“And I will pray the Father and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever.”

(John 14:16)

Sometimes, when we are troubled over our failures, losses and disappointments, we may say: “God seems so far away from me. I feel utterly desolate. My life is a shambles. All my hopes for the future are gone. I pray but nothing happens. What am I to do?”

Once, in a setting of heavy gloom and real tragedy, Jesus spoke some amazing words of encouragement and hope to His despairing disciples. He was leaving His friends. He knew that He was soon to die. Their plans for the future were dashed. Inevitable persecution was closing in on them.

Yet to these desperate men Jesus spoke reassuringly, comfortingly, hopefully: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Ye believe in God. Believe also in me … I will not leave you comfortless … I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, and He shall abide with you forever.”

Jesus’ farewell discourses to His disciples, as recorded in the Gospel of John, are filled with promises of a Comforter who is coming after He has gone, and of the wonders of that spiritual ministry that the coming Comforter would perform for them, then and there.

The coming Comforter, Jesus said, would be constantly with them to serve, in every sort of trouble, as an encourager, a helper, a counselor, a guide. He would bring to their remembrance all the things Jesus had taught them. He would interpret the meaning of their difficult to understand experiences. He would lead them into an understanding of new truth. Indeed, Jesus said, the coming Comforter might be appropriately called the Spirit of Truth. He would make the coward brave, the despairing hopeful, the weak strong, and the guilty to feel clean and unashamed again.

Our scripture lesson from the Book of Acts, which we read a few minutes ago, records the moment of fulfillment of that promise of Jesus to His disciples that the coming Comforter would come. Today is Pentecost, the anniversary of the Holy Spirit’s coming with power upon the disciples. We celebrate Pentecost, the birthday of the church, not only to affirm our faith that the Holy Spirit came two thousand years ago to empower the church for its saving mission, but also to affirm our faith that the Holy Spirit keeps coming to fulfill, for every one of God’s people, Jesus’ promise of the Comforter’s continuing ministry.

But what if we don’t experience in our time of need what Jesus promised? What if the coming Comforter doesn’t come to us? Perhaps we need to notice that the very promises of Jesus carry, also, conditions of the Comforter’s coming.

First, it ought not to escape our notice that the Comforter’s coming is the gift of God. Jesus said: “I shall pray the Father and He shall give you another Comforter.” “He shall give you.” And what is the appropriate mood and stance of one who anticipates a gift? Is it not invariably the mood of grateful expectancy? Whoever would receive the Holy Spirit, the coming Comforter, must learn to wait upon God. “Be still,” said the Psalmist, “and know that I am God.” “Wait,” said the ascending Christ to His disciples, “Wait at Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit is come upon you and you shall receive power.” It was while the disciples were together, waiting in Jerusalem, that the Spirit came on that first Pentecost. “Wait, wait, wait upon the Lord.” It is the tragedy of our activist Western culture, even our peculiar brand of Christian faith and practice, that most of us are too busy to give God a chance to send His Holy Spirit to us.

Another condition of the Comforter’s coming is our full acceptance of the fact that the Spirit comes from the Father and the Son. The old Nicene Creed professes the Trinitarian faith in the words: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son.”

This is the faith that is based on the promises of Jesus about the coming Comforter made in the Farewell Discourses of the Fourth Gospel. Here we find what first appears to be a puzzling confusion of the identity of Jesus with the coming Comforter. Now the Lord is saying to His disciples: “I am going away, but I will pray the Father to give you another Comforter, that he might abide with you forever.” … “Yet a little while and the world seeth me no more. But ye shall see me. I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.”

The other coming Comforter the Lord promises is none other than the abiding presence of the Risen Lord. The Holy Spirit, that coming Comforter, is not a strange, impersonal spiritual power or force. The personality of Jesus Christ is the norm for the personality of the Holy Spirit. As Canon Streeter put it: “What is the Holy Spirit? It is no other than the Spirit manifested in the life of Christ. If Christ is our portrait of the Father, He is none the less our portrait of the Holy Spirit.”

And if, in the crises and struggles and pressures of life, we are disappointed that the promised coming Comforter is not our ready, daily, strong ally, it may well be because we have learned so little of Him from Jesus Christ, and committed so small a fraction of our days to Christ’s discipleship, trusted with so faint a spirit in Christ’s Kingdom’s values, and opened our lives to so slow a trickle of His love.

Once after sitting silently in a Quaker meeting, Helen Keller rose to speak out of her experience. She told of how she, as a little girl, blind and deaf, “was shut up in utter darkness and unbroken silence with no real life, no world, no hope, no future. Then someone came, who, with patience and tenderness, brought her into contact with the world out there beyond her, interpreted it to her, and opened in her undreamed of capacities of communion with that new world of life and thought.” (Rufus Jones Speaks to Our Time — H. E. Fosdick, p. 21)

This service, which Helen Keller’s teacher, Miss Sullivan, rendered the blind, deaf child, was to be for her the organ of interpretation of the outer world. This is what Jesus Christ has done for us as an organ of interpretation and revelation of that inner world of the Spirit. No one can turn his back on Jesus Christ, the gospel account of His life, His clear command to discipleship, His challenge to take up the cross and follow Him, and expect the coming Comforter to be a close ready guide and encourager and strengthener. We must come to Christ by faith, and allow His full Lordship over our lives, or the coming Comforter cannot come.

There is a third condition of the Comforter’s coming. Jesus said: “If you love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter.” “There is a certain courtesy in God, which makes Him refrain from forcing Himself upon the person who does not want Him … There can be no fellowship between those who are diametrically opposed; even if a person seeks for, and longs for, and poignantly desires fellowship with another, that fellowship is impossible if the other ignores the very existence of him who desires fellowship.” (William Barclay — Promise of the Spirit — p. 36)

Are you ever puzzled over that Biblical phrase describing our human nature as “made in the image of God”? What does that mean?

Some theologians are quick to say that it is our rational faculty, our capacity for thought, memory, reason, which sets us human beings apart from the rest of the animal creation. Others have suggested that the image of God in man is the human moral consciousness, the categorical imperative to duty. But the majority of theologians find their most satisfying agreement, on the meaning of the image of God in man, in the human capacity of awareness to God’s presence. Henry Pitney Van Dusen put it this way: “The image of God in man is, then, that bestowal of Divine Spirit which, because it is God’s gift of His own Spirit, has the capacity to recognize Him who has made Him and whose He is.”

But every act of ours that is a denial of this nature dulls our apprehension of the Eternal Spirit. It dims our awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit. In A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More is twitted for his stern conscientiousness in keeping his word, suffering imprisonment and threat of death rather than break his oath. In dramatic portrayal of the enormous spiritual issues at stake for him, Sir Thomas cupped his hands in front of him and said: “If you pour into my cupped hands water, as long as I hold my fingers tightly together the water remains. But if I release my fingers the water flows through them and is gone. So, if I keep my oath and my word, I hold my soul, my very self in my hands. I know who I am. If I go back on my word, my soul slips through my fingers. My self is gone. I do not know who I am.”

A young meteorologist, in addressing a group of students at the University of Wisconsin, observed that there is very little truth in the old quip: “Everybody is always talking about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.”

The fact is, he pointed out, that people always have been doing plenty about the weather and are increasingly doing more and more. “Since the first primitive man threw a skin over his shoulder and discovered it warmed him, man has been practicing climactic modifications. Later man built a house. That was climactic control on a scale of yards … When people built cities they built waterproof houses and paved streets so that they would be waterproof. The water runs off rather than soaking in. Therefore there is less water to vaporize in the air above the city, and more dust in the city’s air blown up from the pavements. Tons and tons of smoke from the city’s chimneys are mixed into the city’s air. So, the average city gets less sunlight by about 30% and 10% less ultra-violet light and heaven knows how much less rainfall than comes to the open country about the city.” Oh, yes, people have always been doing plenty about our weather and are increasingly doing more and more, polluting the atmosphere with the exhaust from our gasoline engines and destroying the rain forests and wetlands.

So, by the same token we, free spirits that we are, sparks of the Divine Spirit as the Creator made us, by what we do, and do not do, to pollute the spiritual atmosphere of our homes and nation, by the tastes we cultivate or fail to cultivate, by the disciplines we acquire or discard, become more and more open or closed to the marvelous ministries of the coming Comforter.

Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove, and grant us the grace to cultivate those habits of the heart and mind and soul that will make always welcome God’s Holy Spirit.