Perhaps because of such bumper stickers, along with a host of other intellectual and scientific embarrassments running from Galileo to Darwin, most thinking folk nowadays - and certainly this would be true on the campus of Warren Wilson - most thoughtful non-churchgoers probably believe Christianity to be hostile to questions and to the life of the mind.

Like so many of the more recent stereotypes about our great faith, however, it turns out that's wrong. The very first word of human speech in the New Testament is a question: "Where?" Where is this child to be born, the wise men ask in Matthew's gospel.

And in Luke, Mary's question to the angle Gabriel - "How can this be?" - has not only resounded throughout the ages, it's a question many of us have asked in our own way when confronted with puzzling possibilities. How can this be, God, that I have to move from my home and start my life over in a new place? How can this be that I have to raise my sister's children? I wasn't expecting that! How can this be?

And let's not forget Jesus' own haunting cry of dereliction from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

So, the truth is that questions appear throughout the biblical record. Good, hard, thought-provoking, even occasionally dangerous questions. Questions that not only move the story forward, the story of God's ongoing dance with us; but also serve a more personal purpose, bounding around in our hearts, echoing our own sense of wonderment, our own confusion, our own curiosity about matters of life and faith….Where, God? How, God? Why, God? When? Me? Now? Really?

Such questions are our birthright as Christians. Asking them, living them, is not evidence of doubt but a matter of faith of the most honest kind. A faith that starts deep inside and grows outward. A faith of the heart and of the mind. A faith tested by life and found up to the task.

And today we have another of those probing questions. "What does this mean?" the crowd asks in response to the bewildering, astonishing outpouring of Holy Spirit they have just seen and heard.

On one hand, that's a tough one to answer. What does it mean, this great outpour of Holy Spirit power? I think it means different things to different people in different times and places. To St. Augustine, Hildigaard von Bingen, Martin Luther, George Frederick Handel, Martin Luther King, Jr., your grandfather, your mother, you, me. Different things to different people.

But for readers of this story, the question is a bit of a set up. If the Wise Men's "Where?" sets up the gospel of Matthew, and if Mary's "How?" sets up the Gospels of Luke, this What sets up the Gospel of the Holy Spirit, as Barbara Brown Taylor calls the book of Acts.

The answer begins to unfold on the first page. Until now, that is to say, throughout Jesus' entire ministry as recorded in the gospels, the Apostle Peter has been something of a comic book figure. His behavior is so impulsive and erratic you or I probably wouldn't trust him to take out the trash and get it right.

And that's not the end of it. If he'd just been impulsive we could perhaps explain that away as a matter of temperament.

But a crisis of faith comes for him, as it comes to all of us at some point. And when it comes, when his faith is tested for the first time, when he is asked not to walk on water - child's play really - when he's asked the harder question - whether he knows this rabble rousing would be Messiah, this trouble maker whose antics are drawing crowds and making the religious and political authorities sweat, when he's asked, "Peter, do you know this man?" He pulls up the hood of his robe, denies he's ever seen him and slinks off into the night, his faith in tatters.

But on this day - this day of Pentecost - he gets a second chance and he takes it. And he begins to live into the greatness Jesus must have seen in him early on. Not that he was expecting it, this second chance. Along with all the other disciples, Peter has doubtless been asking his own version of this same question. "What does it mean? I left my nets, my living, my very identity on the shore that day when he asked me to follow him. And I left my faith behind on that fateful night when he was arrested and I denied him."

"And now this, I'm trapped here in this upper room. Trapped by the vector of a life that hasn't gone my way. Trapped by false hopes and my own failures. What does it mean?"

And then the wind starts. Peter feels it first like a kind of voice. He's felt that same power before. Heart it, stood next to it, been loved by it, denied it. He feels the wind and hears the voice inside of it. His memories stir. His pulse quickens. His hope rises.

The wind gathers force. Once he stood next to such power and watched it work. Now he's breathing that very power. It's literally in the air. He takes deep gulps of it, like a man who's been too long under water. He can't get enough of it. He can't get enough of the life in it, the promise of it, the power in it. Indeed, it fills him with such power and hope that tongues of fire burst forth above him. Like he's God's own torch. The wind blow still harder, so hard it blow the shutters off the windows and he doors off their hinges.

Once a cartoon figure, the Apostle Peter strides through that open door, walks out into the street and proceeds to preach the first explicitly Christian sermon in the history of the world. When he's finished, some 3,000 people sign new member forms and turn in their pledges cards to the First Pentecostal Church of Jerusalem.

What does Pentecost mean? Ask Peter. Or, Thomas, for that matter. You remember Thomas. "No, Jesus, I don't believe! I don't and I won't believe. I don't care if you are standing right there in front of me, just as you promised you would. I still don't believe. Cause that's what I do. I doubt."

Thomas hears the wind, too. Feels it like a pulse of God's own electricity. It fills his lungs, but it does more than that. For Thomas that wind blows and blows and blows until it fills the sails of a ship that takes him, finally, to India, where scholars believe he founded the church of South India, which flourishes to this day.

Now, if like so many good liberals you think, Oh, that's too bad. I hate it when Christianity gets exported to other cultures. It may help to remember what Thomas was exporting. Perhaps he was there in the synagogue that day when Jesus stood up and preached his own first sermon. "I have come to preach good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind."

There is a phrase for what such a message means in a culture where everyone but the wealthiest few are poor, where landless peasants are captives to economic systems that exploit them, where people's sight lines to the future are blocked by hopelessness. There's a phrase for what that kind of message means in such a culture. In English, we call it "Good News." Thomas would have know it as gospel. That's what he exported to those poor, landless peasants in south India - the same thing Peter preached in Jerusalem.

"What does it mean?" the crowd asks. Ask Thomas what it means. The Doubter become an intercontinental bearer of the Best News Ever.

Of course, that was then. Another famous doubter of modern times, the French existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus, also wondered what all this means. Bill Kellerman, a Methodist minister, tells the story of how Camus came to talk to a group of Christians at a Dominican monastery.

"He had a complaint and a yearning," Kellerman writes. "It seemed to him that as the preparations for WWII were undertaken . . . the church [had] remained unconscionably silent, or spoke only in an abstract and obtuse style."

Camus, in contrast, was candid and blunt: "For a long time during those frightful years I waited," said Camus, "for a great voice to speak up in [the Church]. I, an unbeliever waited . . . for I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation when faced with force . . ." :What the world expects of Christians," Camus continued, "is that they should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation of violence in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could arise in the heart of the simplest person . . . the grouping we need is a grouping of people resolved to speak up clearly and to pay up personally."

The voice Camus is calling for is the voice of Pentecost; the grouping is a Pentecostal church.

That's the voice in which Peter speaks on this historic occasion when the church is born. In his sermon on that first Pentecost, Peter uses a word he's never used before. Indeed, it's a word that appears only once before in the NT. "Let me speak freely to you," he says to the crowd gathered there that day. That "freely" comes from the Greek word parrhesia.

It breaks into the biblical records here with a force that's lost on us English speakers. For not only has it only occurred once before in the New Testament, but it is a word deliberately lifted out of the political lexicon of the ancient Roman empire.

Originally, as Bill Kellerman notes, the word parrhesia "signified the right of the full citizen to speak fully and freely in the public assembly." It literally means "the freedom to say all." But, of course, then, as now, one was not free to say all. Then, as now, even a patriotic citizen was not free to criticize the Emperor or the Empire.

Fortunately, Peter did not serve the Emperor. Filled with the Holy Spirit, the man who denied Jesus now breaks out and speaks not as Roman citizen, but as a citizen of the Commonwealth of God. And, he's willing to lay it all on the line in the service of the Kingdom where he holds his citizenship. A kingdom whose values were fundamentally at odds with a militarized Empire bent on colonizing the world.

Yes, I know that's strong stuff. But, maybe we need a dose of such Pentecostal power from time to time in our shrinking denomination. And, if you don't think this story has political overtones, if you think church is just a place to come to be comforted and inspired, read the rest of the story.

There's a rhythm to Acts. The disciples speak so freely and so boldly of this new Kingdom and its sovereign Lord that they are literally arrested. They speak out loudly and clearly in a voice so powerful and persuasive that not even the slightest doubt could arise in the heart of the simplest person. They proclaim a message so full of joy and hope that despite the risk of jail time, despite being accused by the Romans of treason, thousands join ranks in this new Kingdom.

Led by a group of disciples that once denied and doubted their leader, this first Pentecostal Church of Jerusalem becomes a grouping of people resolved to speak up clearly and to pay up personally.

"What does this mean?" That, it would seem, is a very good question.