Rev. Dr. M. Taylor Bach

Psalm 106:1-5 John 14:15-21

This morning, I want to invite you to go on a journey with me for the next several weeks and explore suffering. Everyone suffers but it helps if you have knowledge in advance about how to handle it. It reminds me of years ago when my son and I took scuba diving lessons. In those lessons, the first thing we did was read a book about it. The second thing we did was stand on shore, and put on all the gear. The third thing we did was get into a shallow swimming pool and walk around in the gear and then go under water. Lastly, we went into the deep end. Then and only then were we ready to go out into a lake or go into the ocean. Preparing for suffering before experiencing it is like that. It is something that can be quite helpful.

As we go on this journey, we are going to be exploring the nature of God to a higher degree. We will explore how God intersects with our life, and who God is to us and for us. I think if you hang with me through this series, we will end up feeling rewarded for it. We will have a new sense of joy and peace and a sense of perseverance when we end up facing suffering. Believe me, everybody will face suffering at some time. It happens to us all. Those of you who are older have already experienced it. Those of you who are younger, maybe it has not yet happened, but it will. We can always learn more about how to deal with it and how to handle it better.

First, let's look at the nature of God. The scripture gives us attributes of God. It says that all good comes from God and that evil is the absence of God. Contemplating the goodness of God is something that is important for us. I don't think that we generally have any sense of how good God is and how in comparison we don't compare with that and we don't live up to that. As I contemplate the universe, the creation and the great distances between planets, I'm aware that they are millions of light years away from each other. Yet they are all a part of God's creation. How immense He must be. How enormous He must be. It is really unfathomable. If you really think about the purity of His goodness in that immensity, it must be incredible. So that thought can come to us as we go through our lives. We can actually be filled with this immense purity and goodness as we walk in the grace of God. That is an important concept to register in our minds at first. We look at other traits of God. We use big theological words like He is omnipotent. Omnipotent means that He is all-powerful. As we think of that, I am reminded of discussions in seminary where we would challenge each other&is there anything that God can't do? We decided that God can't create a rock bigger than He can lift. Does that make sense? He can't create a rock bigger than He can lift because He is all-powerful so He can lift any rock that He ever creates. He can't do logical opposites at the same time. The all-powerfulness is also something available for us. When we call upon Him to fill us, we, too, are given power. We are given energy. The next trait of God is omniscience which means He is all-knowing. In a cute way, we capture that analogously with Santa Claus. “You better watch out. He knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows when you've been bad or good so be good for goodness sake.” Really, that is a trait of God. He is all-knowing so He sees you in your private moments. He reads your deepest thoughts that you would not share with anybody. He knows everything about you. You can't hide from God. Paul Harvey, a radio personality, when he was broadcasting, would always say, “You can run but you can't hide.” Oh yes, we can run away from God but we can never hide from God. He always knows what is going on with us. That can be both comforting and frightening. If we are doing something bad, it is frightening. But if we are doing something good, it is comforting. That brings us to the scripture that Jill Parsons read this morning about God sending His Holy Spirit. The translation in the New Revised Version which is the altar and the pew version that we use, uses the word Counselor to describe the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a counselor-advisor sent to us to teach all truth. Other translations have chosen to use the word comforter and both are correct renditions of the Greek word. He is a counselor in that He gives us wisdom and advice but He is a comforter, too. He can comfort us in our suffering. He can be with us in our suffering and enable us to feel His soothing care, even in the most intense suffering that we can have.

I am reminded of three examples of how God in the Holy Spirit comes to people as a comforter. A man named Robert Rogers lost all of his family in the Kansas flood in the year 2003 - his children and his wife. He was interviewed by television personalities and the question was, “Why aren't you bitter? Why aren't you angry about this?” His answer was, “God.” He felt that the only way he handled his suffering and his loss was by the indwelling of God with him. God was there, the Holy Spirit was there as a comforter and enabled him to get through the intense suffering and the intense loss that he felt. The Holy Spirit reassured him that one day he'd be reunited with his lost loved ones. We have that ability, too, to look to God as our comforter when we experience difficulties in our life, whether it is loss, whether it is a calamity or a disaster or something of that nature. This has always been my experience.

This morning, one of our parishioners showed me a newspaper article about one of our other parishioners&93 year-old Marie George who lives at Llanfair Retirement Home. The newspaper article that was shared with me described how Marie went through the tornado that came through this area several years ago. Her house was the only house on her street that was destroyed. They had to totally demolish it, pick it up, carry it to the back of Kuliga Park, dump it and bury it. There have been several times that I have visited her and took her communion when we've talked about how she and her husband got through the suffering of losing her home. Her answer was always, “God.” “God helped me through that calamity.” “God helped me through that situation.”

A man by the name of Randy Butler lost his son in a terrible car accident. Again, people asked him, “How is it that you are not bitter? How is it that you are better?” His answer, too, was that he would sometimes get down on his knees and would shout to God, “Why God? Why?” And he would never get a satisfactory answer to his question, “Why?” But what he did get was the voice of God say to him, “You know, I lost my son, too. I understand your pain. I will support you through it.” And he said that made all the difference because he knew that God the Father had experienced the same feelings and emotions. So we have examples in life of people who get through difficult times because of the comforting of the Holy Spirit. It is fascinating to me that all the contemporary atheists and all the atheists before the present time have used suffering as a way to say God doesn't exist. “If an all-loving God existed, there would be no suffering,” they'd say. But the reality is that God uses suffering to bring us to Him. That is one of the benefits of suffering. Almost inevitably when a person has a great calamity like the three that I just mentioned, instead of becoming bitter, most people turn to God and become better. This is virtually a universal experience with few exceptions. It is fascinating, isn't it, that God has given us a way to move closer to him - through suffering. It is just one of the benefits of suffering&if we can even think of a benefit of suffering. We can be carried by God, then. We can be carried in His loving arms when we go through crisis, when we go through loss, when we go through the calamities that might beset us in this life. So for the next several weeks, we will explore God's nature even more. We will explore theories of how to cope with and deal with suffering. We will also explore how to receive God's favor. When we receive human favor, say from a boss or someone close to us, it always feels good. When we receive God's favor, we can make it through anything.