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The story for Season 1 of Ted Lasso centers around Rebecca Welton. We start with the finalization of her divorce from Rupert Manion. As part of their settlement, Rebecca became owner of the “one thing”, in her words, “that Rupert ever loved”: the Football Club A.F.C. Richmond. After all the pain he has caused her, Rebecca makes it her mission to destroy the club. This leads to her hiring an American Football coach, Ted Lasso, in hopes his inexperience coaching Soccer will tank the club’s prospects.
Along the way, Rebecca harms others as she brings them into her plot, including Leslie Higgins, Director of Football Operations for the club. She also makes some friends, including Keeley Jones, who she hires to do P.R. for the club. She even comes to feel some sympathy for Ted.
Just as Rebecca pushes Higgins away, Keeley inadvertently learns about Rebecca’s plot, specifically through one of her failed attempts to make Ted look bad. Keeley gives Rebecca a chance, telling her “either you come clean to Ted or I’ll do it for you.”
Shortly after, Keeley calls Rebecca out for not telling Ted. Rebecca moans, asking how do you tell someone you’ve harmed them for no reason and wondering that now that it’s all in the past what would admitting anything now change.
Keeley gives Rebecca a soft, caring look and says, “It would change how I feel about you.”
Rebecca still struggles getting the words out, but Keeley’s words reach her. She tells Ted what she did, and he forgives her. Then she goes to Higgins house to get him to come back and help the team.
As she talks with Higgins, she says “I lost my way for a minute, but I’m on the road back.”
I tell this story to help explain our reading from Genesis today and why the story of the Sacrifice of Isaac needed to happen.
As we saw near the start of this Season after Pentecost, Abraham’s story began well. God asked him, while he was still just known as Abram, to leave his family behind and go with his wife Sarah, then known as Sarai, to the great unknown. Abraham was 75 at this point with no children, yet God told him that he would be made into a great nation.
And Abraham did it. He believed and trusted in the Lord, and it was counted to him as righteousness, as Paul told us back in our Romans reading that very same Sunday.
And yet cracks started to form in Abraham’s trust and Faith. He didn’t quite leave his father’s home behind as God had asked. Instead, he took his nephew Lot with him. This almost led to disaster for Lot, as alluded to two weeks ago with Sodom and Gomorrah, the place where Lot was living at the time that was being destroyed for its xenophobia. Yet God still provided help and protection to Lot.
Then Sarah gets a bright idea. God’s promise seems impossible to fulfill by ordinary means. Instead, she decides to use her servant Hagar, who we saw last week. Through Hagar, maybe Abraham can have the child of promise, she thinks. This, of course, causes problems and jealousy. Yet God assures Abraham that the child of promise has not yet come.
As we saw two weeks ago, the child God promised does come, 25 years later after the start of Abraham’s journey. Now, Sarah sees no need to keep Hagar and her son Ishmael around. Abraham acquiesces to her request and sends Hagar and Ishmael, his own son, out into the wilderness. Yet even as he does this, God still provides, and promises to provide, protection to Hagar and Ishmael, even though none of this was ever supposed to happen.
Abraham has failed to fully trust in God’s promise and word over this time. He has failed, thanks to his own lack of trust, to act justly as well. What he needs is to prove himself again. He needs to live into the Covenant he and God made in the passages between our recent Genesis readings, all the way back in Genesis 15, before the debacle with Hagar even. What Abraham needs to do is show that he can follow God’s promise.
The only way Abraham can show this is by trusting that God will still make a great nation from his children, from Isaac specifically, even if Isaac were to be taken away.
Now some look at this passage and see cruelty in making Abraham choose to sacrifice his son. Those people fail to understand a crucial point. Abraham has had many adventures at this point, and they have given him time to know God, as much as any of us can. God did not let Lot die in Sodom and Gomorrah, even though Abraham didn’t specifically ask that Lot be saved, though Abraham did make it very clear that is his hope by asking if even 10 righteous might be found that Sodom might be saved. Spoiler alert, there were not. Yet God still saved Lot and his family anyways.
God could have overlooked the plight of Hagar and Ishmael. Ishmael wasn’t supposed to be born. He was not part of God’s plan for Abraham and the nation of Israel that would come from Abraham’s offspring. Ishmael is born from Sarah and Abraham trying to “game the system”, trying to game God’s system really. Yet God still looks out for Hagar and Ishmael and makes sure that for Ishmael, though the passage is always mistranslated in our English Bibles, “everyone’s hand will be for him.”
God does not overlook anyone, not even those Abraham brought wrongly into his drama by failing to fully trust in the Lord. God certainly won’t overlook Isaac, the child God promised, now.
What Abraham needs to realize is the truth of the words he speaks to his son, “God will provide.”
Abraham was lost and far gone. He’d failed to trust in God. He’d failed his son Ishmael even. It is rededicating himself to God and trusting that “for God all things are possible”, as Jesus Himself tells us, that Abraham is able to come back into the fold.
This is something we struggle with too. We struggle to trust in God. We struggle to believe that God will provide what we need. We struggle to have patience. We struggle to follow God’s will.
Like Abraham, we need a nudge, if not a hard push, to turn back to God. Nothing good comes from making our own way. Nothing good comes from failing to listen to the Lord. Learn from Abraham. Trust in God, and turn back in those times you fail to do so.
In this way we can follow the path laid out for us today in our readings from the Gospel and Romans. In this way we can turn back to righteousness. In this way we can turn back and be made free.