Lower East Side, New York

 

Who would you be if you could try again? (Luke 22.14-20)

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

October 1, 2017

 

Early in the week we watched the movie “Groundhog Day.” I hadn’t seen it since I first saw it in the theater in 1993. I remembered the movie being funny, I remembered it being clever, and I remembered it being rated PG. I also remembered the premise. Bill Murray, playing a television weatherman, finds himself stuck in the same day, February 2nd, in the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. No matter what he does that day, he wakes up the next morning to live the same day all over again. His alarm clock plays the same song, he looks out the window at the same scene, he greets the same people at breakfast, and so on. These are the things I remembered about the movie, and I thought it might be a help during these times. Because it has begun to feel like every day we’re getting up to the same bad news. Another hurricane or earthquake. Another protest for black lives. Another piece of mean legislation proposed. Another hateful or insensitive tweet from the president. It feels like the long winter in the movie “Groundhog Day,” and I wondered how the movie might speak to this moment.

What I hadn’t remembered about the movie, however, was its heart. Sure it was funny and clever and rated PG, but it also struck at something so deep that I don’t think I really understood it 24 years ago. Bill Murray’s weatherman begins as a kind of self-absorbed jerk and makes a narrative movement toward becoming a better person. This in itself is standard Hollywood fare. But the existential seasons he goes through are not. When faced with the same day over and over again, he first panics, then embraces the opportunity, then falls into a deep depression, then tries to seduce his love interest, Andie Macdowell, then really falls in love with her, then lets go and begins to love everyone and simply live as if his one day mattered. . .in a way that he had never lived before. It’s a breathtaking movement, made all the more powerful by the fact that it is not preachy at all. It’s deadpan. For example, in one scene Murray sits with two local sad sacks at a bar and asks them straight out. “What would you do,” he asks, “if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?” One of them takes a drink and stares into space while the other one answers, “That about sums it up for me.” In a sense, that’s the movie’s question: Is it possible not to be stuck in one place, to live each day differently, and to do things with our lives that matter?

While I didn’t appreciate the movie’s depth when I first saw it, many did. Screenwriters Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis began getting mail right away. Christian ministers wrote that they had captured something about the heart of the gospel’s idea that we are all redeemable. But rabbis also wrote that it was a perfect depiction of mitzvah, good deeds done to repair and restore the world. Buddhist monks wrote of the cycle of samsara that we are all stuck in until we begin to break through with spiritual practice and insight. Pagans wrote of the way new life in spring pushes through winter’s dark. And psychologists wrote that the movie reminded them, more or less, of every one of their patients. Writing of the movie on its 20th anniversary, James Parker observed, “The makers of ‘Groundhog Day’ appeared to have struck, almost by accident, a water main of meaning. The Message, as I heard it, was this: There is a way back, a way through the imprisoning mystery of yourself, a way back into life.”[1]
That is the first part of the message I heard. That it is possible to try again. It is possible to rise to each new day and choose to be the person I wish to be. Nothing binds me to the past. Nothing determines the new day. I am confined only by my inability to imagine things otherwise. Every viewer puts himself or herself in the place of Murray’s weatherman. When he begins to change, we all realize that we might, too.

Yet there is a second part of the message. The weatherman changes because he moves beyond his love of self and begins to love the whole. By the end of the movie he knows, and genuinely loves, everyone in the small town because he has spent so much time with them that he has begun to see how beautiful they are. It is a conversion not unlike the one Thomas Merton had while standing on the sidewalk. “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut,” Merton wrote, “in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. . .”[2] Merton continues by describing what he felt was seeing every person as God saw them and the wonder and beauty of it nearly hurt his eyes.

It’s hard to think of a more Christian message than that. Or, in the spirit of the movie, a more Jewish or Buddhist message. But in the context of our own tradition, I was struck by the emphasis on trying again. Behold, I am doing a new thing. I was lost but now I am found. Like being born again into a different way of life. Our faith suggests, if not complete certainty, then ways of living and being that are grounded in love and that believe in the possibility of change, transformation, and redemption. We don’t have to be stuck in the same day, doing the same things, as the same people. We can get out of bed and make different choices. Which is not to discount the difficultly of change. The movie suggests it takes Murray’s character an untold number of days to slowly become a better person. But the movie’s heart hangs on the idea of possibility. It is possible to try again.

It brings us to communion in a strange way. Because if there is one thing we do over and over again, it is communion. Here at Circular we do it in the same way every month, which I believe is actually a comforting and grounding practice. We make the same circle, we share the same elements, we say more or less the same things, but we ourselves are never exactly the same. From month to month we change. Jobs change, lives change, kids grow, parents age, dear ones die, anniversaries pass. The circle is a kind of marker for us. Every time we come to it we remember where we were the last time. We remember who we were. And we are offered the chance to ask again who we would like to be.

Jesus would have understood this when he began the ritual. Because he was engaging in the same kind of practice. He and his students were sharing the Passover meal. We heard it this morning in Luke’s telling. Luke, incidentally, is the only gospel to point out that this is the Passover. He seems keen to let us know that this is something Jesus and his students would have done time and time again. Yet Jesus reinterprets the meal and brings it into the present moment in a way that suggests its transformative possibilities. He took the unleavened bread and the cup of wine and said that they themselves were new. This is myself, broken and offered. This is the cup of our covenant together. Keep doing these things even after I am gone. In order to remember me. But also in order to remember my teachings and let them live in you. He mentions that the kin-dom is coming, still waiting to be realized. But it also seems, as so often with Jesus, that it is fulfilled in the moment, in the performance of it. Perhaps both are true. We are waiting to be changed. And we are becoming changed. So long as we join in the circle of participation. Which is all the weatherman did in the movie.

I’ll leave it to you to determine exactly what happened that created the change at the end of “Groundhog Day.” To their credit, Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis wrote a couple of ideas that they decided to leave out so that viewers could interpret things for themselves. But I believe what made the change was Bill Murray’s participation. Something happened inside himself that allowed him to let go of the things he couldn’t control and take hold of the things he could. Only then did he begin to see the possibilities all around him. Only then did he fall in love with it all.

It’s an invitation, I think. To watch the movie. To break the bread. To pass the wine. To try again. And to fall in love with it all.

Today may it be so with us.

Amen.

 

[1] James Parker, “Reliving Groundhog Day,” The Atlantic, March 2013, accessed online at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/reliving-groundhog-day/309223/

[2] Thomas Merton, quoted in Albert Raboteau, American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 122.