The Gospel According to Ted Lasso: A Curse to Reverse

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect. ~ Hebrews 11:1–3; 39–40 NRSV

Hebrews 11 builds up to the well-known passage of Scripture about the great cloud of witnesses that surround us, which is found in chapter 12. In Paul’s letter to Hebrew Christians in Rome, he describes faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith sounds pretty hard, doesn’t it?

Paul describes the faith of ancestors of the people he’s writing to, names we know well from the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament: Abel, Enoch, and Noah; Abraham and Moses; the unnamed Hebrews who had been enslaved until they crossed the Red Sea; Rahab; Gideon; Samson; Samuel and more.

In the letter to the Hebrews, Paul remembers each of these ancestors as heroes of the faith. He remembers them for the blessings that they experienced, embodied, and offered.

But the stories of these spiritual ancestors also include tremendous hardship, some their own doing, some not. Abel was murdered by his own brother. Noah’s excessive drinking caused problems for his family. In addition to faith, the stories of these ancestors include war and genocide, violence and sexual violence, natural disasters, and betrayal.

Like all people, their lives and character contained a messy mixture of good and bad, easy and hard, blessings and experiences that can be called nothing short of curses. In fact, our passage ends by saying that, even though God commanded each of these people for their deep faith, none of them received what God promised them. Thus, for example, Abraham didn’t live to see a nation be born from him, and Moses died before entering the Land of Promise. The Voice Translation translates it this way: “That promise has awaited us, who receive the better thing that God has provided in these last days, so that with us, our forebears might finally see the promise completed.”

Of course, Paul wrote these words long ago, but as Scripture, they live in perpetuity. Each generation has the opportunity to help complete the promise. In the spirit of Ted Lasso, we might say that each generation has the chance to reverse the curse.

Let me tell you where that comes from.

As you know, Ted is a salt-of-the-earth, optimistic fella who shifts from coaching football at a small Midwestern college to managing a team in England’s premier football league. It doesn’t matter that Ted knows nothing about soccer because he cares more about building character than winning games.

He finds himself and his team in a bit of a pickle, though, when Dani Rojas, AFC Richmond’s newest rising star, gets injured practically as soon as he joins the team. After a great first practice during which Rojas makes excellent plays and runs around the pitch enthusiastically yelling, “Football is life!” the player falls out of nowhere and can barely walk.

Nobody’s around him. Nothing touches him. He doesn’t fall in a hole. The best way Rojas can explain what happens is by saying, “I did not trip over something. Something tripped over me. Something not there.” You see, Rojas has been in the team’s treatment room, and those who’ve been part of the team for a while know that the treatment room is cursed.

Upon doing some investigating, Ted learns that at the beginning of World War 1, flyers went up all over Richmond advertising a day when young men could try out for the football league. The ad was a bait and switch. When the athletic young men arrived at the stadium, they were greeted by recruiters, not coaches. 400 men enlisted that day to help the war effort. Almost none came home. Their physicals took place in none other than the treatment room.

The present is connected to the past, and the football team is cursed by something that happened long ago. On the surface, Ted Lasso doesn’t seem like the best candidate to help break a curse. When the team owner asks him if he believes in ghosts, the happy-go-lucky coach responds, “I do, but more importantly, I believe they need to believe in themselves.”

But what Ted does know is that those young soldiers made an enormous sacrifice. Most of them gave their lives for freedom, and their sacrifice has impacted his team. Without it, they may not be able to be professional football players either. In addition to this, Ted also knows that sacrifices should be honored.

He asks each person who’s part of the team to bring something meaningful to the clubhouse. That night when they gather, each person tells the story of the object that’s special to them. And then they throw it into a fire. A blanket given by a beloved grandfather, the first pair of cleats (or boots) that a player got as a kid, a newspaper clipping that’s haunting someone and needs to be burned.

Through shared sacrifice and shared stories, the team heals the curse. They heal the past, but they also heal the present. So you see, this is the moment when the team finally becomes a team. Instead of being a group of individuals trying to become stars, they become a community invested in each other and a common purpose.

Perhaps this is part of our purpose while we get to spend some time here on this earth. We’re all shaped by the past, in both positive and negative ways. When we heal the hurts of the past, we heal them not just for ourselves, which is worthwhile in and of itself, but we also heal them for others.

In his book My Grandmother’s Hands, noted author and therapist Resmaa Menakem writes, “Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality. Over even longer periods of time, as it is passed on and gets compounded through other bodies in a household, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture.”

What if the struggle for racial equity and equality, gay and transphobia, the tendency to exclude people for fear that they might get our piece of the pie? What if that isn’t actually culture but results of unhealed trauma?

According to Paul, we have the opportunity to reverse the curse! Let’s learn our history instead of trying to keep the parts that have resulted in generational trauma out of classrooms. Let’s learn and acknowledge how the past impacts our personal present. Let’s share our stories and honor and respect them as they are told because that’s what binds us together. Then, perhaps we can heal together. That can also cause ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time.

According to the apostle Paul, the promise awaits us. When it reaches completion, everyone will experience it all the way back to those early ancestors of the faith. Imagine the healing. Imagine healthy family systems. Imagine culture rooted in wholeness. As Ted Lasso himself says, “We’ve got a curse to reverse!” In church talk, that means we’ve got a kingdom to build. The Kingdom of God. Which womanist theologians say is rooted in kin-dom, connection, communal healing. May it be so.