Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
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One of my favorite shows is last year’s Ted Lasso. Ted is an American Football coach going through a hard time in his marriage. To give his wife, soon to be ex-wife, some space, he takes a job in England coaching International Football, what we call Soccer, a sport he, by his own admission, knows very little about.
Ted is hired by the new owner of AFC Richmond, Rebecca Welton. Rebecca got the team as part of her divorce with her cheating ex-husband, Rupert. Since the team is the only thing Rupert ever loved, she does everything she can to destroy it. This is why she hired Ted, and she tries to sabotage his attempts in building up the team every step of the way.
Eventually, Rebecca starts to become friends with Ted, and starts to feel guilty about what she has done to him. She marches into the locker room where Ted’s office is, an area of the building she has never gone into before, and she confesses everything. Ted looks at her, taking it all in. Then he sighs and looks at her and says, “I forgive you.”
Rebecca says to him, “Why?” to which Ted replies, “Divorce is hard…. It makes folks do crazy things…. I’m coaching soccer for heaven’s sake in London. I mean, that’s nuts.”
As Rebecca leaves, Ted says to her “Nice seeing you down here boss. You liven up the place.”
Rebecca did everything she could to make Ted’s life harder. Yet he was able to move past that and even see her as a valuable part of the team. He made her worthy, not for anything she had done, but simply out of kindness and forgiveness.
Every single reading we have this morning shows God doing the same for us. Isaiah feared approaching God. He did not feel worthy. But the angel touched a coal to his lips so that Isaiah could be made clean and worthy so that when God the Father asks who to send, Isaiah is able to say, “Here I am. Send me.”
When it comes to our own sin, we need new life, and as Nicodemus learns, when it comes to new life, there is the Son, Jesus Christ, ready and willing to provide. As Jesus tells him, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that in the end everyone who believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
When it comes to accepting this new life, Paul tells us it is the Spirit that lets us move away from sin and death into this new life Jesus brings. It is the Spirit that raises us up and makes us worthy to be adopted as children of God.
In all these readings, God lifts us up to be worthy, even though we don’t deserve it. God does so in unity through each Person of the Trinity, the very aspect of the nature of God we celebrate today.
It is easy for us to focus on what makes us unworthy and bad. Our liturgy has many places to remind us of our sinfulness. It can be a good thing to do so to keep us humble.
But we must also remember that we, at the same time, have been made worthy through the power of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The great Three in One. A Unity that one day will hopefully mark our unity with one another.
How can we better recognize the worthiness that God has given to us? How can we better see that God has provided to us everything that we lack at the core of our being? If we can see that God loves us, maybe we can learn to actually love ourselves and in doing so, maybe we can start to love others too.