“There is no ‘I’ in team.” It’s a classic sports cliché, reminding us that just as the word “team” does not have the letter “i” in it, the concept of a team doesn’t have a focus on the individual. If you focus on your own performance, you are inevitably letting the team down in some way, because everyone has a role to play, right? That’s why we play team sports in the first place. Well, for some of us, anyway. When he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, Michael Jordan told the story of being in a game in which the Chicago Bulls were down by ten points or so and the clock was running out.
At that point, Jordan essentially took over the game, scoring 
about 25 points in a short period of time and single-handedly bringing the Bulls to victory. “We’re walking off the floor,” he says, “and Tex” (meaning Tex Winter, an assistant coach), “Tex looks at me and says, ‘there’s no “I” in team.’ I look back at Tex and say, ‘there’s not, but there’s an “I” in win!”
What he later said he meant by that was that he will do whatever it takes to win, whether that’s playing as a team or playing as an individual. Jordan did understand the importance of teamwork; he was a superstar from his first season, but it wasn’t until they built a talented team around him that they started winning championships, six years after his debut. But there was also absolutely no doubt that Michael Jordan was the star of the team, and the key ingredient for their wins: they won six championships with him, and none without him.
And no matter how much we talk about there being no “i” in team, or that teamwork makes the dream work, when it comes down to it, everybody wants to win. And when there’s no time left on the clock and the game depends on scoring on this play, you want to give the ball to a Michael Jordan, or a Mia Hamm, or a Tom Brady, right?
But there is always tension between star players and team cohesion, especially when there’s a disagreement about who the star is. When Reggie Jackson joined the New York Yankees in 1977, he was not only one of baseball’s best power hitters of his generation, but one of the biggest personalities in sports. That all spilled over in an infamous interview he gave early in that first year, in which he was reported to have said, “this team, it all flows from me. I’m the straw that stirs the drink.” That was a pretty provocative thing to say as the new guy on a team that had gone to the World Series without him the year before.
But it was even more provocative given that the reigning American League MVP was not Jackson, but Thurman Munson, who was not only the Yankees’ catcher, but their first official team captain since Lou Gehrig, and the man who had often been called “the heart and soul” of the team. Not surprisingly, this caused serious bad blood between Jackson and Munson, and their feud became a defining aspect of the team that began to be called “The Bronx Zoo” because of how all the gifted but volatile personalities had to be separated to keep the team from descending into chaos.
You might call the church in Corinth “The Corinthian Zoo” for the same reasons. The Corinthian church was made up of immensely gifted people but also many volatile personalities, with a lot of competition over who is the straw that stirs the drink. In particular, there are some who have the gift of speaking in tongues, and they clearly think they are the most holy because of the demonstrably powerful way that the Spirit moves through them when they do so.
Others are gifted preachers and argue that speaking in tongues doesn’t mean much if someone else can’t translate, whereas they are proclaiming the Word of God with power and insight. Still others have gifts of healing and claim that theirs is the most important. And so on. Each of these factions wants the church to “win” in its ministry, but each wants to be the star, the straw that stirs the drink, the “i” in “win.” And that is a recipe for conflict, competition, and chaos, as both Paul and the Corinthians themselves experience.
The tension between stardom, teamwork, and winning is one of the most insightful themes in Ted Lasso, particularly in the third season, and it plays out in ways that I think help us understand what Paul is getting at both in this passage we heard today and in the larger letter. One of the remarkable things about Ted as a coach is that, from the very beginning of his tenure at AFC Richmond, he openly says that to him, success is not about wins and losses, but about helping his players be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.
His constant emphasis is on the importance of teamwork, to the point that, in the first season, he benches his best player, the immensely talented and immensely self-centered Jaime Tartt, who is focused solely on scoring goals to further his career, and refuses to join in Ted’s team-building efforts.
By the time we get to the third season, though, it seems like even Ted is feeling the pressure to win. When the team owner convinces an eccentric superstar player named Zava to join the team as a free agent, Ted and his assistants redesign their entire game strategy around Zava, using what they call a “4-5-1” offense: 4 defenders in back, 5 offensive players in the middle, with all roads leading to Zava up front; the whole team’s collective job is simply to get the ball to Zava, the superstar, and let him shoot.
And it works, after a fashion: the team goes on a winning streak, the first such success they’ve ever had as a franchise. But when the unpredictable Zava suddenly retires in the middle of the season to become an avocado farmer, the team is left floundering with how to move forward, since they have lost their “one” in that 4-5-1 offense, and they end up losing their next game to their arch-rival, which is fortunately just an exhibition played in Amsterdam.
At that point, Ted realizes that they need to do something different, and gives the entire team the night and next day off. He ends up in a ridiculous American-themed restaurant, which happens to be showing a video of an old Chicago Bulls game from the Michael Jordan era. In doing so, he is struck with inspiration by the Bulls’ use of the so-called “triangle offense,” a revolutionary basketball strategy in which every player sees themselves as one part of a triangle on the floor, connected to two other players with whom to give or receive passes at any given moment wherever they are on the floor, rather than being tied down to a particular spot because of their position. (Interestingly, it was perfected by none other than Tex Winter, the assistant coach for the Bulls who told Jordan that there’s no “i” in team.)
The next day he hands his notebook with his thoughts to his assistant coach and asks if there’s anything to it. The coach thumbs carefully through the notes as Ted explains the overall strategy: “the way I see it, we’ve been playing too rigid, you know? Our guys need freedom to follow their guts, their hearts; as long as they remember to fill in the spaces someone left behind. They gotta have one another’s backs, that’s for sure. It’s just constant, nonstop motion, just going from position to position until positions don’t really even exist anymore. It’s fast, fluid, free; with full support.”
The assistant coach considers all that for a moment. “You should call it Total Football,” he finally says. “Oh, I like that!” Ted responds, but the coach continues, “which was invented right here in Holland in the 70s.” Ted considers that for a moment, a little disappointed that his epiphany was unknowingly unoriginal, but quickly shakes that off. “You think we should try it?” he asks. The coach nods slowly. “Yes, I do.” And they set out to do just that.
Now, it takes some doing; they boldly implement the new offense in their very next game, and for the first half of the game, it’s a disaster, as they are still trapped in the old thinking about positions and getting the ball to the star, whom they view once again as Jaime Tartt. It’s not until half-time of that game, when Jaime stands up in the locker room and says, “I ain’t doing it wrong; you’re doing it wrong,” which sounds like classic Jaime selfishness until he begins to explain.
“If you want this to work, you got to stop going to me, and start going through me,” he says, and goes on to show how they’re still putting him out front, when he needs to be in the center so they can go through him to all of the other players as the situation dictates. It’s not about one single star anymore; it’s about a constellation. “That’s Total Football,” Jamie says. They all nod, go out for the second half, and not only win that game but the next 15 in a row to set themselves up to compete in the final game for the Premier League Championship.
Now, as it turns out, Total Football was invented a bit earlier than the 70s. It was probably somewhere in the mid-50s. Not the mid-1950s, mind you, but a little over 50 years after Christ was born. And it was invented in Asia Minor, not Holland, by none other than Paul himself, who realized that the Corinthians desperately needed a new strategy for how to be a church to get them out of their rigidly defined roles that were all competing for stardom. The preachers, the teachers, the healers, the speakers in tongues all think that the Corinthian church should be running a 4-5-1 offense, and each of them believes that they should be the “one” to whom everyone else passes the ball.
Paul agrees that all of those roles are important, but he disagrees that any of them should be the star, the one, and he instead proposes Total Football, using the famous image of the body: “For just as the body is one, and has many members, and all the members of the body though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. Paul goes on to demonstrate the ridiculousness of excluding either oneself or others from the body on the basis of their own role or identity, or of demanding uniformity of role or identity: “If the foot would say, ‘because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body…If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?…The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’”
What’s truly amazing is how many Christians, particularly ones who claim to be Biblical literalists, continue to feel that exclusion is an essential practice for the church. Just this week, right here at First Presbyterian of Bethlehem, we received an email from someone who came to worship with us here recently. They said they had a bad feeling about us when they sat down, and they walked out before the end of the service. They then went to our website, they said (which, and I’m not making this up, they spelled with an s-i-g-h-t) and discovered that we are committed to the full inclusivity of LGBTQ people in the life and leadership of the church.
“I will never step foot into your building again,” they said. Now, this person may just be a troll who’s never set foot in our building at all, but regardless, he is clearly quite comfortable saying to LGBTQ Christians, ‘I have no need of you.’ But he and all those like him are wrong; Biblically wrong, theologically wrong, ethically wrong, practically wrong. Now in some ways that’s a whole other sermon, but in the context of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, I want to attest that, as a straight, cis-gender, Generation X man, I have needed and continue to need my LGBTQ siblings in Christ to be a more faithful Christian, because they can help me see and hear and know things about the gospel and the will of God that are all to easy for me to miss, or overlook, or ignore on my own, simply because of the realities of my own limited experience and perspective, and sadly that’s particularly true when it comes to our experiences of the Christian Church.
But the truth is that all of us are like that; all of us need the other in Christ, whoever the other is, and are needed by the other. All of us have different gifts, perspectives, experiences, and identities that help us to be far more faithful together than we ever could be apart. That is what Paul is calling the Corinthians and us to recognize and accept.
More broadly, though, I think Paul calling us as the church, as this church, to the ministry of Total Football is both inspiring and challenging for us right here and now. Because the truth is, the Christian church, particularly the predominantly white, mainline Protestant expressions of the Christian church in the United States, have gotten used to playing a much more rigid game. We are used to being defined by our own positions, and relying on a star to set us apart as a team: our location, our building, our preacher, our music, our programs.
But the simple and undeniable truth is, that system does not work anymore, if in truth it ever did as much as we thought, given that Jesus has a similar definition of success to Ted Lasso: it’s not about the wins and losses, but on transforming the lives of us as the players, on and off the field, to be the most Christ-like version of ourselves that we can be. And that, my friends is good news, because Total Church may be a challenge, but it is a liberating one.
It gives us the space to follow where we discern Christ is leading us rather than where we think we are supposed to be; it is fluid and free, with full support of each other in the individual gifts, roles, identities and callings that each one of us has, and united in the one Spirit that gives the gifts, offers the roles, establishes the identities, and issues the callings. It is the Spirit that establishes the ties that bind us to one another in joy and in suffering, in service and in need, in hope and in challenge; in total love, total faith, Total Church. So come: the whistle is blowing; the game is underway; let’s get on the field…together.