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The television show Ted Lasso really begins with the story of Rebecca Welton. She is recently divorced from a very wealthy man who, it turns out, had multiple affairs behind her back. As part of the settlement, Rebecca received the one thing her ex-husband truly loves: the British football club AFC Richmond. They’ve never performed well, but they have done well enough to remain in the premier league. Rebecca is determined in the aftermath of her divorce, to destroy this club.
This is where Ted Lasso comes in. He is a college American football coach who just built his team up from nothing into real contenders. Rebecca decides to hire him to manage AFC Richmond even though he has never set foot outside the United States and has little-to-no understanding of the inner workings of football. Her hope is that Ted will be able to lead Richmond to it’s downfall, and she does everything in her power to bring about that end.
Ted works in a different way from most coaches though. He doesn’t care about the wins or losses. Instead, he tries to make his players, as he states it, “the best versions of themselves both on and off the field.” In spite of a rough season, Ted has an immensely positive impact on the team. He starts to have one on Rebecca as well.
In fact, there comes a point when Rebecca admits, “I lost my way for a minute, but I’m on the road back.” Though she brought Ted in to bring destruction to Richmond, he brought something else. He brought healing, to the team and to Rebecca as well. It was an unexpected but wonderful gift of love and grace.
God does the same for us. Though we expect God to work in one way and not the other, God often surprises us by what He has been working in us and in the world.
We see this throughout our readings today, first in Jeremiah. God, in commissioning Jeremiah tells him that He will give him the power through his words to “pluck up and pull down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.” We often get fixated on that the set of words that something is being destroyed or is ending. Yet with God, these tearing downs are often the beginning of something new. Think of Jesus’ own work in this world. While Jesus was tearing down one way of religious thinking, He was building up something to replace it. He did not let sin continue to destroy us, but used death itself to rebuild us into something new and wonderful through the gifts of Resurrection and Grace. In the same way, while Rebecca wanted to tear down Richmond, Ted used what she had done to help build it back up into something grand.
We might think that Ted should have stayed coaching football in America instead of transitioning to a new sport. Jesus speaks to something similar in the Gospel today. He points out that we would have expected the Prophet Elijah in the past to have gone to the hungry and needy within his own nation. Instead, God sent him to help a widow and orphan from a Gentile land. Same with Elisha’s own healing of a Gentile. We cannot anticipate where God will go or even where God will send us. Often times God acts in the ways and with the people we least expect.
Now when Rebecca starts to realize where she went wrong, Ted is there to forgive her, even though she has tried to sabotage his efforts to build up the team. In that moment of forgiveness, he tells her, “I think that if you care about someone and you got a little love in your heart, there ain’t nothing you can’t get through together.”
That’s what Paul is telling us this morning. After his stretch of teaching on gifts these past several weeks, Paul tells the Corinthians, as well as us, that even if we were to have the supposed “best” gifts possible, it would mean nothing without love. This love Paul speaks of is the same love we speak of every Sunday before our service. It is the love that calls us to love God with every fiber of our being and to love our neighbors, all those around us, as ourselves.
God works in ways, as well as with and through people, we least expect. We often don’t see that when things are brought down, when an ending comes our way, God is really building something new up. To see what God is doing, and to be a part of that work, we need to have that love Paul speaks of in our hearts. We need to be able to love God and our neighbor. We need to have the same love Ted had, the kind of love that can forgive someone even when they were acting as our enemy. We need the kind of love that can recognize that there are Rebeccas in this world who act not out of pure evil, but out of brokenness. That brokenness is what we all experience through sin, and it is the very thing that God is working to destroy in order to build us back up, whoever we are and wherever we may be, so that we can have that love in our hearts, that love that bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things. Because if we have that love, then we truly have something worth possessing.