Ted Lasso to eschatology in five easy steps

just kidding about the five steps part

I’m taking a break from publishing during the month of July. Please enjoy this post from the archives!

On last week’s episode of Ted Lasso,¹ Zava made a comment,“My wife, Christina, is the only woman I see with clarity. Every other woman is a smudge.” Now theologically, I don’t believe that anyone is a smudge. I think a stronger doctrine of people as image-bearers and loved by God, will help redeem some broken parts of the church’s witness; I think it’s integral to our being in the world. BUT, all the same, this phrase has lingered with me for days. I see my husband with so much clarity and delight that other men are just a smudge. I don’t say that as a prescription for marriage because I think it’s just not true for most marriages. I’ve heard stories of marriages where the spouse is the smudge, so broken and blurry it’s hard to bring the person into focus. But nevertheless, that is where I find myself. And not just with my husband, my children are so close to my heart—these little pieces of myself—that I carry them with a delight and a weight that I do not others. I have a few friends who seem to be such intimate pieces of myself that others are just smudges. I view it as gift, not something that makes me think less of others but something that makes me weep with joy. 

But those types of relationships also cause pain. This kind of love means the potential of deep loss. If everyone is a smudge, there is no huge loss. Again, not theologically speaking, only experientially speaking. If I don’t know anyone, don’t cherish anyone, don’t grow deep with anyone over years, they never stand out in sharp clarity. One smudge rubbed out means another smudge moves over and everything is fine. But to have people you see sharp and in focus, who have shaped so much of who you are, is to be ripped apart at the seams when they are undone. And one day they will be undone. It’s an existential waiting to see who will die first. That’s a bleak way of looking at things but sometimes I exist there. It comes to mind, unwillingly to be sure, and the thought of existence without these people makes me groan. 

I’ve had practice dreading death, though not as much experiencing it. Perhaps this is why this topic lives inside my body. When Micah, our oldest son was born, we took him home, delighted and exhausted. He went into a metabolic crisis when he was five days old; his body started shutting down. His temperature dropped. He was non-responsive. The first children’s hospital he was admitted to told us that there was nothing they could do. They planned to wait and see what happened. He was intubated. His blood pressure was managed by medication. The only thing his body was doing independently was his heartbeat. We knew what they meant and I was hurtled forward in my mind, imagining this world where my baby died of some strange disease that I had never heard of and I was left trying to find a way to live. He would have died at that hospital too if it hadn’t been for a resident who ordered him to be transported to a different hospital.

My pastoral ministry class insists that we take death seriously. Along with taking death seriously, we have to take Christian witness seriously. One of my class assignments involves writing my own funeral. The past two mornings on the way to work I’ve listened to a podcast talking about Christian funerals and all that we’ve put aside in our discomfort and despair over death. There is no longer a proclamation of Christian truth over death. The pastor said we have stopped allowing the dead to attend their own funerals. We’ve stopped before the end. This leaves believers unable to to bear up under loss. For all that the Spirit is healing and moving and reworking the world already (and we get to participate in that. It’s part of our work as followers of Jesus), great ruptures are still being ripped in the world because the enemy still exists, he’s still fighting. One of those great ruptures is death. Death is antithetical to the life we are supposed to possess and inherit as people in relationship with God. It is not part of God’s creation; it is an anti-creation, an undoing of what God did. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

The part of the story we live in now leaves us with hope.² Though the enemy is still undoing, he will not undo forever. One day these great ruptures will be healed, remade; the demonic work of death will be undone. We know it because it was already undone in Jesus. When Jesus rose from the dead, he brought others with him. We live with the promise that all others who live in Christ will live and live and live and not die, at least not permanently. What would have been a final siege, a holding of what was supposed to be God’s but was now under the power of the devil, is only a momentary fracture. We are fractured from them and they from us, and they from their own bodies, but only for a time. We anticipate a resurrection, a bodily one. All things will be put back together. It just feels as though the loss will rip us apart while we wait. 

The Bible tells us that we don’t grieve as those without hope. But we do grieve. Death is the enemy. It is unnatural. It is against what we were made for. The horror that a person we loved is no longer with us is a horror for that reason: they are no longer with us. It’s not just death that is a horror though, much of the world is. It is a continual undoing of what God has done. War. Violence. Shooting of children. Shooting of adults. Abuse. Desecration of nature. Division. Dehumanization of people. Tragic accidents. Systemic destruction. These things tear at my soul; they weigh me down. And they should. They are evil. They are monstrous. To complicate the story, that evil is not just out there. That same darkness lurks in me. The Bible describes anger as murder and lust as adultery. Even in the barest forms at times, these things have lived in my soul. I am helpless to get them out and to be guilty in one part is to be guilty in all. But my faith demands that I believe that all will be repaired, even myself. Even now I can participate in at least some portion of the repair. Where it is in my sphere of influence under the power of the Spirit I work for creation and again anti-creation. When it seems that the enemy has won, he has not. Death was defeated and we are waiting on the final victory. 

Stuff like this is scary to write and contemplate. I’m afraid that I will be asked to live it. Soon, at least. I know that at some point I will be asked to live it.³ But it seems to me that I need to have rehearsed the story beforehand. I need to have put a stake in the ground before the world goes dark. I need the knot in the rope to cling to though it will really be the Spirit holding me up. It’s this same story that stops me from total despair when I read the news. I will lament and I will grieve and I will be angry and I will participate in the remaking of creation. And I will wait, achingly, for the restoration of all things, believing that there is a Victor who will shut out death and pain and loss and sin one day forever. Even my closest people, though I might lose them for a time, will not be lost to me forever. None of us will be smudges then. We will be the deepest, most alive expressions of all we were made to be. 

1. Season 3, episode 5.

2. Here I’m referring to the larger story of Scripture. We live in the space beyond the resurrection and yet before new creation.

3. This feeling reminds me of the meme that says “I’m not superstitious but I am a little stitious.”