Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
Original Manuscript:
This is an interactive manuscript. To follow links, click the highlighted words below.
In the hit show Ted Lasso, the titular 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 Ted, 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.
As time goes on, Rebecca starts to become friends with Ted and begins to feel guilty about what she has done to him. Towards the end of the first season, 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.” With that, he makes her worthy to be down there.
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 his act of kindness and forgiveness.
Like Rebecca, we do not start out worthy. We have all done things we are not proud of. We have all done things that are wrong. Yet like Rebecca, we are made worthy, not by our own work, but that of another. In our case, that work is the work of God.
This is the lesson we hear in our readings today, that God has made us worthy. We see this first with Isaiah in the Temple. Isaiah, in the time of the death of the king, a time of great transition and uncertainty, witnesses a vision of the heavenly throne. He is immediately frightened.
Now Readers of the Torah will remember that God warns Moses, as the Lord gets ready to pass by him on Mt. Zion, not to look at God’s face or he will die. Isaiah would know this, and that is why he is frightened. He knows he is a sinner. He knows he is unworthy, and he fears even seeing this vision will mean his death.
Yet the seraphs there by the throne take a coal from the altar and touch it to Isaiah’s lips, which would have likely been painful, even more so than Rebecca having to admit her fault to Ted. When the coal touches Isaiah’s lips, the seraph tells him that his “guilt has departed” and that his “sin is blotted out.”
Isaiah, though a sinner, has now been made worthy so that when the Lord cries out “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah has the courage to reply, “Here am I, send me.”
The worthiness Isaiah receives is not for him alone. We receive this worthiness too. Just as with Isaiah, it is not without change. Jesus, in speaking to Nicodemus, says to be worthy to enter the Kingdom of God requires being “born from above”. It is not a thing we can do on our own. It requires God’s work as Jesus explains when He says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
Through Jesus’ work in this world, we are made worthy. Not only are we made worthy to enter the Kingdom through His Sacrifice, we are made worthy to be children of God through adoption, as Paul tells us in Romans.
Ted made Rebecca worthy through his act of forgiveness in Ted Lasso. God does the same for us. There is nothing we can do on our part to be made worthy. God does that work for us.
That doesn’t mean we don’t change as a result. Rebecca had to first admit her wrongdoing to Ted. The same is true for us. We see this in Isaiah’s confession and having the coal touch his lips. We see it with need for renewal and rebirth that Jesus speaks of to Nicodemus. We see it in the fact that we are adopted by God, as Paul shares to the Romans.
God does the work to make us worthy. That work creates a change in us. No longer can we believe that we are fine and okay. No longer can we hold to the idea that we are worthy on our own. Yet when we accept that, we can let God in to change us so that for the first time we are worthy, forgiven, and reborn in the Love of Christ Jesus.