California National Guard troops in Los Angeles, California, on June 8, 2025. (Qiu Chen/Xinhua/Alamy)
While reporters and peaceful protesters were accosted on Pentecost by militarized forces, on the other side of the country tanks have been rolling into the nation’s capital so President Donald Trump can enjoy a military parade on his birthday this Saturday. About 7,000 military personnel are expected to participate in the parade, along with displays of rocket launchers, missiles, and fighter jets. The estimated $45 million for the event includes millions for repairing the streets since they weren’t intended for massive weapons of war to roll over them. (That amount of money could instead fund school lunches for 14 million high school students or provide Medicaid coverage for nearly 15,000 children or cover a year of disability compensation for more than 7,000 military veterans.)
Trump wanted such a military parade during his first term but faced opposition from Pentagon leaders. Now, as he looks forward to his show, he’s also militarizing the streets of Los Angeles. California National Guard troops arrived in the city Sunday morning after Trump ordered them to — over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who blasted Trump for “the acts of a dictator, not a president.” The man who inspired an insurrection against the nation’s Capitol and then pardoned those who violently attacked police officers is now taking the rare move of federalizing National Guard soldiers to stop protests, though the presence of National Guard troops instead seemed to intensify the opposition in the streets. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he might send Marines into the city.
As we watch the militarized policing in L.A. and the military parade in D.C., we can see what some scholars call the “imperial boomerang.” Aimé Césaire, a 20th-century Black poet and politician in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, noted this phenomenon as he wrote against colonialism. He argued that people justify barbarism as long as it’s used against others, but once they’ve “legitimized it,” it eventually is also “inflicted on them.”
“Then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss,” he explained. “They are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.”
German philosopher Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish and fled into exile when the Nazis came to power, similarly wrote about “the feared boomerang effect of imperialism upon the homeland” in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. French philosopher Michel Foucault also made this argument, warning that the repressive methods governments use to control people in colonies and other lands eventually are used against their own citizens as well.
In that light, Sunday offered an apocalyptic moment. Not in the sense of end-of-world chaos as some think of that term (and as some rightwing pundits want to cast L.A. now). Rather, the term “apocalypse” means an unveiling. The countering images of Pentecost’s wind and fire with the chaos in the streets of L.A. should be a revelatory call to action. It’s a question of who will we trust: Spirit-filled preachers proclaiming a global gospel or the exclusionary violence of empire?
A protester holds a sign in front of a line of California National Guard troops in Los Angeles, California, on June 8, 2025. (Eric Thayer/Associated Press)
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, who died last week, noted that Pentecost provided the early church with the gusto it needed to challenge the empire.
“The book of Acts begins in Pentecost when the wind breaks out in many languages and many tongues, a breaking of old tribal patterns of convenience,” he explained. “When the church knows the wind-spirit, what happens is that it has the courage and the freedom and the energy to take on the exploitative forms of empire that keep people disadvantaged. So in the book of Acts the early Christians were regularly hauled into court to appear before officials of the Roman Empire, because the status quo Roman Empire feared the inbreaking of the transformative power of gospel people. In the book of Acts the fearful crowd accused the early church that it was ‘turning the world upside down.’ Everything felt topsy-turvy where Jesus had come; the old patterns of control and certitude no longer worked.”
“We are in a like situation. We live now in a society of greed, indifference, and violence,” Brueggemann added. “It is a time in which the people of Jesus are called to stand in the spirit against the order of the day. The church stands against the exploitation of cheap labor and insists upon a decent wage for all workers. It stands against endless violence of guns and endless policies of war. It stands against exclusion of those who are unlike us in society. This is a time when the people of Jesus are coming to terms with our odd identity because the gospel, mandated right there in the book of Acts, is to turn the world right side up. The wind unleashes a mighty force into the world that the old powers of status quo never welcome.”
May that wind blow through our churches and lives.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
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