Bumper Sticker Theology: Terrible Triplets; August 16, 2026

speaker-0: Our first reading this morning comes from the book of Job. So the accuser went out from the presence of the Lord and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job took a potchard with which to scrape himself and sat among the ashes. Then his wife said to him, Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die. But he said to her, You speak as any foolish woman would speak, shall we receive good from God and not receive evil? In all this Job did not sin with his lips. Now when Job's three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuite, and Zophar the Namitite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud. They tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. The word of the Lord.

speaker-1: so on this third week of Christian cliches, we come to a decidedly different grouping, one that I'm calling the terrible triplets. They are things that you've certainly heard, things you might even have said yourself, even if you don't quite believe them, because they give us something to offer when suffering is at hand. we could certainly add to this list of terrible triplets, but then we'd have to like brainstorm an adjective for quadruplets. Crazy? accidentally unkind quadruplets? I don't know. We'll cross that bridge when we get there. But the triplets are as follows that I've chosen for this morning. Number one. Everything happens for a reason. Two, God needed another angel. Somebody made the puking noise at the early service when I said that one. And three, God will never give you more than you can handle. You know, I bet you can actually buy that set of cross-stitched pillows at Hobby Lobby right now if you looked hard enough.

speaker-0: Thank you.

speaker-1: We've heard from Job's friends who are absolutely crushing it right now and you'll notice that they haven't yet opened their mouths. That's about where their good deeds end. Because when they all open their mouths, they offer all sorts of fun hot takes. Hot takes like Kirk suggested to the children. Hot takes that make Job's wife suggestion that he curse God and die seem appealing. I'd invite you now, as we pivot to the New Orle Testament, to listen with me to Paul's encouragement to the church in Corinth as he speaks to them about enduring affliction. And we'll take it from there. This is 2 Corinthians chapter 1, and then we'll skip down in the book to chapter 12. Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our afflictions, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction, with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ. If we are being afflicted, it's for your consolation and salvation. If we're being consoled, it's for your consolation, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we also are suffering. Our hope for you is unshakable, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our consolation. But we don't want you to be ignorant, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experience in Asia. For we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt like we had received the sentence of death, so that we wouldn't rely on ourselves, but on God, who raises the dead. He who rescued us from so deadly a peril will continue to rescue us. On him we have set our hope that he will rescue us again as you also join in helping us by your prayers, so that many may give thanks on our behalf for the blessings granted to us to the prayers of many. Skipping to chapter twelve now. This is Paul speaking, to keep me from being too elated. A thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness. So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses. So that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ. For whenever I am weak, then I am strong. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.

2 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: O Lord, let our trust in you abide. Let it hold us in suffering, let it console us in trials unspeakable. Let it comfort us in silence when words are insufficient. In all things give us grace for every moment. Do this even now by your word and your spirit. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Christ, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. We started this series with two cliches whose origin stories live somewhere in the spectrum between malignant and hateful. Teach a man to fish sounds like prudent advice, except for when you realize that was only ever directed at poor people during the Gilded Age and then during black folk during the civil rights era. Cleanliness is next to godliness, seems harmless enough until you consider how it codes against those who are culturally unclean. And you can guess who those are. And if you guessed racial minorities, the poor and immigrants, you win? I don't know. Today's terrible triplets are awful for a different reason entirely. They don't have some ugly birth story. No, they arrive on the scene for wholly beautiful reasons. I mean, silence is a formidable foe when disaster strikes.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: And so people reach for these sayings, all of which sound just close enough to being wise or godly or have sort of the sheen or smell of religion on them. We reach for these because we want to be able to do something. We want to be able to help. Most generously, these cliches, these terrible triplets, are attempts at both witness and withness. They try to attempt to express something about what God is doing. That's the witness piece. And they also try to express the fact that we are there with them. That's the witness piece. God needed another angel, for instance, when somebody is dying or has died, is an attempt to witness to the fact that God is not absent in that suffering. It might even sound like God has offered a loved one an untimely promotion. That's not true. nowhere are we taught that humans become angels after death, but it sounds nice, right? Turns out that it's a wonderful life has proven to hold more weight for us than scripture in this regard, because every time a bell rings

speaker-0: Nature is changed.

speaker-1: Silly, but oddly charming, right? The gospel according to George Bailey. Listen here. It's untrue, but we are actually willing to overlook the fact that it's untrue if it might bring us a little comfort. And again, we really feel the need to say something helpful. All three of these triplets, and very much everything happens for a reason and God won't give you more than you can handle, end up becoming attempts at PR for God. And truthfully, they're as much PR for somebody else as they are for us. We're trying to convince ourselves, as much as we're trying to convince the people who are actually going through a hard time, that they're gonna be okay or they're gonna make it through because God would never overwhelm them. Or that someday they're gonna understand this tragedy or this death or this accident because there was some divine purpose behind it. We need God to make our chaotic lives make sense. And so I'm not here to shame anybody for reaching. For these cliches. At the same time, I think we can do much better. Not only because these sayings scarcely hint at the truth, but also, in my experience and probably yours, they just aren't that effective. It doesn't feel very good to hear these things. So the first way that we can do better is to model what Job's friends do. Before they open their big dumb mouths. And that is to sit. Just to sit. In fact, in the Jewish tradition of sitting Shiva, this is the scripture that has inspired that. Shiva just means seven, by the way, so it's to sit for seven days and seven nights with someone who is grieving. These friends just want to come. And be with their friend who is going through, is going through, has gone through something terrible. The most beautiful gift that you can give somebody in that situation likely isn't some brilliant turn of phrase that's gonna make everything all better. There is no making death and loss better. The simply the loveliest thing that you can do. is simply just to be there. Kate Bowler, she teaches at Duke Divinity School. And she has spent her entire career studying the prosperity gospel, which is America's uniquely ugly theological claim that faith and clean living can offer the adherent wealth and health. Think your Kenneth Copelands and your Jesse Duplantises of the world who really need your donations so that they can buy a nicer private jet to prove just how holy they are. just wait till you hear my pitch for offerings this morning. Morning. I've got some ideas that I'd like to try out. So Kate has spent her life studying folks like this. And just a few years ago, when she was 35 and had a one-year-old son at home, she was diagnosed with stage four cancer in her colon and given two years to live. And so many. of these platitudes came rolling off of the tongues of well mean meaning people in her life and in the comments section online. And so she did what every academic does. She turned it into a book. She wrote a book called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've loved.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: And then she wrote two quasi follow-ups to that, reflecting on her journeys in suffering. And yes, Kate is still with us, eleven years on, thanks be to God. She's a deeply faithful and wise soul, and one of the things that she offers is that the love that is required in traumatic moments doesn't often translate into the right thing to say, but it does often translate into the imposition of a casserole. Love puts on flesh in tragedy better than it can ever put on clever words. So instead of trying to fix it with half-baked theological nonsense, we can instead ask: how can I sit with you instead of opening my big dumb mouth? How can I be a real dude and sit and stare into a fire with you because I don't really know what to say, but I want to be with you. We can stare in the same direction for a while, we can kick rocks, we can watch a river flow, but I don't really know what to say. So how can I do that with you? Or maybe better yet, what would be a good time for me to drop off this food that I made for your dinner? Withness presence is a present. I think that so much of the problem of our trying to reach out with words and the silly things that we often say that are well-meaning is because we have not dared to be deeply thoughtful about our own suffering and what it might mean. And the Apostle Paul can be helpful here because in other places. Paul says, really helpful, like, you got this girl, kind of stuff. Like, like you are pressed but not crushed. You're persecuted, but not abandoned. You're struck down but not destroyed. Praise the Lord. Hallelujah. We are more than conquerors. Whoa! Through him who has given us strength. Right? Like, that is the vibe. Which gives very popular suffering vibes in 2026 as far as As I can tell, because I diagnose how we mostly handle suffering as a deep desire to ignore the pain as long as possible. Or to stuff it down and pretend like everything is okay until it explodes, right? Because that's not a winning strategy. Or, or if you are an observer to somebody else's pain, what we think we're supposed to do is fix it. Make it go away. Find the right thing to say to make it vanish. Poof. Preferably without a trace that it ever happened. Like a Boy Scout. We want to find equilibrium as soon as possible. But that is not what Paul is doing in our scripture this morning. In our passage this morning, Paul is like, I need y'all to know that we were utterly, unbearably crushed. And that we despaired of life so much that we felt like we had been given a death sentence. He does not say that God will not give us more than we can handle. He says he felt unbearably crushed, like he was dead. And I don't know if y'all have read the New Testament before, but God gave Jesus more than he could handle, didn't he?

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: Ain't no cross-stitched platitude got purchased there. And there ain't no coming back from it. Ain't no Boy Scouting it so that it leaves no trace. Paul goes on to talk about his thorn in the flesh, some physical ailment that he has begged God to release him from, but from which he has found no reprieve. We don't know what this is, but it might be that Paul has got some problem with his eyes. And we think this because in another place he writes, Look at what big letters I'm writing with my own hand, which is a really weird thing to write in a letter, unless that's novel for you, right? I'm writing this myself and I'm We don't know. But he's got some nagging problem that will not let him go. And in other places, Paul lists all the ways that he has suffered. The man keeps receipts. He says he's been shipwrecked three times, beaten with rods three times. He even got stoned once with rocks.

speaker-0: Thanks.

speaker-1: Famously, he went blind for a couple of days, not to mention the emotional and spiritual pain of having to admit to God himself. And everybody else that he spent half his life mistaken. The persecutor of the church becomes the church's greatest evangelist. Paul does not say everything that has happened to me happened for a reason after all of this. But,

speaker-0: Mm-hmm.

speaker-1: an important but, he does believe that his suffering was useful. That is not to say that God is actively willing anyone's pain. But it is to say that nothing that happens to you, good or bad, is wasted on God. Everything might not happen for a reason, but God can snatch victory and transformation from the jaws of meaninglessness and defeat for you. That's at least one of the lessons we can learn from an empty tomb. Franciscan and contemplative teacher Richard Rohr loves to say that if we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If we do not transform our pain or allow our pain to be transformed, we will most assuredly transmit it. There is no use simply leaning into our thorns and hoping they'll go away or waiting on time to be a healer, because many wounds go septic untreated. Time doesn't heal everything. Paul's point is that when we despair and when tragedy strikes, those aren't always moments for us to dig deep or man up or rise to the occasion and prove our mettle. They are, in fact, opportunities to admit that we're overwhelmed, that we're sunk, and to throw ourselves instead on the mercies of God, who is our strength and weakness. Jesus cried out on the cross that he felt abandoned by God and then he died. He did not rise to the occasion on his own. He did not jump off the cross as like those who were mocking him and defeat the Romans and overthrow all evildoers. Instead, Jesus was raised by God's power at work in him. And Paul testifies that that same power, God's same power, is at work within you by God's own spirit. And precisely in every moment of overwhelming pain and weakness, God's grace is going to be sufficient for you. You don't got this. But God has got you. The Christian life is not supposed to make you strong enough to suffer unscathed. Our faith, our belief that God is with us makes us humble enough to suffer. To trust God to see us through our sufferings, and to believe that pain and suffering can be transformed so that whatever scars we bear when we've come through it can become beautiful and useful in God's service and helpful to our neighbors. Suffering isn't going to be argued or PR'd away. It might be casseroled away. I'm Midwestern enough to believe that that's a possibility. But thank God, making suffering vanish was never our job. Our job is smaller and it is harder sometimes. It is to sit in the ash heap with the suffering. It is to bring a casserole because again you just never know. It's to keep our yap shut sometimes. And it is to trust that the same God that did not spare Jesus a cross is not wasting whatever wreckage you are standing in right now. That's the hope on offer. Not that this is going to make sense right now, not that it happened for some unknowable reason, but that the Father of mercies, the God of all consolation, will and can meet you in it. Weakness and all. And that the God who raises the dead is still somehow in the business of raising and transforming you. That is way too much for a pillow. But may this cross shaped hope be stitched upon your souls. Thanks be to God. Amen.