As I sat with my father in hospice care twenty-four years ago I was able to hear a lot about his life I hadn’t known. It was not an easy life. Poverty and even brief homelessness as a child after World War I and during the Depression of the 1930’s. He entered the army one month to the day after Pearl Harbor and stayed in through the North African campaign, the invasions of Sicily and mainland Italy, and finally service in northeast India in the final days of the Burma campaign. He came home in late 1945, met my mother (a remarkable woman herself who worked at the FBI during the war) and was a wonderful husband, father, and provider. He refused to advance his career working for the CIA by sacrificing his responsibilities as a husband and father and I never once heard him complain. As my sister eloquently put it a few years ago, “He was the first, and still the best, man I ever knew.”
One of my most vivid memories of him was when I was a sickly little kid in the 1950’s suffering from every respiratory infection that ever came near. One night I was having trouble breathing so – as my mother kept bringing steaming bowls of boiling water up from the kitchen – my father sat with me under a blanket in a suffocating cloud of steam as I tried to clear my lungs. Medically there was no benefit for him to suffer with me, but he stayed, for what seemed like hours, just being there for me and with me. In my mind even today, that is the epitome of what it means to “comfort” someone.
In today’s scripture portion, Elijah is exhausted; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. He feels abandoned by God and the people of Israel. He has collapsed under the sparse shade of a broom tree in the Negev desert south of Beersheba, and prays, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” Then, an angel sent by God touches him and says, “Arise and eat.” Elijah opens his eyes and sees a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. He eats and sleeps until the angel again touches him and repeats, “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.” This is not what modern day movie viewers would describe as a “Hollywood” moment. Quietly and lovingly God, through his angel, provides food, water and rest. . . exactly the comfort Elijah needs at that low point in his life.
As modern Americans, we have lost that understanding of the word “comfort” and it’s been replaced with an expectation of a reclining chair, a remote control, a cold drink and a bag of chips. Biblical comfort means being there with and for someone when they need rest and assurance. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is referred to as “the Advocate,” the “Helper,” and the “Comforter.” In John 14:26, Jesus tells his anxious disciples, “But the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” Earlier on that same night, Jesus told the disciples, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Comforter (Helper), to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” (John 14:16,17)
The same God who created the Heavens and the Earth, who parted the waters of the Red Sea and who raised Jesus from the dead, was able to find Elijah in despair in the shade of a prickly bush in the desert to comfort him with food and water. He will find you every time you need Him because He is not distant and abstract, If you have invited Him in to save you, He is living inside you.
Jesus could not have said it more plainly: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)