Proper 4

He’s the unlikeliest of folk heroes. Khaki pants. Team jersey. A whistle dangling from his neck. Ned Flanders mustache. A sun visor covering his receding hairline.

He is, of course, Ted Lasso, the character created by Jason Sudeikis that became a runaway success for Apple TV+. Ted is an American college football coach, plucked from obscurity by a wealthy English divorcée who tags him to coach her Premier League football team (in America, we’d call it a soccer team). The problem is, Ted’s never coached that kind of football. He’s reading the rulebook on his flight to England, cramming for the exam he knows is coming: his first meeting with the team.

British sportswriters are underwhelmed by Ted’s introductory press conference. They think Ted’s boss, the team owner, is crazy. It turns out, she is — crazy like a fox. Her secret goal is to run her football franchise into the ground to punish her ex-husband. She recently won the team from him in their divorce settlement, and she knows how much he loves it, the pet project of his life. She doesn’t care how many millions it will cost her; she just wants to stick it to him. And how better to do it than to hire a coach who is manifestly unqualified and certain to become a laughingstock as his team flounders? The bottom line is that the bitter team owner is setting up Ted to fail. He’s the sacrificial lamb she needs to wreak her revenge.

Much hilarity ensues. But what’s truly surprising about the TV series is the character of Ted Lasso himself. He is truly likeable, despite it all. An unflappable optimist, he never seems to notice how the odds are stacked against him. Ted — a quintessential decent human being — reliably does the right thing, while flashing his trademark ear-to-ear grin.

One of Ted’s earliest actions is to tape up a homemade, crudely lettered sign over the door of the team’s locker room. The sign displays just one word: “Believe.” That’s the essence of Ted Lasso. He’s a true believer.

What Ted believes in is his team’s potential for victory. The question for us is, if we taped the word “Believe” to our bathroom mirror, what exactly would we be reminding ourselves we believe in?

Life has a way of testing and revealing what we truly believe. With illness, suffering and grief, no human life — not even the life of a Christian — is free of soul-shaking experiences. Some of life’s crises arise quite suddenly. When faced with looming spiritual obstacles, how do we respond?

Ted Lasso has a little advice to offer on that score. One of his memorable sayings from the TV show is, “There’s two buttons I never like to hit: that’s panic and snooze.”

Think about it. If you were to receive some terrible news tomorrow — a bad medical diagnosis, the death of a loved one, or the loss of a job — would you be inclined to hit the panic button? Or would you hit the snooze button instead, pulling the covers over your head, going into a kind of denial, hoping the problem will just go away?

There’s an alternative. We can choose to press another button, located right between panic and snooze. We can decide, in faith, to accept the new normal. Sure, there may be grief for the old normal that is no more, but we know those days are not coming back. The hard truth is, the Lord has picked us up and dropped us right into the middle of a new normal. So, what is there to do but unpack, arrange our clothes in the dresser drawer, and make ourselves as comfortable as we can?

            The apostle Paul talks about the new normal in today’s Epistle:

“We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For we who are living are always being handed over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal flesh.”

Paul doesn’t mince words here. He’s not like those prosperity preachers you see on TV, who promise that if you just give your heart to Jesus, every good thing will come drifting down to you like manna from heaven; that you’ll never have any pain, difficulty or heartache.

No, Paul is brutally realistic. Just look at the words he uses: “afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down.” No hint of a prosperity gospel here, just a frank acknowledgment that life — for Christians as for any other person — is hard, and sometimes very hard.

But there’s some good news. Such affliction is not forever. Eventually, we can grow to accept the new normal. We can learn, in time, how to push that button between panic and snooze. We can claim the difficult experience as our own. And we can come to realize that, while life may knock us down sometimes, it can never keep us down — not if we approach such obstacles with Christ by our side.

Paul goes on to speak of facing the ultimate challenge: the death that will one day come to us all. We are “always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus.” To Paul, even facing the prospect of death is a new normal. Beyond it, by the grace of Jesus Christ, is the promise of resurrection. He’s bold to claim, “that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” We may be struck down, he admits. But we’re not destroyed.

Kate Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School, has become an inspiration to many, not so much for what she’s taught and written as an academic — which is impressive — but for her personal story as a survivor of colon cancer. Kate — at the time a young mother — was diagnosed at age 35 and given just a few months to live.

It turned out she did a lot better than expected and is still very much with us, but the experience changed her life. Ever since then, in addition to her teaching and research, she has spoken and written about her own experience claiming and owning the new normal.

In one devotional, Kate shares something Anthony of the Desert, a monk from Egypt and the most famous of all early monastics, once said. Someone asked Brother Anthony what we ought to do to please God.

The ancient monk replied with a very simple piece of advice: “Wherever you go, keep God in mind. Whatever you do, follow the example of Holy Scripture. Wherever you are, stay there and do not move away in a hurry.”

Kate comments: “What I hear in those instructions is to try to eliminate double-mindedness. BE WHERE YOU ARE. You don’t have to be extra, extra holy. You simply have to be where you are, and keep God in mind.”

Be where you are. And keep God in mind. It’s hard to think of a better motto for loving the new normal than that.

 “Afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair.” It’s the gift of God to all who resolve to be where they are and keep God in mind.

             None of us get very far as survivors of one affliction or another by pretending that bad things don’t happen to good people. The reality is that sometimes they do in this fallen world we all live in. Nor can we claim God protects Christians from pain and struggle — just ask Paul, with all his talk of affliction and perplexity.

But one thing most any Christian survivor of hard times learns from hard experiences is that, along with affliction, the Lord gives us what we need to get through difficult times. All of it is built on awareness and acceptance in faith of the new normal.

Yes, there are losses in life. Accepting the new normal means bidding farewell to the old, knowing it may never return. Kate Bowler learned it as she resolved simply to be where she was. Countless survivors of tornados, floods and hurricanes have had to say farewell to their old homes, but learned to look forward rather than back, knowing the life they are living is still a good life.

We Christians are a resurrection people. We know that out of death comes new life. Out of a shattered, old normal comes a new normal. There’s still joy to be found, hope to be cherished, and a resurrection faith that sustains and strengthens.

Even if the worst should come, God creates for us a new normal, a place that — in often unexpected ways — offers blessedness and joy.