Sermon: Comforter

If anyone were ever to write ‘The Bluffer's Guide to Theology',[1] there is one sentence that should have pride of place. I have heard this sentence on many different occasions and in many different forms. It is a sentence which can be used to criticise a theologian's whole work or a specific short text, a whole liturgy or a Eucharistic prayer. I heard it first when at Cambridge when a friend complained that so many of the lectures on the early church Fathers ended with this sentence and I heard it most recently when the officers of the Board of Ministries and Training - the direction and leadership of which is my day job - were moved to be critical of a theological statement prepared by our two bishops. The sentence is this:

‘It has a deficient understanding of the Holy Spirit.'

Should you wish to pass for a theologian without going to the trouble of studying for many years, this is one of the sentences you should commit to memory. It will do very nicely after most sermons and in reviewing many books. The sentence works, like all bluffers' tricks, because it is true - whether or not the person speaking it knows why it is true, or has any idea at all of what the consequences of the truth that they have just expressed might be. And so my point is this: on the whole, Christian theology, Christian thinking, Christian living tends not to do justice to the Holy Spirit. Examples are always ready to hand, even here at Matins. There is, for instance, the Te Deum which we heard a minute ago. There is plenty about the holiness of ‘God the Father Everlasting', and then much about the ‘King of Glory, Jesus Christ'. But when it comes to the Holy Spirit all we get is one little line: ‘also the Holy Ghost, the comforter'. And the Apostles' Creed is not much better with its spare ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost'. The Holy Spirit is the Cinderella of the Trinity. The late Muriel Spark was aware of this when she commented in an interview that: ‘I think that the Holy Ghost has been seriously underestimated.'

In this sermon I want to address this underestimation of the Holy Ghost by engaging with a word which has been used to describe the nature and activity of the Spirit, the word ‘comforter'.

The first thing to say is that while this is one of the more familiar words for the Spirit it is certainly not that which is most fashionable. Nor does it have the most impressive of pedigrees. It appears as a translation of the Greek word paraclete. The plainest meaning of the word is ‘advocate'. It refers to one who has been summoned both to stand with and speak for us in a situation of judgement. In John's gospel, Jesus himself is identified as the paraclete, the only one who can effectively intercede for us to the Father. And yet later in the same gospel, the Spirit is identified as another paraclete, a replacement. And it was some of the early Fathers of the church who first identified this other paraclete as a comforter - one who addresses the pastoral needs of the disciples when they are left without Jesus, their friend, Lord and primary advocate. This in turn has been engrained into our English understanding of the Holy Spirit as the word ‘comforter' is used in the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Prayer Book and therefore in many anthems and motets. Tallis' ‘If ye love me', and the Te Deum being especially obvious examples. (Interestingly the originally Latin Te Deum includes that solitary untranslated Greek word paraclete.)

But if you look at more recent translations, prayers and hymns you will be far less likely to find the word ‘comforter'. It has become unfashionable in church, ironically perhaps, just as the word ‘comfort' in its various forms has become very fashionable. However, one can see why the translators go off it when you think of some of the contemporary uses of the word ‘comfort'. To exemplify this I want to refer to an interesting internet article by Dr Chris Willerton called ‘ministering in the church of the comfort zone':[2] Willerton reminds us that comfort often means ‘absence of stress' and can also be what he calls a ‘lo-fat substitute for conscience' or ‘the idolatry of one's own preference'.

Simply to mention these usages is to make it reasonably clear why contemporary theology does not like us to think of the Spirit as ‘the comforter'. For the Spirit is not one that merely removes stress from us, nor does it take us from places where stress is likely to be inflicted. Equally, the Christian will have only slightly more than zero tolerance for the idea of a ‘lo-fat alternative to conscience'. And let me be clear about this phrase. What the writer is talking about is the tendency for people to use the idea of ‘not being comfortable with...' as a way of avoiding moral or ethical engagement. As he rightly says, whether or not one is comfortable with something is beside the point. We can be comfortable with what is wrong and very uncomfortable in combating it. And clearly, this is not the sort of comfort into which we can expect to be lead by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit's concern is more with truth and justice than with comfort.

And yet, though the word ‘comfort' has developed these amoral connotations it does not follow that it has no efficacy in bringing us a more adequate estimation of the Holy Spirit. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary offers four main meanings of the verb to comfort: ‘to strengthen', ‘to cheer or relieve', ‘to soothe or console', and ‘to make comfortable'. Of these, it is only the fourth that is not a purpose or work of the Holy Spirit. Comforting as in ‘making comfortable' is not part in the Christian project, as Willerton's article makes plain. But we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater if we are not careful here, because the other verbs are very real and all-too-easily underestimated aspects of the work of the Spirit. So I want to conclude this sermon by going beyond the bluffer's guide approach and meditating more deeply on each of them in the hope that this might give us a fuller estimation of the Holy Ghost.

First, to strengthen. This is without doubt a work of the Spirit. It connects us as well with another concept without which we will be doomed to underestimate the Spirit - that of power. The Spirit is capable of action, achievement, transformation. It is indeed estimable. Jesus was a great teacher and healer. But it is the Spirit who enables and empowers the disciples to take his message and his methods, his story and his gospel, into new situations and places, to environments and contexts that are very far from being ‘comfortable'. To strengthen is to encourage, to build up, to enable or empower. This is precisely the missionary work of the Spirit, which empowers people to move utterly beyond any personal comfort zone.

Secondly, to cheer or relieve. We naturally think of the Spirit as sending us out in missionary mode and full of hope. But we seldom recognise that it is a natural consequence of being a person with a mission, a passion, a sense of the injustice of the world, that from time to time at least one is going to be disappointed. I once upset my parishioners by quoting Schopenhauer's dictum that, ‘old people tended to look disappointed'. I still think he has a point, but the point has a positive corollary. To live hopefully is to run the risk of disappointment. Moreover, it is the evidence of history that disappointment is a fact of life for anyone who seeks the Kingdom of God. Deep disappointment is waiting for anyone who has a vision for the future which does not factor in the truth that in the end the gravitational pull of human sin brings all sorts of projects tumbling to the ground. Good people always experience disappointment, and ordinary people often inflict it on others. It is therefore vital to the mission and ministry of the church that the Spirit is active in cheering people up and relieving them of the burden of failure. Without this ongoing, undramatic, and yet inspired, work the flames of Pentecost would have burnt out years ago. To put it another way, if old people do not look disappointed then they are witnesses to the Spirit's capacity to cheer and relieve.

And thirdly, to sooth or console. These two are appropriate verbs to apply to the work of the Spirit. They are words of restoration. Sometimes we all need to be picked up and reoriented. There are times when not only does our sense of humour fail but so too does our sense of lightness and ease and delight in living. There are times when events shock us, when life roughs us up: a friend is diagnosed with cancer, another friend dies, another one simply lets us down. We cannot be fully human without being deeply affected by such things. For all of us, there are times when we identify more with the dead Christ in the tomb or the scattered dry bones of Ezekiel's dream than with the stories in the early chapters of the book of Acts. It is in these all too familiar situations that we need the grace and comfort of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, if the Holy Spirit is not a comforter we wonder about how thoroughly human God really is. Just as if a church is not pastoral we have to wonder how Christian it is.

Do we underestimate the Holy Ghost? Yes, of course we do. But if we are prepared to capture a rich and developed sense of what it means to be a comforter we might inch a little closer to doing justice to this enigmatic and endless subject. But more importantly, we might have a far greater awareness of how God's Spirit works through others for us and, from time to time, through us for others.

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[1] The successful bluffer remembers key facts and sayings, and by careful application, manages to present the impression of a full-fledged expert.

[2] See http://www.heartlight.org/articles/200108/20010817_comfort.html