The Eve of Christ's Nativity-The Rev Melanie Lemburg

 Christmas Eve 2021

 

        “The world can be divided into two types of people:  those who love Ted Lasso and those who haven’t seen it yet.”[i]  If you’ve been following us here at St. Thomas this past year, you will know that I was late (and a little reluctant) to watch the Emmy-winning Apple TV show titled after its main character Ted Lasso. My friend and colleague here discovered the show pretty early and after her initial enthusiastic recommendation, she would periodically say, “Have you watched it yet?”  This summer just as the 2nd season was coming out, I finally succumbed to her gentle yet zealous encouragements to “just watch it, you’ll see!”  Here is what I found.

        Ted Lasso is an American college level football coach who is hired to coach for a premier soccer league in England.  He’s never played soccer before, doesn’t really understand all the rules, and he has all sorts of misadventures because of the differences in how we use the English language and in the different culture.  But here’s the thing.  The show isn’t really about soccer. It’s about humanity—what forces drive and motivate us and about how we are all a strange mix of light and dark, of hope and self-interest, of kindness and smallness.

        Ted is this intriguing character because he carries in him an unrelenting optimism that sees potential in people and helps invoke the best out of most of the people around him.  

        In the first episode, on his first day of work at his new job at fictional AFC Richmond Football club, Ted walks into the locker room and then tapes up a handwritten sign on a yellow piece of paper.  The sign reads “Believe.” Throughout the two seasons, Ted refers to the sign occasionally, sometimes just by tapping it with his hand as the players watch him walk through the doorway into his office. 

        And I think, when you boil it all down, the success of Ted Lasso in this current moment in our common life is that we all are desperately looking for, longing for, something or someone to believe in.  We long to remember how the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.  We look for the hope of the promise that kindness, vulnerability, and forgiveness can change the world.

        This time of year, we hear a lot about believing.  We watch movies about how the power of belief can help bring about magic in this old, tired world.  One meditation on Belief says it this way:

“This time of year we’re told to “believe.”

But what does that mean?

Judging from the movies to believe

means to believe in magic, or Santa, or romance,

to be optimistically wishful and naïve.

In many Christian circles to believe means

to think, as in believing certain doctrines are true.

But the word “believe” comes from old English,

rooted in German, belieben—to love.

In scripture to believe means to give your heart:

to lovingly entrust yourself, not to an idea but to a person.”[ii]

        We know the people who walked in darkness; we are them.  We long to give our hearts to something or someone, to put our trust in something greater than ourselves.  The Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “we are all meant to be mothers for God, for God is always needing to be born.”

In order for Jesus to be born on this night so many years ago, his mother Mary first had to say yes to God’s invitation.  She had to give her heart to God, to put her trust in God in an unexpected and unprecedented way.  Joseph, also, was given a chance, a dream, a moment when his initial no to being the father of Jesus changed to become a yes, and he, too, gave his heart and his trust to God.

        That is the gift of this most holy night—the old, familiar story reminds us of how normal people, not so different from us, said yes when God’s messenger showed up in their lives asking for them to believe, inviting them to believe, to trust, to give their hearts and to help give birth to God. 

        It’s a reminder of how regular people—Mary, Joseph, the shepherds—witness and participate in the birth of Emmanuel/God with us and how they gave their hearts to him, upending both their own lives and the entire world.

        This year-maybe above all years-we have longed to believe in something, in someone.  We have longed to give our hearts to someone or some cause that is worthy.  We have longed to be saved from ourselves and all the craziness that is going on in the world around us.

        The gift of this night is the reminder that through the birth of Emmanuel-God with us-God shows us that God is with us, that God invites us to give our heart, our trust, ourselves to God.  And when enough of us say yes to God, God will change the world.  It has already happened, and it will happen again. 

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