And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each

Last week I confessed, to almost no one’s surprise, that I tend to be a planner. I am not very good at it, my plans never do seem to work out the way I had in mind, but that doesn’t stop me. I love to look ahead at the calendar and see where the events of summer will fall, to see when the Golf outing and Pig Roast are, to place the weeks of Advent relative to Thanksgiving and Christmas, to identify Easter as “early or late” each year. I can usually tell you, without looking, the number of days until I see the Little Red Headed Girl (3 days) the number of weeks until Rutgers football season begins (14 weeks) and the amount of time left until I will be the only person in my home with a job (10 months and a week).

But there is a part of planning ahead that I have learned to avoid.

It’s the worrying part.

Now one of the reasons that I don’t worry about the future is that I have been fortunate enough to be the son of one woman and the husband of another, both of whom qualified as Olympic class worriers! So I have always had my worrying done for me by the women in my life, some men get their shirts ironed, I get my worrying covered. It’s worked out well.

But that doesn’t mean that there are not things out there to worry about, there are problems, real problems, in the world. I continue, and I know so many of you do also, to watch in slow motion horror as the oil blob gradually and irresistibly begins to swallow the shores of the gulf, closing off fishing and shelling waters and oozing it’s way toward the Keys and our own Atlantic. I continue, and I know I’m not alone, to fight off the feelings of helpless apathy as I read the slow drip of death of our young women and men in the military, from what I believe future historians will record as a multi-decade war in the deserts and mountains of the Middle East.

I continue, as you do, to react with disgust and embarrassment at the appalling lack of a moral compass in so many of today’s politicians, entertainers and athletes.

All of these things worry me as I look at our nation.

And there are real problems in the Church of Christ, here and around the world.

We’ve done amazing things as a congregation over the last few years, in terms of our buildings and programs, however I know that most you are tired of hearing me say “we need more” and I promise you, I’m even more tired of saying it, but the windows are next on the list, and there are only 2 of the 11 days of Summer Season Sunday School covered, and the stresses of family life are starting to show; our children’s attendance pattern at Sunday School is sporatic, and our Youth Group struggles to find a pattern of programs and activities that will work in 2010, and our denomination is so obsessed with mere survival that they are willing to embrace any new fad that promises a few more bodies in the pews, and I won’t even touch upon the woes of our Episcopal and Catholic friends these days.

And there are real problems in our families, the stresses of loosing a job, or just the threat of it, sets ripples into motion that can become tsunami-like by the time they roll to shore. Promises of a college education need to be rescinded and trimmed, marriages flounder and dissolve around us, retirement plans are shattered and abandoned, medical reports come back with works like tumor and malignant, and decisions are made regarding hospice and nursing homes and the world is full of people who are anxious to tell us that we have chosen poorly, and we are left with a mix of anger and guilt and failure.

It is hard to look at our world and our lives and our children and not worry about what comes next.

I paint a gloomy picture.

And I would almost be sorry for that, except that it describes, in so many ways, exactly where the disciples were in our morning lessons.

They were locked away in their upper room, not knowing what would come next, surrounded by a hostile culture that was filled with powerful politicians and religious leaders who would want them silenced if they ever emerged from that upper room, their families and friends had cut them off.

And they, like so many of us, were waiting for someone to fix things, someone to rescue them, someone to come and take away all of their problems.

They waited, as we do.

They worried, as we do.

They made their tentative and fearful plans, as we do.

But the really didn’t know what to do, nor do we.

You see we are not the first to face these fears, these disappointments, these sorrows that life brings.

Those disciples, few in number, were only six weeks away from the Resurrection and yet here they are shuttered inside and hiding from the world.

And suddenly the Church was born.

The fire came, the Holy Spirit, and they heard the roar of the wind and I can’t explain a bit of it.

Except I know that there are moments when that fire comes to us, often when we are at our lowest and most vulnerable, often when we have stopped trying to control God and left ourselves open to her. And I’m not being cute when I say “her”, the word for God’s spirit, Ruach in Hebrew, is a feminine noun.

And when she comes to us, we are the Church.

That’s the real reason I have learned not to be overwhelmed by the worries of the world, the Church or my life: God’s spirit still roars and whispers and works in the world, the Church and our lives, always at the right time.

That doesn’t mean that all of our questions are answered, it doesn’t mean that all of our problems are solved, but it means that God’s spirit in our lives changes our perspective and our priorities.

The disciples – the word means students – became the Apostles – the messengers.

They couldn’t help themselves, they had a message to share with the world and they had to get out of that dark upper room and into the sunlight of the world to share it.

They had to pray, they had to sing, they had to preach, they had to serve, they had to love, out there, in the world. Now let just stop it there for a moment.

If you are wondering, as I sometimes do, why in your dark moments, why in your uncertainly, why in your sorrow you have not felt that fire in your life, perhaps it is because you missed one thing that was true about the disciples: they were together.

We shut ourselves off from each other, they opened themselves up to each other; we deny our pain and they hurt out loud. And because they were together, bound by love, the fire came to them.

One writer said this about Pentecost and its meaning in our lives: “The bad news is no one is coming to fix all of our problems. The good news is that the solutions are all around us, we have the courage, the compassion and the strength that we need.” And we find them when we tell the story of our lives with the fiery enthusiasm that laughs and cries, and with the loving companionship that forgives and appreciates.

And how will that story sound?

That’s the really cool thing about Pentacost that everyone overlooks.

In the ancient legends of the Jews there was a major event which explained the variety of languages in the world. It was the story of when humanity attempted to raise a building that would give them access to heaven. Well, God couldn’t allow that! So one night he confused their tongues so that when they came to work the next day they couldn’t communicate with each other and their frustration grew and they couldn’t work together, so they went their separate ways to inhabit the world, with language providing a barrier.

They called the building The Tower of Babel, we call it Congress, but that’s a different conversation.

Quite intentionally Luke, in his account of Pentecost, portrays the first and primary gift of the Holy Spirit to be the gift of communication.

I think we often miss that in the story because we come to the story thinking that we already know what it means to be Pentecostal, right?

Pentecostals speak in tongues, special spiritual languages that almost no one understands.

But, in the Bible, on Pentecost, it sounds different, doesn’t it? Everyone hears the disciples talking in their native tongue. It always reminds me of when I was a kid and we took a class trip to the United Nations and I don’t know if they still have it, but they had these head phones that you could listen to the discussions that were going on and turn a dial to hear it in your language. You tell your story and let God translate it into the language that people need to hear.

You tell your story about God’s beautiful creation and let those who spoil the water and the air hear God’s anger and let those who love the land and the sea be filled with hope.

You tell your story about the wonders of the Church that the Spirit gave birth to that day and let those who have used the Church to fatten their wallets and take advantage of children and the poor hear God’s anger and let those who teach and give and serve be filled with joy.

You tell your story about the holiness of promises made at weddings and at baptisms and let those who take those vows lightly and those who use them to bully others hear God’s anger and let those who love and cherish their spouses and their children be filled with even more love than they have given.

This is what the Church is, the clearinghouse for stories that need to be told, again and again, the place and the people where God’s spirit can whip through our souls and fill us with the fire and the love that we thought we had lost, the fire and the love that we so desperately need to lift us out of the shadows of worry and into the light of life.

Tell your stories, there are people who need to hear them and they will and they will hear them in terms and ways that you can’t even explain, they will hear them in their native language, in words that make sense in the context of their lives.

And listen and you will hear the stories that you need, in the words that fit you life and your fears and your dreams and your failures and your joy and your sorrow.

Tell each other the stories of who you are and listen and you will hear the roar of the spirit and you will recapture the fire and the love that you were created to give and to receive.

And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each