Will you pray with me?  Spirit of the Living God, we give you thanks and praise that each one of us has found our way to this place this morning.  Great is your faithfulness to this community of your people, and our cup overflows with gratitude.  Open our ears to hear your word anew this morning.  Amen.

On a flight into Honduras in the fall of 1998, the plane approached the landing strip with unusual speed.  We bumped onto asphalt, brakes squealing, as the plane skidded to a sudden stop.  Before I knew what was happening, applause broke out in the plane’s cabin. I glanced at the other American students aboard the flight.  “Why are they clapping?” we whispered.  No one knew.  Later, we would learn that the landing strip in Tegucigalpa is considered to be one of the world’s most dangerous due to the steep approach and short, sloping runway.  There is often cheering when a pilot lands safely.  And so we joined in the cheers, eager to begin our adventure in Honduras.

I exited the plane a foreigner, a gringa, whose halting Spanish proved to be the source of confusion and embarrassment on many occasions.  For the first time, I experienced life as an inarticulate outsider.  For someone who relies, perhaps excessively, on my verbal acumen, that semester in Honduras humbled me beyond belief.  So many times I wanted to say something significant, but remained silent, because the Spanish words would not come.  By the time they did, the conversation had taken a turn, leaving me behind in a dust of confusion.  Other times, I rallied every brain cell I possessed, blurted out a string of Spanish words only to discover I had used the word “toilet,” for example, instead of “napkin.”

It was like building the tower of Babel.  You ask for a brick, and someone hands you exactly what you need.  You build with speed and efficiency.  “Ha!” you think, “we can build this thing up to the gates of heaven.”  Then one day, you again ask for a brick, but your neighbor doesn’t understand a word you’ve said.  They throw up their hands, muttering angry, unintelligible words.  The air fills with babble until each one finds a few who understand, and the half-built tower is abandoned.

It’s not a bad analogy for the church these days.  We do speak different languages.  There are the spirited Pentecostals, literally speaking in strange tongues.  There are the polite Presbyterians, who dare not dip into religious ecstasy.   There are the UCC’ers, who flash our liberal credentials by reinventing every word in the Christian vocabulary.  There are those Lutherans who intellectualize matters of the heart, those evangelicals who are concerned about the state of their neighbor’s soul.  The Episcopalians are swinging their incense while the Baptists are dunking folks in rivers…we really do speak different languages.  Most of the time, we’re all too willing to abandon our common labor—the building up the body of Christ—to isolate ourselves with those who look and speak and worship like us.

In Godly Play this year, we ended our last class with the story of Pentecost.  The curriculum insisted on telling the story of Pentecost by beginning with the story of the tower of Babel.  If Babel is the epic story of human division; Pentecost is the spirited response of unity.  If Babel is fraught with pride and hostility, Pentecost is aflame with humility and hospitality.  If Babel reminds us that we come from dust, Pentecost is the phoenix spirit rising from the ashes.  Babel is steeped in the hubris of humanity striving to reach divine heights, while Pentecost is the anointing of a God who reaches us in our very depth.

The story begins where too many religious stories begin—with a small group of believers isolating themselves from the world.  The disciples gather in the upper room with the doors closed.  They fear the religious authorities, who do not look kindly on challenging the status quo.  They fear the political authorities, who don’t give a second thought to using the tools of violence to accumulate wealth.  They appear to be confused about Jesus’ mission, and wonder why he has abandoned them.  They have gathered to quietly observe the harvest festival of Pentecost.

And yet, in the midst of another closed-door session, there came a sound, like the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled the house where they were gathered.  The Greek word for sound here is the same word used to describe God’s voice at Jesus’ baptism.  I imagine it sounded like the collective whisper of every language ever uttered.  I imagine God’s voice sounded like the height of the most beautiful articulation of the human voice and the depth of the richness of oceanic sounds, harmonized into one powerful voice, like the rushing of a mighty wind.  And there appeared tongues as of fire, resting on each one of them.  Do you sense that the author is trying to put into words something that was indescribable?  So don’t worry this morning if you can’t picture exactly what happened.  Don’t get bogged down in details, just allow your spirit to get caught up in the power of it, the mystery of God’s presence.

The disciples became filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues.  These tongues, it should be noted, are not the same as “speaking in tongues,” a spiritual gift that, elsewhere in the Bible, is described as being understood only by God.  No, these “other tongues” were other languages, such that Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and Arabians each heard God speaking to them in their native tongue.  You see, when the divine Spirit is at work, we hear God talking straight to us.  It might be through someone living on the streets, or the universal language of music, or the simple beauty of lightning bugs illuminating the night sky, but there’s no static or need for an interpreter.  God is speaking straight to us.

The story of Pentecost is often described as a story of unity.  But in truth, it is a story of particularity.  It is the good news that God comes to us just as we are, speaking our language.  Is it too much to imagine that God speaks to Pentecostals in crazy tongues, or to Presbyterians in polite liturgy?  Is it too impossible to believe that God speaks to Lutherans through intellect and to Evangelicals through the testimony of witness?  Do we believe that God is powerful enough to speak to Jews through the Torah and Muslims through the Quran?  Or do we believe we have a corner on truth, exclusive access to the one who created all living things?

Some of you know I attended a rather orthodox Christian college where I often felt like a fish out of water.  I’ll never forget—one day I was talking with a friend, and she said that her roommate believed that God’s primary language was English.  “Do you mean to tell me you don’t think God speaks Spanish?” I asked.  “Well I do, but I think English is his primary language,” she responded.  A minute later, of course, they burst out laughing and confessed they were joking, but I didn’t feel naïve for taking the bait.  Too many of us believe, just because we hear God speak our language, that our way of talking is God’s primary language.  Too many of us assume that our way of talking about God is the only legitimate articulation of the divine.

Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber observes that not much has changed since that first Pentecost.  “People are people—flawed, smug, confused, embarrassed, and embarrassing—the very people to whom God sends the Spirit…and that,” she says, “is what’s so dangerous” about the whole thing.  God is still God—the divine one loving those who are profoundly human; the force of beauty rising through the cracks of what’s broken; the dawn of hope breaking upon a landscape of despair.  God is still God—making use of broken, despairing, flawed people to do beautiful, extraordinary things.

But to receive the untamed Spirit of God, sometimes the first thing we have to give up is the pursuit of certitude.  At one time, I was certain that my place was in the established church.  As some of you have heard me confess, I don’t really have the personality of a new church start pastor—I’m too introverted, too young, too saddled with family responsibilities, too single-minded in my vision.  I never imagined myself planting a new church, but the Spirit leads us out of our comfort zones and into some strange places.  In fact, when we are filled with God’s Spirit, I’m convinced we wind up precisely where we had never intended to go—in the storm of a contrary wind, in the thick of a needy crowd, at the table with strangers, on our knees in the garden.  God takes us where we need to go, and I guess that’s how we find ourselves here this morning.

When we look at the stories of our faith, it’s almost as if God seeks out those who face undue obstacles along the way.  People like Moses, who identify with an oppressed minority even while being seduced by the privileges of those adopted into the mainstream.  People like Rahab, who find themselves squarely outside the religious institutions of their day, sworn off as sinful because they lead nontraditional lives.  People like John the Baptist, who linger on the fringe of the community and find more comfort in the solitude of wilderness than in the temple.  The divine Spirit weaves a stunning diversity of people into a rich tapestry of roles.

And so it is with us.  I was recently at the farmer’s market, in grubby gardening clothes, when I saw a familiar face.  How do I know her, I wondered, and then I remembered.  15 years ago, we met at staff training for the Appalachia Service Project.  Now the old me would have thought, wow, she looks great, and she’s got her hands full with two young kids.  I would have turned around and walked the other way.  But starting a new church has changed me.  I am open to God’s Spirit creating unusual encounters.  What used to feel like manipulative pressure to twist someone’s arm into coming to church now feels like an opportunity to offer an authentic invitation to someone who might be searching for a spiritual home.  So I pushed aside my shyness and introduced myself to Jenny, who is actually here this morning.  And as we began to catch up, she told me that her husband works for the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Program.  “Wow!” I said, “Our church just decided to support ASAP with our outreach dollars.”  Jenny’s eyes kinda lit up.  “Do you go to church?” she asked.  “Yeah,” I said.  “Actually I co-pastor a new church start called Land of the Sky United Church of Christ.”  And Jenny’s face broke into a huge smile.  “I’ve been looking for a church,” she said, “but haven’t been able to find the right fit.  Do you have young families at your church?” And when her family showed up the following Sunday, they discovered just how many young families we have.  Some people would say it was a coincidence that I ran into Jenny at the farmer’s market.  But I call it a miracle.  God’s Spirit was at work in each of us to make a way for her family to be in our midst.

Sara recently said that what’s most important on our spiritual journey is being filled with the divine spirit in a way that overflows into the world.  When we speak in new ways, she said, it’s not because the language of traditional church is wrong, but because it’s our task to constantly reclaim and reapporpriate language for a new generation.  At Land of the Sky, our primary purpose is not to scrutinize your beliefs.  We give thanks that each one of us is an expression of God’s creativity, giving language to the divine in a variety of ways.  Our purpose, instead, is to invite you into a practice that seeks to follow Jesus, understanding that this path will take us to places we never intended to go.  It will form us and transform us, it will beckon us into wild storms and along the precipice of profound stillness.  The way of Jesus will give us ears to hear those who appear strange, and inspire us to speak in new languages.  It is the way of the Spirit who blows through an ordered, isolated people and turns them loose on the streets, igniting a wild fire that consumes old assumptions and makes all things new.

Last Sunday our Justice Circle talked about a new initiative that we’ve been invited to participate in—it’s called “Straight Apology.”  It involves attending a gay Pride event while wearing a shirt that says “Hurt by the Church?  Receive a straight apology here.”  The founder of this initiative has been to countless pride events across the country, hugging gays and lesbians who have been deeply wounded by the church.  Can you imagine—accepting that our religious tradition got it wrong and taking responsibility for trying to make it right?  The truth is, regardless of whether we’re gay or not, many of us have been hurt by the church in which we grew up.  I’ve heard the stories, and they are difficult and painful tales of misuse of power and purity through exclusion.  There are stories of being told that we are not good enough, and never will be.  Stories that what we believe isn’t adequate for God’s mercy.  What does it mean to acknowledge that the church has failed many of us, but not to leave it at that?  What does it mean to claim our God-given ability to heal, through the power of the divine Spirit?  What does it mean to say that those who showed us anything less than God’s extravagant love and mercy will not drive us away from the church; but that we will hold firm to the truth that God speaks the language of our hearts, that we will follow the beautiful trail that Jesus blazed, that we will end cycles of shame and guilt and give birth to communities that love and heal?

We are not perfect.  We don’t have it all figured out.  The good news is that this is nothing new.  Down through the ages, God has called on imperfect people to testify to the perfect love of the divine.  God calls each part of the body of Christ to discover our gifts and use them for the common good.  It’s a dangerous, unsettling calling.  Sometimes we will wander in the wilderness.  Other times we will speak in new tongues, and find that people from many walks of life understand every word. Through it all, I pray that we will open ourselves to the mystery of God’s presence.  I hope that we will make mistakes, and learn from them.  I pray that we will acknowledge our wounds and lay claim to healing.  I hope that we will hear God’s voice in unexpected ways and from the most unlikely sources.  Artist-theologian Jan Richardson offers this Pentecost blessing: “May the sound of God’s name spill from your lips as you have never heard it before.  May your knowing be undone.  May mystery confound your understanding.”  Amen.

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