Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's June 4, 2006 Sunday worship service.

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The summer of 1979 is one I will long remember and treasure. That’s when a couple of buddies and I enacted every college student’s dream – we left familiar surroundings to go on a summer-long adventure. Three crazy guys with no specific plans – just a destination I only vaguely had heard of – Helena, Montana, because one of my friends had an aunt and uncle who lived there. So, off we went, trusting we would be able to find work and a place to stay, but the main idea was to see a new part of the country and have a good time. Once we got settled into a small apartment, most days we’d drop by the unemployment office, where people would call in looking for an able and willing body to do odd jobs -- help put a roof on, dig a ditch, spread topsoil, split some firewood – name it, we were willing to do it. And surprisingly, before long, we had adequate work to pay our bills for the summer plus some spending money to drive to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, to buy a cowboy hat and go to my first real rodeo, and take a riverboat ride.

That summer of ‘79 was, for me, among other things, a kind of rite of passage – living on my own in a place with no family safety net, no set schedule or responsibilities. As you might imagine, there were plenty of wonderful memories, but I think the most profound experience I had was the serendipity of crossing cultural and religious barriers through new people I met that summer.

Within a couple of weeks, we became friends with some folks who were part of a local Mormon church, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I can’t, even now, remember exactly how it happened – one of my buddies must have done some work for a Mormon family who had children about our age– but in the twinkling of an eye, it seemed, they had invited us along on their young adult activities, welcomed us into their church and homes, and, in general, shown the hospitality of Christ in a way that I had never before experienced.

When I went, I had only vague knowledge and a few unfounded suspicions about the Mormons, who I knew through the occasion sighting of one of their young male missionaries who were about my age and who, strangely, at least to my eyes, wore suits and rode bicycles. Since then, I have studied Mormon history and beliefs, and I know quite a bit more – but back then, 25 years ago, I was able to move beyond stereotypes, and I soon realized how good it felt to have perfect strangers and new friends care so deeply about your welfare.

Mid-August, about a week or so before we had to leave to head back east, we got a call from Social Services that provided another unique encounter. An elderly Russian woman who spoke only a little broken English, who lived in a very modest wood framed house outside of town, had a broken hot water heater which had flooded her basement, and we went and baled it out. After doting on us as if we were her grandchildren and paying us with some crumpled dollar bills, which we tried to decline, she fed us a meal there in her small kitchen. Looking around, for the first time in my life, I saw depictions of saints from the Russian Orthodox Church and other icons displayed on her wall, images that gripped me with their oversized, brooding eyes and the yearning, haunting sense of an other-worldly spirituality. In the poverty of that humble kitchen, I felt the peace and mystery of the God whom I had never met in my own world of southern Protestantism. Even though I knew no Russian and she only limited English, for a year or so after that, she and we corresponded with cards and short notes, and she always greeted us as her “sons” whom she would forever love and remember.

To this day, I credit, at least in part, my desire to paint God’s activity in the world with broad brush strokes, to that summer spent in Helena, Montana. What would it be like to live in a world without assumptions, without lines, without barriers, where communication and community are real even among people of whom we are suspicious or who don’t speak the same language?

Even though this audience for Peter’s sermon on the day of the first Pentecost was an audience divided by language and nation, by cultural memory and geographic barriers, those Jewish pilgrims who trekked to Jerusalem from the far corners of the known earth were also united. The Holy Spirit drew these disparate people together and made them one in faith.

The text says that the original band of disciples, having been overcome by an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in an upper room in Jerusalem, were Spirit-enabled to speak in the languages of every nation whose citizens had gathered in the holy city. Each heard, in his or her own native tongue, the message of God’s purposes revealed anew in Jesus of Nazareth. No small accomplishment, given that the speakers were mostly unlettered, untraveled Galileans, who were probably fluent only in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the day.

These Hebrew witnesses to this amazing event of multiple languages being spoken, probably also recalled an old story from their scriptures, the ancient tale of the Tower of Babel. It was a story of distance and isolation and barriers, just the opposite of what they were now experiencing in Jerusalem.

In that story, human pride believed a tower could be built into the heavens so that the people could become like God. The desire to construct this tower, which probably recalled the ancient Babylonian ziggurat temple, led God to disperse these would-be tower builders and to confuse their understanding. God, the story says, punished pride by creating the languages of the world which forced groups of people to live apart from one another, no longer able to work together.

But now, in Pentecost, babel has been reversed. If Babel turned the world upside down, then Pentecost, the writer of Acts seems to be saying, has turned it back aright. Instead of being driven apart, Pentecost says people need to come together.

The story of Pentecost is a universal tale embedded deep in our collective sub-consciousness. It says that the thick lines we so readily draw can become thin, even erased, if we will but tune our soul radios into the right frequency, letting the air waves of God’s universalizing spirit take hold through us, among us in our world.

God’s Pentecost work has begun, and it continues among us. We have the same source of strength, the same fire, the same opportunities to go beyond barriers, as those original apostles had.

Each generation has to choose anew what we will do with that enigmatic fire of the Holy Spirit – what will be our new language? How will we be a Pentecostal people?

Many of you can hardly imagine yourself living in a different culture or nation or even hearing the gospel in another tongue or language. But perhaps the greatest calling of the Church in this Third Millennium is to imagine just that -- and to help prepare, in particular, the young and others ready to be retooled by the spirit, for the changes that are coming like wildfire upon this global village in which we all live.

Sociologists and cultural anthropologists have a penchant for trying to characterize moments in history by giving names to particular groups of people – baby boomers, yuppies, generation x are a few that come immediately to mind. But the latest buzz word used to describe young people who came of age around the year 2000 is the word “millenials.”

A recent “Faith and Family” article in the newspaper reported on East Tennessee Millenials, young people of college age and beyond. They experience faith through service, not by learning doctrine or feeling they are being locked into a belief system. They prefer the word “spirituality” to the word “religion,” and they are constantly exploring new ways to encounter the mystery and majesty of God.

They, moreover, are inclined to accept different beliefs of different religious traditions as all equally valid; thus faith is woven with strands from Buddhism and new age spirituality, not just from the cloth of traditional Christianity. “They see people of various faiths and backgrounds, values and traditions as being the way God made them [not as objects of conversion; thus, differences in faith represent] a gift to be explored and [a gift to be] celebrated.” (Steve Musick, 5/27/06, Knoxville News Sentinel)

While I know that trends and catchy phrases will come and go, I do believe that we live in a new day when the outpouring of the Holy Spirit has taken on new meaning, perhaps most, especially with the young. The church, it seems to me, if we take Pentecost seriously, has an opportunity, in our age, to rediscover itself by standing on the shoulders of the young and experiencing a new vision that will take us beyond barriers. What will the church do to foster and further this renewal? Will our children and grandchildren have faith, and can we allow it be a faith different from the one we once received?

In the name of Father, Son, and HS. Amen.