Of the Three Persons in the Trinity, the One we are least able to type-cast, is the Holy Spirit. The names we use for this Person reflect that—Comforter, Helper, Advocate, Sophia, Wisdom, Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, Breath of God. You can neither tie up nor pin down the Holy Spirit, and yet, we have a whole day for celebrating the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church and use this day as the culmination of the season of Easter, as if this is the final piece in the “what’s resurrection?” puzzle.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has one explanation, I suppose. Do any of you remember the BBC radio series from about 20 years ago? The premise is that earth is destroyed to make way for an inter-galactic by-way, and one person (Arthur Dent) survives by accidentally hitching a ride on a passing space ship, hence “hitchhiker’s guide.” In Arthur’s travels around the galaxy, he runs into amazing oddities that seem to have some ironic comment on life as we have known it on the late great planet earth. One of the things Arthur runs into is a Babel-fish. By allowing a Babel-fish to swim into your ear canal, you can listen to any foreign language and understand what the people are saying. Bible scholars, so far as I know, have never called the Holy Spirit a Babel-fish, but there is quite a debate over whether the Holy Spirit was translating for the speakers or translating for the listeners on that first Pentecost in Jerusalem. Whatever—the end result was the same. It was the “un-Babel-ing” of the Church. People were hearing the gospel in the language of their hearts. That’s the premise of Wycliffe Bible Translators—making the Word of God available to people in their “heart language,” the language they know best, the language in which they think and dream and pray.

Modern evangelism gurus make a similar point about language. In the diverse, secularized world we live in, the Church seems to speak a secret language. This has been brought home to me as I’ve spent time with the 4th-graders in the Walk Through Worship class. We think because we’ve got the order of things in the bulletin that our worship service is comprehensible. But the difference between prayers of “adoration,” “dedication,” and “confession” is not readily apparent, even if the spelling is correct and we’ve got them in the right order. What does “illumination” mean? What is a “doxology” or a “sacrament”? There are a lot of mysterious things that happen here each Sunday. We might as well be speaking in tongues. It’s as if the Church has a secret language. And it isn’t just kids who need explanations.

That Pentecost thing—remember that I said it was the un-Babel-ing of the Church? How many of you know what we are un-doing when we say “Babel”? See? Secret language. Babel was the name of the town close to the beginning of time in which all humanity (still speaking the same language) decided to stay to build a tower. God objected, since the original plan had been for humanity to go out and populate the whole globe. To keep the original plan on track, God caused humans to develop different languages. Humanity couldn’t work together because they couldn’t talk to each other, so they spread out. To “un-Babel” something would be to take away that which caused the dispersion, to make it possible for humans in their diversity to communicate with each other. When the Holy Spirit causes the foreigners to understand what the apostles are saying about the gospel of Jesus Christ, that is “un-Babel-ing” the Church. Except it’s more than the Church. It’s as if God, after having spread humanity all over creation, is pulling humanity together again. For what? Don’t you always want to know? This speaking in tongues thing is a nice trick—the miracle of overcoming the diversity of languages—but why? Because it is God’s desire, and the work of the Holy Spirit, to create community.

This spring’s preaching texts have all been about building community. Forming groups of people who, through mutual love and support, hold each other accountable and cooperate in doing God’s work in the world. It’s a Holy Spirit thing. It’s what Jesus was praying for last week—the unity of all his followers. The blackberry sermon—it was about God’s persistently loving us by calling us into community. The good shepherd and the flock—hanging out with each other, sticking up for each other. Thomas not able to believe when he was separated from his community of faith, but able to believe when he was with them. Community. It’s a Holy Spirit thing. And it’s for us.

I hope that when you hear any scripture passage there is always the underlying question, “where am I in this text?” Where are you today? What would it be like if you were given the gift of tongues? When I used to go with my home church on mission trips to Mexico, we didn’t worry about communicating because we took our friend, Ruth, who was as fluent in Spanish as she was in English. But the year Ruth couldn’t come, we were concerned about how we could talk with our hosts. Pastor Peggy and I took pocket dictionaries, and we asked our congregation to pray for the gift of tongues for us, so we could at least ask what work they wanted us to do, when we’d be eating supper, things like that. We didn’t know how thoroughly God had answered our prayers until Ruth received a letter from the Juarez pastor’s wife, Marta. Marta told Ruth that she had been worried, because she doesn’t know English. “But,” she rejoiced in her letter, “It was OK because both Peggy and Eileen know Spanish.” Friends, that was the gift of tongues.

But where is Springwater in this? What would the gift of tongues be like for us? If the purpose of tongues on that first Pentecost was to form community, to un-Babel Jerusalem and maybe all of Creation, what might be tongues for us in Estacada? Marcia Hauer, the pastor at the Methodist church in town, wrote a column in the Clackamas County News last week about “dreaming a church” where everyone was welcome. Does our “secret language” unintentionally exclude people? Are visitors put off by the strangeness of our bulletins, by our quaint custom of pouring water at the beginning of the service, by the many songbooks we use? Or do people just not come in the first place? Perhaps we are strangely mute during the week about our faith. Maybe you have gone through the check out at the grocery and the clerk has remarked on how much you’ve saved with coupons. What if you said, “What I save on my grocery bill, I can spend on food for the Resource Center. Our church brings food every week.” Or perhaps something has happened and you’ve lost your temper—do you let loose some of those really satisfying oaths that you wouldn’t want the kids to hear, or do you think of some other things to say? The gift of tongues is sometimes what we don’t say. Not swearing, yes. Not telling dirty jokes, yes. Refusing to pass on gossip as well as not listening to it. Not making sure you have the last word in the argument. Sometimes the gift of tongues is what we do say. Choosing language and open-ended questions that leave room for other people’s opinions. “How did you think the meeting went?” as opposed to “The meeting was terrible, don’t you think?” Or perhaps one of your friends has noticed that you don’t stay out late on Saturday nights. The gift of tongues would be to admit that you want to get up in time to get ready to go to church. The gift of tongues would then take that opportunity to invite your friend to come with. Or maybe the comment was, “You don’t seem to be as competitive—you don’t always need to win the argument these days.” The gift of tongues might take that opportunity to say that being “right” isn’t as important to you now as it is to try to be like Jesus. Or maybe you’d say that you know God loves you so much that you know there is enough left over for other people to get some attention, too.

When I started preaching, my aunt (who was always my best editor when I was a writer) had one word of advice. “Give me room to walk around.” I pray for that gift of tongues, friends. It is my deepest desire that you “walk around” in God’s word and see where you are being called. Even today. Amen.