What do the blues and Pentecost have in common? For some, it seems impossible for one to declare “I’m tore down” alongside Freddie King on Saturday and sing Robert J. Fryson’s “God is the joy and the strength of my life” with the choir on Sunday. Yet this tension, this collusion of sorrow and celebration, finds home in the Black experience. Both Pentecost and the blues are spiritual expressions born in suffering and sustained by hope, reaching toward something beyond our physical reality — something divine.
In his 2025 blockbuster “Sinners,” I believe Ryan Coogler explores the connection between Pentecost and the blues. Set in late-Prohibition era Mississippi, “Sinners” tells the story of twins Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who open a juke joint in a repurposed slaughterhouse. The “Black Panther” director’s choice of era and goal is worth pondering. In Jim Crow Mississippi, White supremacy reigns. Day-to-day life for Black folks included state-sanctioned violence, segregation, and the erasure of their worth. A juke joint was a form of resistance, a place where Black people could gather freely, unobserved by White eyes, to remember themselves and try, if only for a moment, to be human through the joys of music, food, drink and dance. Juke joints were almost always repurposed spaces. In the case of Coogler’s story, the repurposed slaughterhouse doubles down on the symbol of how places marked by destruction can be reclaimed as sites of joy.
At the grand opening, people flood into the club. Listening to the blues, they sway, sing, and move, filled with the Spirit and the spirits, testifying to an innate rhythm. On to the stage comes Smoke and Stack’s cousin Sammy “Preacher Boy.” As he plays, he turns the juke joint into a sanctuary, inviting those present into a liturgical moment of testifying. The song begins as a confession to his father, a minister who condemns the blues. Preacher Boy honors his father’s work but admits that he needs something he cannot find in a country church house. It is the blues, he says, that gives him that spiritual depth, compelling him to boldly declare, “I love the blues.”
As the scene unfolds, the narrator explains Preacher Boy’s playing and singing has the power to “pierce the veil between life and death.” In that moment, holy chaos erupts as ghostlike apparitions of 70s rock guitarists, 80s and 90s DJs, 2000s twerking, ballerinas, African shamans, and tribal dancers join the performance and dance. The intensity of so many eras of music and expression colliding creates an awe-inspiring scene. As if to mark the moment, the roof of the juke joint catches fire.
Ultimately, what “Sinners” shows us is that Pentecost is not confined to sanctuaries or Sunday mornings. It breaks loose in juke joints, street corners and across dance floors.
As I watched this scene, my mind kept wandering to Pentecost and the Spirit-like eruption of the secular. Pentecost exists as a moment that divinely interrupts the Roman Empire, joining nations, tribes, and the tongues of those who were previously divided. So, too, does Coogler’s dreamscape scene bring together those long dead and yet to be born, saints and sinners, holy and heathen in a divine-human encounter beyond the four walls of a church. He joins and liberates (if only for a moment) those present from a world that devalues Black flesh.
The Spirit’s work of joining is not withheld for anyone under the sound of Preacher Boy’s guitar. In fact, it flourishes — connecting the disjoined, lifting the forgotten, and sanctifying the ordinary. Here, just as in Acts 2, the Spirit does not descend onto the churchiest, most sanctified believers. Instead, it bursts forth in rhythm, sound, and bodies long denied their holiness.
Moreover, the film compels us to reflect on the role of the body in spiritual experience. Pentecost and Pentecostalism, especially in their Black expressions, have always emphasized embodiment. Shouting, dancing, crying, laying prostrate — all of these are bodily testaments to spiritual truths. Likewise, the blues is an embodied art form. The guitar speaks, feet stomp, and bodies move. In both cases, the body is not a barrier to Spirit, but its dwelling place.
Ultimately, what “Sinners” shows us is that Pentecost is not confined to sanctuaries or Sunday mornings. It breaks loose in juke joints, street corners and across dance floors. In the face of terror, trauma, and the ongoing denial of Black humanity, the Spirit still falls — ready to disrupt, gather, and transform.
