The Comforter

'Jesus said, ”If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees her nor knows her. You know him, because she abides with you, and she will be in you.

”I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”'

--John 14: 15-21

A couple of years ago, not long after my cancer diagnosis, my dear Aunt Meredith sent us in the mail a down comforter. But this was no ordinary down comforter, no, this was the comforter that belonged to my grandmother, my Mimi. I remembered this comforter as the one my sister enveloped herself in when she came down with chicken pox, and the fluffiest, most comfortable blanket there ever could be. It has provided warmth and contentment to so many in our family, including my Mimi in her final days, and Aunt Mere thought we should have it, that we might be comforted by it, too. And we were, and then some! We took to calling it the Poof, and boy howdy, did it make a difference. There were magical healing powers in that comforter, Kristen said. Somehow, whoever was wrapped in it – me, Kristen, Casey even – felt better, more secure. We felt held, by the love of our ancestors, and by God. The Poof is the platonic ideal of “comforter.”

My Mimi's Poof, providing comfort to Casey and me during my cancer and transplant recovery.

Alright, well, down comforter, anyway. Jesus promises his apostles in our reading from the 14th chapter of John this week, that once he has gone away, God will provide for them a comforter. Not a blanket, obviously, but one who will give healing, security, maybe even a fluffy, poof-like feeling to those who receive. The word Jesus uses is Parachlete, which our New Revised Standard Version translates as Advocate. But this is a word that doesn’t really have a direct English counterpart, so various translations over time have called it something different: the New International Version says Counselor; the Common English Bible says Helper; the Message says Friend; and the tried and true King James Version translates Parahclete as Comforter. Many of you may be more familiar with that word, especially if you attended an Episcopal church prior to 1976 and did Morning Prayer most Sundays and said or sang the Te Deum. You may remember the line in that ancient prayer about “the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.” This is the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of the Living God, the Spirit of Love. The Third Person of the Trinity. Whatever word we use.

This is the promise Jesus makes to his apostles in the hours before his death, that even after he is gone they will not be left orphaned. In those days disciples of a rabbi or any other teacher were often called orphans whenever their teacher died, since they were left without any guidance or tutelage. Jesus promises that this will not be the case for those who follow him. The Parachlete – the Advocate, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit – will come and lead them and guide them and show them how to love as Jesus has loved, how to boldly proclaim God’s goodness and mercy to a broken and hurting world the way Jesus did, how to have hope when all hope seems lost. 

The Parachlete will, indeed come on the Day of Pentecost, and set those same apostles’ hearts on fire to go into the world, to push through their fear. How can they do this? Because of love. Because, as Jesus says, not only will those who love him keep his commandments, but he will love them too. He will keep loving them, even after he’s gone, through the Parachlete, who will comfort them and advocate for them and be the voice of God speaking to and through them. This is how the world will know Jesus is still alive. This is how we still know Jesus is alive, through the power of love that is poured out in the actions of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter. 

The world doesn't know Jesus through proselytizing. Those who have no use for the Bible will not know Jesus through quotes from Scripture because, what’s the point? Saint Paul understood this, as is illustrated from this week's reading from the Acts of the Apostles in which we see what happened when the Spirit led him to preach to the people of Athens:

'Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”'

--Acts 17: 22-31

Paul doesn't try to convince the Athenians that they’ve been wrong all this time and that he has all the answers. He doesn’t quote the Scriptures to prove his point because they don’t care.  He doesn’t take an anti-intellectual stance and decry philosophy as the devil’s favorite subject. He acknowledges right out of the gate that they are a religious people; in fact, religion was so much a part of Greek daily life that it was something they took for granted.  He relates to them and commends them for their sense of devotion. Greeks were deeply religious, but not exactly spiritual. The gods didn’t really care about humanity, so why care about them? Still, they have an altar even to a so-called “unknown god.” What they call unknown, Paul says, has actually been made known. Such a god loves all created things – Paul even quotes the poet Aratus of Soli who coined the phrase “we are all his children” in his work entitled Phenomena. This is the one whom Paul proclaims, without ever even using Jesus’ name. He’s not concerned with winning an argument but by simply letting people know the truth that he knows, which is that we are all united one to another in this God, through the Parachlete, the Advocate, the Comforter, the Spirit of the Living God that fell afresh on the world and became, what Paul Tillich called, the Ground of All Being.

This is the scandal of the Parachlete’s presence in the world because she cuts through the jargon of the dominant doctrines and disciples of the day, both civil and theological. She calls to us to get out of the world’s way of thinking – which is usually binary and absolute – and into God’s way of thinking – which is ever-moving like the wind and grounded in love. Even among Christians it is hard sometimes to pay attention to what the Parachlete is doing. How can the Spirit help fix the problem of attendance not being what it once was or figuring out where money is gonna come from for roof repair? And what about the people on the other side of the street, preaching something different from us, what would the Spirit REALLY have us do about them because we gotta respond and do SOMETHING, right? Does the Spirit want us to be more spiritual or more religious?  Thinkers or doers? Does any of this sound like it comes from a place of love? Do any of these attitudes meet people where they are and open us up to receive and listen to the Spirit?  Maybe the next time we are faced with those fears we can pause and invoke the Parachlete and acknowledge that presence, that Spirit of God; after all, there’s nowhere we can hide from her. When we acknowledge that her we are less reactive, less defensive, and more mindful, more kind. Our Eucharistic Prayer D calls the Holy Spirit “Christ’s own first gift for those who believe.” We dare not squander such a gift.

Is it an Advocate that you need right now? A Counselor? A Helper? A Friend? A Comforter? The Parachelete, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, is all of these and so much more. She is the presence of God that reminds us that we are not alone. She is the voice of God that encourages us to move forward when we think we can’t. She gives us hope when the world seems hopeless. She is the ground on which we stand when we dare to love and the wind that blows and tickles our ear when we dare to be curious. She doesn’t have magical powers, like my Mimi’s Poof. But her presence with us is evidence alone that we are all God’s children, as Aratus said first and Paul echoed. Because she is in the world, we are invited to ask each day, each moment, what is the Spirit up to? How am I, how are we, being called to love more deeply, to see the living Christ more clearly? Parachelete of the living God, fall afresh on us.