Robyn had warned me that a Springsteen concert can feel an awful lot like a religious experience. And sure enough, the first thing Mr. Springsteen did when he walked on stage was to grab a sponge - he would later need this to douse himself for he worked up quite a sweat - and to fling water out on the crowd, which felt very much like a kind of baptism.

It's as though he was saying, Get ready for what's to come, folks, for it's gonna be big. And big it was.

After a couple of tunes he shouted out a question to the crowd: "Is there anybody alive out there?"

It's a line from one of the songs on his new record. The song is called Radio Nowhere . As I hear it, it's a kind of commentary on the banality of our culture, a culture in which more people seem to care about the outcome of American Idol or Dancing with the Stars than care about the outcome of the war in Iraq, than are even aware of the war in Iraq.

"Is there anybody alive out there?" It's hard to know exactly what that question was intended to be. A challenge? A commentary? An invitation? Maybe it was all those things.

But whatever it was the question gave way immediately to one of Bruce Springsteen's modern anthems:

I just want to hear some rhythm , Mr. Springsteen sang
I want a thousand guitars
I want pounding drums
I want a million different voices speaking in tongues

What he wants is to know that people care, that people are indeed alive out there and are paying attention to what's going on in the world.

Why do I say all that? Because if that's what it takes to wake up a country, to wake up the world, to change individual lives, then Bruce Springsteen would have been a happy man if he had been playing in Jerusalem on Pentecost, cause that's essentially what this day is all about - it's about waking up the world and changing individual lives.

Now, in fairness I'm not sure there were a million voices speaking in tongues that day but there were a lot of them. And while the house may not have been filled with the sound of guitars and drums, it was filled with the thunder of a rushing wind, and the dazzling brightness of a fire burning over the heads of everyone in the room.

Energy, divine energy, pulsed through that house like it never had before and it threatened to burn the place down. That in itself is no surprise, for those flames signified something new, namely the official arrival of the Holy Spirit on the world's stage.

What is a surprise is that this bright-hot energy eventually waned and has pulsed through the church all too infrequently ever since.

Or maybe that's not such a big surprise. It takes energy and heat to get something big going, whether that's a rock concert, a marriage, the launch of a space shuttle or the birth of the Church.

And the energy you need to get something that big off the ground is unsustainable; you just can't maintain it without running out of fuel or burning out your engines.

Still, it's hard not to wish the Church, capital C, burned a little brighter.

Most of you know that a few months ago someone felt the need to come into this sanctuary in the early morning hours and discharge a fire extinguisher. In fact that was the second time in two years our sanctuary had been vandalized in that way.

I recently shared this news with a minister friend of mine whom I hadn't seen for a while. "Wow! Sorry about the vandalism," she replied, "but that might make a good illustration for your Pentecost sermon!"

Wouldn't it be great if our church, if any church, was so full of energy that you had to keep fire extinguishers on hand in the event the place burst into flames?

Wouldn't it be great if something big and dynamic happened here every week as we seek to encounter that divine presence?

Actually, I'd like to believe that something dynamic does happen, even if it's not quite so spectacular as happened on the day of Pentecost. Because the truth is that we replicate the conditions that made for Pentecost every time we gather here.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, the text says .

Right there is the key: they were all together in one place. There is a light, a small flame, that burns in each one of us. It's that divine light that make us human, that animates our passions and fuels our dreams.

But separate from one another this little light of mine is just that, little. But when we come together a big light shines. And I'll bet that if we could see things the way God sees things, this light would be visible from space. Is visible from space.

But of course a flame cannot burn without oxygen. Which is why this passage is as much about wind as it is about flame. And a very specific wind at that - ruach - the very breath of God.

And which is why it may not be such a bad thing to be a windbag! Did you know that every time we come together here we form a conspiracy? Think about that word, conspire. Con spire . To breathe with. Every time we gather here we breathe the same air together. Corporate worship is by definition a conspiracy - a conspiracy that rocked the world then, and can still rock the world today. (Author's note: I owe this idea to Barbara Brown Taylor.)

Which again raises the question -- if the conditions that made for Pentecost are present every time we come together, why hasn't the church burned more brightly over the years? Why has the wind of the Spirit gone so still?

Maybe it's because there is still another piece to this Pentecostal energy.

I met someone this week who had spent a number of years in a cult. She reminded me that the most distinguishing feature of a cult, the thing that makes a cult a cult, is that they try to take away your identity. They try to extinguish your unique flame.

And to a certain degree the church has succumbed to that same impulse, the impulse to make people conform. Especially in the last couple hundred years, our missionaries have imposed our standards, our language, our music on people from wildly different cultures.

If you want to douse the fire of Pentecost, to dampen the wind of God's own Spirit, that's the way to do it. For God cannot be contained in any one language, in any one culture, in any one person.

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs--in our own languages we hear them speaking . . .

On that first Pentecost everyone had a voice. The very day the church was born, every culture mattered. Every person mattered. God's own Spirit broke through the limits of language and culture and tradition because no single language can begin to express the wonder of God, no one culture or tradition is anywhere close to big enough to contain the presence of God. No one person had enough vision or adequate words to give voice to the miracle they experienced that day.

Now, that said, there's just one last question. The text says there were a thousand different voices speaking in tongues on that day. Wouldn't you love to know what they were saying?

We do know that they were speaking "about God's deeds of power." But what exactly were they saying? These were people who had never before had any contact with this story. They came from miles away, from a multitude of backgrounds.

So what exactly were they saying? There's another song out there these days that came to mind as I thought about this. It's not a Bruce Springsteen song. It's by a guy name John Mayer.

It's a simple song, and yet it's profound too. It's called "Say," and it goes like this:

Take all of your wasted honor.
Every little past frustration.
Take all of your so called problems,
Better put 'em in quotations.

Say what you need to say

Walkin' like a one man army,
Fightin' with the shadows in your head.
Livin' up the same old moment
Knowin' you'd be better off instead

If you could only...Say what you need to say

Have no fear for givin' in.
Have no fear for giving over.
You better know that in the end
It's better to say too much,

than never to say what you need to say.

Even if your hands are shaking,
And your faith is broken.
Even as the eyes are closin',
Do it with a heart wide open.

Say what you need to say.

I might also add this:

Pray what you need to pray.

Sing what you need to sing.

Say what you need to say.

Feel free to tell God everything.

So maybe this is our chance to share a little of this Pentecostal spirit. Ordinarily we share in the Lighting of the Candles of Celebration and Concern on the Third Sunday of the month. But on this Pentecost Sunday, I invite you to come forward, to let your light shine and to say what you need to say….