Racially motivated Riots ...

and the choice between Pentecost and Babel

On Tuesday night I was driving our middle child to a tennis match. We were coming in to North Belfast and had slowed down in a queue immediately preceding a junction. Suddenly the whir of 5 police sirens speeding towards the roundabout put my senses on high alert. Was there an accident ahead? Yet, I didn’t see any collision ahead. Rather, it seemed people were beginning to gather. The two cars in front of me hurriedly began to turn and move in the opposite direction. It was then that I saw the white placards. My heart skipped towards feelings of fear. The night before there had been anti-immigration riots in a neighboring town. I knew instinctively this was connected. Our middle child was totally unaffected by what was happening. I was being ‘dramatic’. But he was a post ceasefire child. He did not know what it felt like to be caught in riots. We turned the car and started to weave around the back streets to navigate a safe pathway through this part of Belfast. Thankfully, this protest was just a skirmish and came to nothing. However, the protests in other towns resulted in many injured with property damage and burnt out cars, including a burnt out public leisure centre in Larne.

Belfast journalist Sam McBride’s assessment of the deeply perverse logic that motivated rioters in our towns over the past week is hauntingly accurate : “In the Kafkaesque world of the rioters, they protected women by terrorising women; they opposed the strain on public services by trying to burn down a public leisure centre; they supposedly upheld traditional Christian values by rampaging through a street where a Ukrainian immigrant suffering from cancer read to her children from the Bible.” Alina Bohdan, sought refuge having come from Ukraine. She suffers from cancer and has young children. McBride described her experience by saying, “Last night she was huddled in fear reading the Bible to them as a baying racist mob swept down the street, seeking whom they might devour. What sickening insanity.”

Yet the violence is nothing new … it’s the target population that is.

For years in Northern Ireland the ‘other’ was constructed by what church building you worshipped in and whether your national identity was British or Irish. This week, as I video called with a friend from Jerusalem, he commented on the irony of reading in the Guardian how Catholics were being welcomed into traditionally loyalist housing estates in Ballymena to join in on the anti-immigration protest …. Kafkaesque.

We now have had five nights of violence in many of our major towns. All this triggered by an allegation of the sexual assault of a teenage girl. Anti-immigration riots ensued. Petrol bombs were thrown at police officers in Portadown. Immigrant families were hanging British flags outside their homes in order to mark themselves as safe from the mob. A week ago, I was attending the Irish Methodist Church’s annual conference in Thomas Street in Portadown. Now, the pastor, Darrin Thompson is spending whole nights in the same building praying as the violence erupts around him … praying for those caught up in violence … praying for peace to reign.

I keep needing to remind myself not to vilify the other – that there is a story to understand of why some youths feel violence on the streets is their only resort. For many towns, the sharp change in demographics in the last decade have created new challenges. According to Sky News, at the time of the 2021 census, three in ten residents in central Ballymena said their first language was something other than English or Irish. Yet, God’s kingdom demolishes binaries …

In Northern Ireland at this time of year, we pray for rain … not for crops to grow but for rioting to stop. On Friday, I quietly prayed for the rains to come. At first it was a drizzle, then a mizzle. By late afternoon, it was lashing. Like the Inuit community who have many words for snow, we have a wide spectrum of vocabulary for rain; Gentle terms like Irish mist – soft rain – mizzle – drizzle – a squib – a shower – a mere spit … Then there’s the cloudburst – sudden but heavy … Then there’s lashing, pelting, teeming, down pour, thunder shower. On Friday, it was a downpour and though the rioting continued, it was not as intense as the previous nights.

In Acts 2, what caught my attention was the word fulfilling the prophecy from Joel 2: ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all people’ … Not a drizzle – or a mizzle – not selective recruitment – but a downpour – a heavy saturation – oh you know it has been raining!!

This week, Pentecost has been good for me to remember for life can feel scarce and tight – Where people draw up their political lines after tragic, violent gun deaths – Where denominational anxieties continue to strain and we struggle to find a common language to help a hurting people … in the midst of all this God says:

I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh:

Too often I live in Babel territory – where I try to build up my case to justify my existence and why my belief system is right:– to ascend and strengthen my position. Yet, Babel living inevitably sows confusion, hurt and scattering can create despair if you feel your belief system and culture puts you on the outside. It can accentuate the belief: ‘this place is not my home – I no longer belong here’.

God wants us to live in Pentecost territory – letting the Spirit pour down – a place of abundant gathering – ‘I will pour out my spirit on all people’. Just like Ireland, Israel had a North South divide: In the south was Judah with Jerusalem as capital and the temple the centripetal focus for worship. It would have been easy for Judeans to imbibe superiority because in the North were the Galileans. Just as you can tell northerners in our country by their accent, you could probably tell a Galilean by theirs. It was often labelled uneducated. Yet in Acts 2 it was upon the Galileans the Spirit fell. That’s why people were so surprised. Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? These unsophisticated, uncultured ones are now the prophets? But that’s how the Spirit moves – God uses unsophisticated, uncultured Galileans to change the world. The people close to the seat of power witness nothing short of the world being turned upside down:

Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims that day, for the feast of weeks. They were coming to celebrate that moment when they journeyed from freedom in Egypt towards Sinai where God planted the law in their hearts. Little did the disciples know that it would be the pilgrims who would embody the new expression of the Spirit by showing a law that was not just going to be written in their minds – but in their hearts and in their lives; and they would become a passionate witness with centrifugal force to help turn the world upside down.

This week, there is so much grief: I lament that this will be another Summer where newcomers will feel scared to leave their homes, play in the parks, walk the streets … and yet with God’s help I know I will be inspired by the Alina’s of this world who read the bible to their children and pray. Her faith will bolster mine. Her resilience challenges my complacency. So together we pray ‘Come Holy Spirit come’.