Online you can buy replicas of Ted Lasso’s “Believe” banner—blue letters on yellow paper with ragged bits of blue tape at the corners. You can even get a version that looks like it’s been pieced back together after it was ripped apart. If you’re not familiar with the show, Ted Lasso is hired to manage a premier soccer club in London—despite the fact that he’s a football coach who has no experience with soccer. The team is perpetually losing, the players openly hate each other, and the owner hires Ted as an act of further sabotage in order to get back at her ex-husband. Ted’s kindness and positivity, the folksy “Believe” banner he tacks above the locker room door—are at first met with ridicule. However, he quickly begins to bond with the players and to change the culture of the team. Soon they are winning and coach Lasso is a sensation. Despite his public success, the viewer gradually becomes aware of the depth of the coach’s own struggles. His wife has moved on after their divorce, but he’s still in love with her; he regrets living far away from his young son; and he suffers from panic attacks in the midst of big games.

After a tough loss to a rival team following the desertion of a key player, Ted speaks to his team about what belief really means to him. “All we need to win,” he says, “are the fellas in this room right now and all you fellows need to do is believe it.” At that moment, the sign rips in half and flutters off the wall. The players mutter, “We’re doomed,” and “It’s a sign.” Coach Lasso takes the sign down and shreds it into smaller pieces still. “It’s just a sign,” he declares.

Belief doesn’t just happen ‘cuz you hang something up on a wall. It comes from in here [points to his heart] and up here [points to his head] and down here [points to his gut]. Only problem is we all got so much junk floating through us, a lot of time we end up getting in our own way. You know, crap like envy or fear, shame. I don’t want to mess around with that [stuff] anymore. You know what I want to mess around with? The belief that I matter, you know? Regardless of what I do or don’t achieve. Or the belief that we all deserve to be loved. Whether we’ve been hurt or maybe we’ve hurt somebody else. Or what about the belief of hope? Believing that I can get better. That we will get better. Oh man. To believe in yourself. To believe in one another. Man, that’s fundamental to being alive. If you can do that, if each of you can truly do that . . . can’t nobody rip that apart.

I find myself drawn to the moment in Luke’s Easter story in which the women—Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James—are not believed. They told the apostles how perplexed they were to find the stone rolled away, the body they had intended to anoint for burial vanished. They described the terror that filled them when two men in dazzling clothes appeared. Who were they? What did they mean with their question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” And they recounted the power of being prompted to “remember” what Jesus had said. Not simply recalling the words he spoke but letting them be alive in the present. I’m guessing the women, as they related their story, were still very much perplexed. They must have been in deep shock, with this confusing early dawn encounter layered on to the trauma of watching their friend and teacher be brutally tortured and executed. Surely all they wanted from the men was to be treated like people who were telling the truth about their own experience, even if they had no idea what it all meant. Don’t we all know the pain and frustration of not being believed? Of having our authentic life experience dismissed as “an idle tale?” Of having others negate not just what we say but who we are?

The struggle going on in our politics these days is fundamentally about whether or not we believe in each other. Those in power want to force us to conform to the binaries and hierarchies they label “normal.” Can we come together as a society around truths that are more robust and real, recognizing that our uniqueness is good, that we are made in the image of the endlessly dazzling diversity of the divine; that we are male and female, and lots of other genders too; that everyone of every skin color and immigration status has the right to equal treatment under the law and to due process? That no one can simply be erased or disappeared? There’s a new trend going around on social media. When someone receives an autism diagnosis, their loved ones present them with a cake. The cake says, “Congrats on the autism!” There’s supposed to be humor in this of course. And at the same time, it’s a serious commentary on our society’s view of what is or isn’t a cause for celebration. The autism cake turns on its head the idea that neurodivergence is a problem and instead claims it as a gift—one good, interesting, and fruitful way to be human, one of many.

Last Sunday, Palm Sunday, we re-enacted the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem. The crowd shouted, making a scene, creating a disturbance. They staged a subversive, dangerous, public demonstration of opposition to empire’s repression and violence. They enacted an alternative vision of community rooted in the values and practices of Jesus. And some of the religious leaders worried, for good reason. This sort of thing might get them all killed. Despite the risk, Jesus and his community carried on with their protest. And Jesus said, “If these were silent, even the stones would cry out!” During our service last week we reflected prayerfully—in our own time, what messages need to be boldly shouted out, disrupting the complacency of those who want to label the truths an “idle tale?” Whose voices need so urgently to be heard that if we are silent, the stones would cry out on their behalf? We are displaying the messages folks wrote on the screen here in the sanctuary and they’ve been put together into a banner on the organ screen and dropped into the chat online.

The women’s very first reaction to the empty tomb was not fear. They were “perplexed.” The scene they encountered was so surprising, so unexpected, so outside their comfort zone. Luke makes it sound like they stood there for a time . . . “while they were perplexed.” And maybe that’s important, to be hospitable toward what disorients us, to be patient with our puzzlement. Because maybe our confusion is a sign that God is at work. It was in an unsettling moment of perplexity that the women received good news, that they experienced life in the midst of death, that they saw a new possibility: that one utterly shamed and silenced could rise again in power, could know divine vindication, could speak and live his truth without censorship.

A few days ago I attended a prayer vigil for the Venezuelan men who have been deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The names of each of the 238 men (the one whose names we know) were read, and, after each name, those gathered called out “presente.” The goal of those who deported them is to create a theatrical display of cruelty; to falsely, yet vividly, portray immigrants as dangerous and criminal, to demonize them, and then to use the fear and hatred this spectacle generates to control all of us and to further enrich themselves. In the simple act of reading the names of these men and claiming them as “present,” we bore witness to their humanity. We proclaimed the truths of their lived experience, and we gave voice to our nation’s espoused values of dignity and equality.

Anishinabe elder Sharon Day closed the prayer vigil with a few words. She said that listening to the hundreds of names being read brought to mind the proverb, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” And she challenged us to recognize that the genocidal practices of this government today represent exactly who we are and have always been as a nation. And she called us, too, to be like seeds, like buds, like grass that is beginning to green—seeds of a new nation. We, the people, she reminded us, are the only ones who have the power to change the government.  

Easter, in Christian tradition, is also a seed. The resurrection is not the culmination of God’s healing, liberating, life-giving work among us. It’s the moment of germination. It’s the beginning of our believing . . . believing in ourselves and each other. Believing in the community of mutual love and service inaugurated by Jesus. Believing in the collective power of our crying out and rising up. 

Believing.

Amen.