Unlocked: Pentecost for Doubters, Deconstructors, and the Depleted

Pentecost and social justice belong in the same sentence, and this Season 3 finale makes the case that they always have.

This episode goes back to the room before the wind came. The locked room. Full of frightened, grieving, failing people. And that is exactly where Jesus starts.

Two Pentecost accounts belong together. Acts 2 is the outer Pentecost: loud, public, multilingual. But Joel's prophecy is a social inversion, sons and daughters, old and young, servants and free. The crowd in the street is itself a justice statement: colonized people hearing the gospel in their own languages, not Rome's. And the multilingual miracle is the reversal of Babel, not uniformity, but the many held together without erasing each other.

John 20 is the inner Pentecost: intimate, quiet, a locked room. Jesus walks through the locked door, shows his wounds, and breathes on them. The Greek emphysaō appears only once elsewhere, in Genesis 2, when God breathes life into the first human. New creation, in the dark, with people who ran.

Romans 8 tells us the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in us and intercedes with groans when we can't find words. That resurrection power is available now.

Spirit-fueled faith is not a feeling. It is a direction. This is the Season 3 send-off.

Scripture References:

·      John 20:19–23 

·      Acts 2:1–21 

·      Acts 4:32–35 

·      Joel 2:28–29 

·      Genesis 2:7 

·      Genesis 11:1–9 

·      Ezekiel 37:1–5 

·      Romans 8:26–27 

·      Philippians 2:6–8

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

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Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Holy Disruption: Reclaiming a Justice-Rooted Faith course info and interest list

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"Find your justice mindset" quiz!

Transcript

Episode 20: Unlocked: Pentecost for Doubters, Deconstructors, and the Depleted

Jesus, Justice + Mercy · Season 3 Finale  · May 28, 2026

What if the Spirit was never waiting for you to be ready? The disciples locked in that room on resurrection evening are all the answer we need.

Music

Welcome to Jesus, Justice + Mercy. I'm Kristen Brock, and this is Episode 20, the Season 3 finale.

Every year, the church celebrates Pentecost.

And if your church celebrates, there is probably something special about the service, as there should be. But today, I want to go back to a different room before that wind came. Because I think that's where most of us actually live. And I think that room has something to teach us that the celebration part can skip right past.

This is the culmination of 20 episodes of season 3. And if you have been with me for any part of it, whether you found your way here somewhere in the middle, or you've been in this from the beginning, I’m grateful. 

This is the episode where we finally walk out the door and meet something new.

OPENING

I called this season Discipleship on Fire, and if you have followed the arc, you know we spent the whole season going deeper before we went anywhere else. The season moved from inner formation → communal courage → repair → imagination, not as isolated stages, but as an integrated, forward-looking journey of discipleship.

We talked about Black theology, lament, white Christian nationalism, wilderness faith, repair, and what it costs to stay awake. We talked about grief and the women the church silenced and, last week, about mental health and what it means to have a theology big enough to hold the dark.

And now it's Pentecost. The Spirit has come in a mighty and memorable way. And the question is: what does that mean for us, and what do we do with that?

WITNESSING THE SEASON

It probably goes without saying, but I think a lot of us are tired. Not in a way that means we're done, but in the way that means we are doing the work. Staying with things that are uncomfortable. Letting questions sit without rushing to answers. Listening to voices that our tradition may not have handed us, and then letting them teach us something.

That is formation. The idea that we can transform ourselves from the inside to be more in line with Jesus.

You might recall some of the people who walked through this season with us. I share them not as illustrations, but as teachers.

Kieawnie, whose theology of belovedness challenged every version of faith that requires you to earn your place at the table. Conscious, who taught us that you cannot heal what you will not name. The women of Scripture who were renamed and silenced, and whose leadership the church lost and is still paying for. Fannie Lou Hamer, whose mustard seed faithfulness on an ordinary weekday is still the most honest picture I have of what this work looks like in action.

And last week, the story I have carried for a while, finally a bit public. My son. The garage floor. The 5150. Sharing a vision of the church that can hold these difficult stories with care and understanding, not afraid to see it for what it is.

I said last week that Ezekiel's valley of dry bones was the image I kept coming back to. Scattered and disconnected. They were bones unable to reconstitute themselves. And God puts them together, describing tendons and flesh and skin. Verse 5 of chapter 37 says, This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life

God enters the valley first and then gives us life.

That's what this season tried to be. A community that enters the valley. That sees it for what it is. That is open to new understanding and then decides to stay.

And now comes something new.

WHO WERE THESE PEOPLE

Today, I first want to go to Acts 2, but I want to go slowly. Because I think we rush past context, and when we look at the Bible, I believe context is everything.

So, let me set the scene.

These are the disciples, the inner circle, the ones who had been with Jesus for three years. We often idolize them, but here's what we sometimes forget: they are also the ones who ran. When Jesus was arrested in the garden, they scattered. Peter denied him three times before the rooster crowed. Judas had already made his decision. The women stayed at the cross; Scripture is specific about that, but most of the men? Gone.

These are people living with the specific weight of having failed someone they loved in the worst possible moment. They gave up their entire lives, and now they are here.

They're in Jerusalem, probably someone's upper room. Some scholars think it may have been the same room where they ate the last supper just days earlier. So they are back in a familiar space, sitting with fresh grief, in a city where the religious authorities had just orchestrated an execution. The threat for them is not abstract. Their doors are locked for a reason.

John tells us it's the evening of the first day of the week. I think Mary Magdalene’s story here is important. The morning of that same day, she had already encountered the risen Jesus in the garden. She had already told the disciples what she saw. Yet they were still in the room with the door locked.

She had been with Jesus from the beginning. She had stood at the cross when they ran, gone to the tomb in the dark that morning. She had seen him and she had told them what she saw. And it is worth pausing on that because in that culture, a woman's testimony was not legally admissible. Jesus didn't seem to care. He chose her anyway, as the first witness of the resurrection, as the first person commissioned to carry the news that changed everything. The first preacher of the gospel was a woman. And if your church is still debating whether women should be allowed to teach or preach to men, I would gently invite you to take that up with Jesus. He already answered it. In a garden. On the first Easter morning.

And yet, the disciples were still behind that locked door.

I don't say that to be critical of them. I say it because it sounds so familiar to me. Some of us have heard the good news. We have had moments where the resurrection felt tangible. And we are still in rooms with proverbial locked doors. Processing and afraid. Still not entirely sure what to do with what we've been told or know.

I'll be honest with you. There are mornings when I am the person in that locked room. I record a podcast about courageous discipleship, and then I sit with my coffee and watch what is happening in this country and in the church, and I wonder if anything matters. If I am making a dent, and sometimes if the work is worth the emotional and relational cost. I know what it is to have heard the good news and still not be able to make myself open the door. That's not a failure of faith. That is just being human. And thankfully, it is exactly where Jesus starts.

The door is locked because they are afraid, and not of something abstract. John tells us plainly: it is fear of the religious leaders. The same authorities who had handed Jesus over to Pilate were still in power. Nothing had changed structurally. The empire was still the empire. The temple leadership was still the temple leadership. The resurrection had happened, but the systems that killed him were still intact.

I think that’s a justice detail. The disciples are not hiding from a vague threat; they are hiding from a specific system of power that has already demonstrated what it does to people who disrupt it.

And into that room with all of the fear, the grief, the failure, the locked door, the still-intact unjust system, Jesus walks.

Not through a door that they decided to unlock. He walked through the locked one. And that tells me the lengths He is willing to go to meet me where I’m at. 

THE TWO PENTECOSTS

There are actually two Pentecost accounts in the New Testament, and I think they offer us a fascinating roadmap.

Most of us know Acts 2. The day of Pentecost, which was fifty days after the resurrection. Many faith traditions mark those 50 days. The disciples are gathered together when suddenly there is a sound like a rushing wind, filling the whole house. Tongues of fire rest on each of them. They begin to speak in other languages, and the crowds outside hear them in their own tongues. Parthians and Medes. People from every corner of the known world. Every language is happening at once.

Then Peter stands up and preaches. And he quotes the prophet Joel: "In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions; your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days.” Joel 2:28-29.

I want us to hear what Joel is describing. Because this is not a spiritual moment that is indifferent to social structures. It’s actually a social inversion. Sons AND daughters. Old AND young. Servants AND free. The Spirit doesn't fall on the credentialed. It doesn't fall on the ordained. It doesn't fall on the powerful or the educated or the theologically certified or those who attend Sunday School each week. It falls on the ones the temple system excluded. Women. The young. Slaves. 

And look at who is standing in that crowd. Remember, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from across the known world, many of them descendants of communities that the empire had already scattered. Colonized people, hearing the gospel proclaimed in their own languages, not the language of Rome. The Spirit does not fall on the powerful center and trickle outward. It falls simultaneously on the margins, in every tongue, to every scattered people. That is the opposite of how empire works.

The very first public act of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church is the redistribution of spiritual authority to the people the institution had kept from them. It also does not slip past me that even then they believed they were in the last days. Two thousand years ago.

This passage is a justice event. The first sermon of the Church is built on a text that tears down every wall that kept people out.

I don't want us to rush past the multilingual miracle either. We live in a cultural moment where there are very loud voices that proclaim to be Christians, telling us that unity requires uniformity. That belonging requires assimilation. That if you want to be part of us, you need to look and sound a particular way. Pentecost says the exact opposite. The Spirit does not translate everyone into one language. The Spirit speaks every language simultaneously. The miracle here is not homogeneity. The miracle is that the many are held together without erasing each other.

There's actually an older story underneath this one. In Genesis 11, we read about the tower of Babel. The scattering of languages as a consequence for people who built a city and a tower and wanted to make a name for themselves, People who were now unable to understand each other, and were sent in separate directions. Pentecost is the reversal of Babel. But notice what this reversal is not. God does not gather everyone back into one language. God does not undo the diversity. The Spirit speaks every language simultaneously, and everyone understands. The miracle is not that the many become one. The miracle is that the many are held together without any of them being erased. That is a vision the church has never fully lived up to. And in a moment when we are being told that unity requires sameness, it might be the most urgent word Pentecost has for us.

But I want to go back even further. Before Acts 2, there is another Pentecost moment that we talk about much less. And I think it might be the one that matters most for where a lot of us are right now.

It’s in John 20. The evening of the resurrection, again in a locked room.

Starting with v.19"When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the religious leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, 'Peace be with you.' After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, 'Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.' When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'"

This is an intimate moment with those closest to him. It is quieter moment. This is not the story  with wind and fire and crowds in the street. This is Jesus, standing in a locked room, with a group of grieving, frightened, failing people and breathing on them, into them.

The word in the Greek is emphysaō, em-foo-SAW-oh to breathe into. It only appears one other time in all of Scripture. In the Septuagint, or the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, it is the word used in Genesis 2 when God forms the human being from the dust of the earth and breathes into their nostrils the breath of life.

This is new creation. Happening in a locked room. 

We might notice that before the breath, he shows them his wounds.

He doesn't arrive healed beyond recognition. He arrives with the marks of what was done to him, and he makes them visible. He doesn't hide them, minimize them, or ask the disciples to move past them quickly. He shows them. And then he breathes. 

If you were with me for Episode 13, we spent a lot of time there, the resurrection for the scarred, the shut out, and the still waiting. The scars don't disappear. They become a part of the story.

I've been sitting with that sequence for a while. The wounds come before the commission. The scars aren’t erased before sending. This is not a resurrection that pretends the crucifixion didn't happen. The resurrection doesn't erase what happened. It redeems it.

A commentary I read, published under Street Psalms, described John's Pentecost as the inner big bang of creation, the intimate, private moment that precedes the public explosion of Acts 2. Acts 2 is what happens when the inner breath moves outward into the world. You cannot have the outer wind without first receiving the inner breath.

And that is what I hope this season has been. The inner work. The dry bones coming together before the breath arrives.

THE BREATH AND THE WOUND

I want to stay in John 20 a little longer because what happens next is something the Church has largely sat on for 2,000 years.

After Jesus breathes on them, he says: "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

In Greek, that word retain is krateo, kruh-TAY-oh meaning to grasp, to hold fast, to take possession of. To hold someone bound. And the word translated forgive is aphiemi, uh-FEE-uh-mee which is the exact opposite. To send away. To release. To let go. The Spirit-breathed community is given the authority to do both: to release what is binding people, and to refuse to let harm stay buried under a false peace.

The first act of this newly commissioned community is restorative. Not doctrinal or institutional. Not even evangelical in the way we usually use that word. The first thing the Spirit commissions these people to do is participate in the work of forgiveness and repair.

I want to be careful here, because this text has been used in some traditions to give religious authority exclusive power over who receives grace, and that is not what I'm saying and I don't believe that is what this scripture is saying. I think Jesus is doing something much more radical than that. He is handing the repair work to the people in the room. To the ones who ran, who failed, and are still afraid. He is saying: you are now participants in the healing of what is broken. What I did at the cross is now for you to take to the world

That is a profound thing to say to a community that includes people who need that forgiveness themselves. And it is a profound moment to realize that Jesus meant us too. Even in all of our mess.

Here is where the justice thread comes in directly, because this matters for how we understand repair work in the world, not just between individuals, but between communities, between institutions, between the Church and the people it has harmed.

The Spirit-breathed community here is not a court of law. It is not a place where we adjudicate guilt and assign punishment. Or a place where we legislate faith. It is a healing community with the authority and the responsibility to break cycles of harm. To name what happened in order to make repair possible. To refuse to let buried harm stay buried under a false peace.

That's what Episode 8 was about. Starting in the rubble. Reconciliation that holds. You cannot have Acts 2 without John 20. You cannot have the public Pentecost, the Spirit poured on all flesh, without first doing the inner work Jesus gave us of naming harm and beginning repair.

I want to say this directly if you are still deep in the deconstruction space. If you are sitting with a faith broken by harm done in Jesus' name, by a church that looked away instead of addressing the harm, that demanded forgiveness before accountability, that rushed past the wound to get to the celebration, that experience is real and harmful.

The locked room is a real place of fear and sadness. And Jesus did not wait outside it.

He walked through the locked door. 

You don't have to have your theology sorted before the Spirit shows up. The disciples didn't. They were still afraid, still confused, still processing, still thinking that Jesus was going to overthrow the government, and his breath came anyway.

Last week I said: the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, including the parts still healing. I believe that. I believe it for my sons. I believe it for every family sitting in a church pew, carrying something the church doesn't have language for. And I believe it for every person listening to this who isn't sure they belong in a faith conversation anymore.

\WHAT SPIRIT-FUELED FAITH ACTUALLY MEANS

I want to use a term I call Spirit-fueled faith. So what does it mean, when we talk about that?

Here's what I don't want it to mean. I don't want it to be another version of "go change the world" that makes people who are already exhausted feel guilty for not doing more. I don't want it to be inspirational language that lands today and dissipates before Tuesday.

I want it to mean something specific and sustainable.

Let me share what the first post-Pentecost community actually did, because I think we often brush past this. It is one of my favorite pictures of what the Church could be.

Acts 4:32–35. "All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had... there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need."

The first description we get of the Pentecost community in action is economic. The Spirit poured out, and the immediate fruit was redistribution. No one lacked it says. They held things in common.

I'm not telling you the early church was a perfect utopia. But when the Spirit moved, it drew people toward each other, not just in spiritual ways but also in material ones. Spirit-fueled faith is not only an interior experience. It produces something external, concrete, and sometimes costly.

And the people it moves toward are the ones who lack, not those with power or those in leadership positions.

I don't want to skip past what it means to hold that image, a community where no one lacked, in this particular moment. We are living in a time when the most visible Christian voices in our culture are cheering the dismantling of the programs that exist precisely to make sure people don't go without. Food. Housing. Healthcare. All the things that stand between a family and the abyss. Things that people need just to survive, let alone anything for them to thrive. When the people who claim the name of Christ celebrate that dismantling, we have to be willing to say: That is not the Pentecost pattern. That is the opposite of it. The early church didn't cut the safety net. They became one.

I hope that you’ve felt that as a through line of this entire podcast. But more importantly, I believe it is the through line of Scripture. God keeps orienting His people toward those at the margins. Some scholars have counted over 2,000 verses in Scripture about poverty and care for the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the imprisoned, the sick. Over 2,000. And yet somehow the church keeps acting like justice is a political add-on rather than the heartbeat of the whole story. The Spirit poured out on all flesh was poured first on the people the temple excluded. And the community it created immediately began organizing its resources around those with the least.

That is what Justice looks like in a Pentecost frame.

Now. What does that mean for us, here, in 2026, with the world the way it is?

I want to be honest: it is easy to feel like the scale of what's broken is so large that nothing we do matters. I am still watching things happen in this country and in the church that make me want to lock my own door and stay inside. Literally.

But here's what this season taught me. And I am grateful, because one of the greatest gifts of doing this podcast is the learning and growth I get to experience in its making.

Kieawnie serving the unhoused on the streets of her city, that is Spirit-fueled faith. The woman with the issue of blood who fought through the crowd just to touch the hem of his garment, that is Spirit-fueled faith. Fannie Lou Hamer showing up to register voters after everything that was done to her body, that is Spirit-fueled faith. Your mustard seed faithfulness on a back porch on a Tuesday, that is Spirit-fueled faith. 

If you are sitting with this thinking, I am not Fannie Lou Hamer. I don't have a platform. I don't know where to start, or if what I do even matters, just know: you don't have to do all of it. You don't have to fix the whole system. You just have to do the thing your hands can actually touch right now. It might be a meal or a conversation. It might be rethinking your vote or showing up for someone who needs to know they are not alone. Or even keeping your eyes on the hard stuff when everything in you wants to look away.

Spirit-fueled faith does not require that you have everything figured out. It does not require that the systems be fixed before you act. Thankfully, it does not require that your theology be complete, that your deconstruction be resolved, or that your wounds be healed. It requires that you take the next step out of the locked room. Even if you are afraid. Even if you are still healing. Even if every ounce of your being is still unsure. The Spirit doesn't require our greatness. It just requires movement.

Because the Spirit is what moves. Not our readiness.

I want to say something to the people who are still deconstructing, still not sure what they believe about any of this. Some of the most faithful, justice-rooted people I have encountered in this space are people whose faith got broken open and reconstructed around something that feels more honest. The disciples in that locked room were not sure what they believed yet either. They were frightened and confused and had watched everything they thought they understood get overturned in the worst possible way.

And Jesus didn't wait for them to work it out before he breathed on them.

Paul tells us something in Romans 8 that I don't think we sit with enough, or maybe it’s that we don’t give it the weight it deserves. In verses 26-27, he says the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. When we don't know how to pray, when our theology feels broken, and our door is still locked, and we cannot find language for what we are carrying, the Spirit is already in it, already interceding, already groaning on our behalf. Paul also tells us in that same chapter that the Spirit living in us is the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. The resurrection power is available to us right now. The same power that rolled back the stone is what we are tapping into when we take that next step out of the locked room. The breath Jesus breathed into that room didn't just commission the disciples. It stayed with them. And it stays with us. And maybe that is one thing we can rest on.

THE SEND-OFF

We are finishing a season that may have asked a lot of you.

We went back to the rubble. We sat with the grief. We named the harm. We learned from voices that the dominant culture has been trying to silence. Hopefully, we let our theology get bigger, and maybe less easy to tidy up than when we started.

And now we see Jesus standing in the room, saying, "Peace be with you." As the Father sent me, so I send you.

Not: as soon as you're ready or when you've resolved your questions. Not even after you've finished grieving or healing or deconstructing.

Now. As the Father sent me. So I send you. I have so many examples in my life of fighting God, I am not ready. Wait, you want me to do what? but I don't recall ever hearing him ask whether I was ready or not when he showed me where I was supposed to go.

I want us to slow down and share what that sending actually looks like, because I think we move past it too quickly. "As the Father sent me" isn’t just a description of direction. It is describing a posture. Paul tells us in Philippians 2 that Jesus, though he was in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. He emptied himself. He took the form of a servant. He humbled himself. That is the shape of the sending, not with power leveraged from the top, but with presence given from below. When Jesus says, "as the Father sent me, so I send you," he is not just pointing us outward. He is describing what it looks like to go.

That pattern of sending matters. How did the Father send Jesus? Into the mess. Into the margins. Into the places the powerful didn't want to go. To the woman at the well, the man with the unclean spirit, the leper, the tax collector, and the children being turned away. Into the temple to flip the tables. Into the garden to pray until he sweats blood. Into the hands of an empire that killed him.

That is the pattern of sending. And the Holy Spirit now carries that pattern and breathes it into every generation of the Church.

This summer I’m taking a breath. Theology Unleashed is coming. It will be short, hopefully a little fun. Each week, doing Hebrew and Greek word studies, considerably less scripted than usual. It is a Sabbath season, and it is needed. Elijah needed to eat before he could run. The disciples waited in the upper room before the wind came. This will be a season for all of us to rest just a little.

And then, this fall, Season 4. The Reckoning Season. We are going to go deeper into a lot of the topics I have covered in the past. We are going to talk about the church's specific history with slavery and segregation, about reparations, about what repair looks like when we stop intellectualizing it. We are going to name things that might make people, including me, uncomfortable. 

But we can only do that work because of this season. You cannot reckon with what you have not yet been formed to hold. I am hoping Season 3 was an opportunity for formation.

So here is what I want to leave you with.

The door of our locked rooms opens outward. The disciples didn't stay there. The breath moved them, eventually, gradually, imperfectly, into the streets, into the city, and into the world. Into a community where no one lacked and into a movement that crossed every boundary the empire had drawn.

Spirit-fueled faith isn’t a feeling. It is not a moment. It is a direction. It is the slow, costly, Spirit-powered turning of a life and a community toward those furthest from the center of power. 

I always want the feeling. I want to wait until I am sure, until it feels right and good. I want the fleece story. And I don't dismiss the importance of being sure of what we are hearing. But waiting for a feeling can put me on a rollercoaster when I really just need to take one step forward. And thankfully, it isn’t my power that propels me anyway.

That is what Jesus did at Pentecost. It is what the Spirit commissions us to do. And it is what this work, this podcast, this conversation, and this community are all about.

Thank you for this season. I'll see you this summer.

Jesus. Justice. No apologies.