Measured by the number of times I have seen and referred to it, Groundhog Day is my favorite movie. I can’t help thinking about it on February 2nd. (Spoilers ahead).
Bill Murray plays Pittsburgh weatherman Phil Connors. He and his producer, played by Andie McDowell, and his cameraman, played by Chris Elliott, check into an inn in Punxsutawney, PA, on February 1 because the following day they have to report the annual ceremony in which a groundhog (also named Phil) will see his shadow at sunrise and predict six more weeks of winter — not a stretch because February 2nd is smack-dab between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.
Phil gives a lackluster description of the meaningless event and is eager to return to Pittsburgh. However, a blizzard forces him and his crew to stay an extra night. The following day, he is awakened by Sonny and Cher singing, “I’ve got you, Babe!” — the same song that woke him up the day before, and the announcer says that it is February 2nd. Phil lives Groundhog Day over and over again, and then again, and again.
I’m reminded of the movie, not just because today is February 2nd, but because, like Phil, I keep repeating something over and over again.
I am trying to write a book about the Beatitudes of Jesus — nine sayings that each begin with the word “Blessed.”
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are those who mourn.
Blessed are the meek.
These first three, especially, make no sense. What is blessed about poverty, spiritual or otherwise?
Mourning isn’t exactly “happy” (another possible translation of the word “Blessed.”)
And who wants to be meek?
So, I sit down every morning and write a few hundred words. The next day, I write a few hundred more without making any discernible progress toward writing a book.
I’m taking today off to think about Bill Murray’s Phil and what happens to him in the movie.
When the movie begins, Phil is an unlikable, arrogant bastard. He dislikes and looks down on his producer, cameraman, and all the people in Punxsutawney.
What makes repeating Groundhog Day hell for him is that he is stuck in this hick town with these dumb people, repeatedly reporting on a meaningless event.
However, over time, Phil begins to see how spiritually impoverished his life is. He has no friends. He loves no one. No one loves him. He isn’t doing anything that matters to him. This depresses him. Slowly, he starts to make some changes in his daily routine. For example, he takes a piano lesson every afternoon from a teacher who thinks he is her new student each time he comes to her door. The daily routine doesn’t change, but Phil learns to play the piano.
By the end, Phil begins to appreciate Larry, the cameraman and falls in love with his producer. He starts living a meaningful life, not by spending hours meditating or studying any religion’s scriptures, but by simply facing the fact that his life isn’t worth living and meekly (the word in the Greek New Testament means “teachable”) learning how to live a better life step-by-step.
The working title for my book about the Beatitudes is A Life Worth Living Forever.
I think that is what the gospels mean by the phrase “eternal life.”
Jesus transitions from the Beatitudes to the rest of the Sermon on the Mount by declaring, “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.” He says keeping the light under a bushel basket or for salt to lose its flavor isn’t right.
In the movie, Phil eventually gets out of his own way. He creates a community of friends that resembles the Kingdom of Heaven on a small scale. He accepts and makes amends for how he has treated his co-workers and television audience. He eventually becomes the richest man in town, measured by how much he is loved. His light shines.
I can’t seem to explain the Beatitudes, but I can point to Bill Murray’s Phil and say, “That’s what they look like.”
Like Phil, we all have a light inside of us, and Life will teach us how to let it shine if we will let it.
And thank you, friends, for reading this. I’m trying to learn to write like Phil learned to play the piano.
In 1996, Bob Dole was running for President against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. It was, like all presidential campaigns, hard fought and, at times, nasty. I mentioned in a sermon that both attended the same church in Washington, D.C. — Foundry United Methodist. I said I thought that was remarkable until I realized that our own congregation included both Frank, whose liberal views were well-known, and Roy, who everyone knew was pretty conservative. That got a big laugh from the congregation, especially from Frank and Roy, who embraced each other and joked about it for years afterward.
This kind of connection across a lot of social, political, and economic barriers was something that made me proud of the church that formed my faith and that I served as a pastor for forty-five years.
But, something has changed. In the past three years, the United Methodist Church, once the largest Protestant denomination in America, has been shrinking like Greenland’s glaciers as congregations break off and, in many cases, join newly-forming Methodist denominations.
The presenting issue is the church’s stance on homosexuality.
As a world-wide denomination, our official rules prohibit ordaining “practicing” homosexuals and marrying same-sex couples. An increasing number of clergy and congregations in the U.S. are critical of, and even defying, these regulations. They argue for an open and affirming acceptance of people in the LGBTQ+ spectrum. This has, of course, led the other side to demand compliance.
Both sides accuse the other of being captured by the culture:
Conservatives see Liberals are replacing scripture with "Woke" ideology.
Liberals say conservatives are ignoring the core command to love God and to love our neighbor by joining in the political Right's scapegoating of LGBTQ+ folks.
Both sides are right, but not for the reasons they think.
The culture we have been captured by is the Culture of the False Binary. It is the culture that believes:
“If I am right. You must be wrong.”
”If I am right about one thing, I must be right about everything.
And, if you are wrong about one thing, you must be wrong about everything.”
This is not a new phenomenon. The world in which Jesus lived was split between Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and other religious-political groups that believed they were right and everyone else was wrong. They sorted the world into “good people” and “bad people,” Jews and Gentiles, clean and unclean.
The dominant culture has almost always encouraged people to split into these kinds of binaries: heretics and believers, solid citizens and welfare cheats, native born and immigrants, white and not-white, traditionalists and progressives, “Men” and “Women.” It is always easier to win an election or get people to fall in line by pitting “us” against “them.”
In contrast, Jesus gathered people from all those groups into his band of followers. Two of them, Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax collector, would have made Joe Biden and Donald Trump look like best friends.
The church, at its best, is Roy’s and Frank’s church. It counters fearful division by creating a community that brings “us” and “them” together at the communion table and in service to the world. Now, however, “Traditionalists” want to create a “pure” church and “Progressives” want to be free to welcome everyone.
The split has become personal for me as the first church I was appointed to after I graduated from seminary is going through a process to discern whether they want to stay in the denomination or leave it.
Even after almost fifty years, I still know members of that church. A couple of them have asked if I would write about it. I haven’t wanted to. It breaks my heart. And, I have nothing new to say about the issues that divide us than has already been said.
But, I guess I could share the most important lesson that church taught me in those early years of ministry:
I am not always right.
It was a hard lesson to learn. I had, after all, spent seven years in college and seminary learning to become a pastor by studying psychology, Hebrew, Greek, theology and other subjects that I thought would help. Furthermore, the church I served part-time when I was in seminary had grown big enough to support the full-time pastor that followed me. I was hot stuff.
When I arrived, I could see the things that needed to change, and I began to institute them. Some of them worked. But, to my surprise, not everyone agreed with everything I said or did.
At first, I took this personally. But, over time (perhaps longer than it should have taken) I began to understand that none of us is as wise as all of us. My beautiful ideas got mashed up in Administrative Board meetings and produced solutions that weren’t as elegant, but worked in the real world.
This did not mean that I gave up producing ideas and proposals that I really believed in. It did not mean that I had no convictions. It meant that I learned to hold them with the kind of humility that John Wesley exhibited when he prefaced many of the things he said with the words, “Until I am better instructed, I will believe . . .” These are not words we hear when Republicans and Democrats debate each other, but they are words that I think Methodists should use when we make our assertions.
Back then, I had many of the same convictions about human sexuality that the most conservative Methodists hold today. But, in that church and the five that followed, I met people who did not fit my theological cookie cutter. Their experiences, their love for Jesus, the faithfulness of their commitments, and their spiritual maturity convinced me to reread my Bible and change my mind. That is why I am on the “progressive” side in this argument.
However, I have friends on the other side who have parishioners who were chewed up by a permissive and promiscuous culture. These people found healing in churches that gave them structure and guidelines for their lives.
I do not think my friends have to be wrong for me to be right.
I think it would be more helpful for all of us to first of all ask:
How well do I understand my own sexuality?
How well do I understand my partner’s sexuality?
. . . before we make dogmatic pronouncements about the sexuality of people we have never even met.
We would be much more helpful to each other and to the world around us if we approached this particular subject with humility and compassion instead of self-righteousness.
Right now, that kind of respectful dialogue may be beyond the capabilities of a small-town congregation. It is certainly beyond the capabilities of the larger denomination. So, ultimately it will come down to a vote: “Yes?” Or “No?”
That reminds me of the another lesson I learned in that particular church.
When I was there, the congregation made a huge decision that involved a large amount of money and some big changes. One of the “pillars” of the church was particularly opposed to it. I was firmly on the other side. When the vote came, most people voted for the proposal.
Afterward, that man came to me and said, “You know that I was against this. But, I believe that the majority should rule. My wife and I will support the decision and give to it.” And, they did.
In the next four decades, I lost a lot of votes in the churches I served and on the floor of my denomination’s ruling bodies. Sometimes, those loses were pretty tough, but I remembered his words and I moved on.
I suspect that, in the end, that little church will not go the way I want it to go. But, whatever it decides, I will love it and pray for it.
We all know intuitively that the essence of the art of living is knowing when to let go. This is longer than usual, so I’ll begin with a summary:
It’s not wise to let go too soon.
It’s costs a lot when we don’t know when to let go.
If we let go at the right time, we get out of jail and find joy.
The good news is that we have practiced letting go all our lives. You took your first step when you let go of a parent’s fingers. You can’t take a breath without letting go of the one you took before.
We stumble in life when we don’t let go. My college roommate began Freshman year wearing his high school varsity jacket around campus. He was proud of it because his basketball team had won the division championship. But, after a couple of weeks, he realized that upperclassmen were laughing at him. He had to let go of that jacket or look foolish.
On the other hand, it took me almost a year of getting C’s to let go of my high school self-image as “the smart boy” to whom A’s came easy.
Letting go isn’t that hard in the first half of life. Like the toddler taking that first step, we are reaching out for freedom when we:
Let go of the home we may have lived in for decades.
I bet you know people who didn’t let go of those things soon enough. Do you think you will know when to let go?
Pharaoh can teach us about letting go.
Pharaoh? You mean the Egyptian king?
Yep. Pharaoh
.
I ran into Pharaoh a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to lead a Torah study for the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparents Network. How did a retired Methodist preacher find himself doing that? Because I let go. I’ll get to that below.
The Torah portion began at Exodus 3:17. Jews name their weekly Torah portions using the first word or two in the first verse. But the first word in this verse, in Hebrew, is “Pharaoh.” They didn’t want a Torah portion named after the Hitler of the 13th century B.C.E, so they used the second word, b”Shalach. The root, Shalach, means “to let go” — an action.The prefix “b’” turns it into a time. B’Shalach means “letting-go-time.”
So we translate it: “WHEN Pharaoh LET the people GO.”
This Third Half of Life is b’Shalach, “letting-go-time.” Time to let go of:
A job. A blessed relief for some. For others (OK, for me,) it means letting go of our identity.
The house we needed to raise a family.
Habits that our younger bodies could sustain (or survive) but are damaging our aging bodies.
Our role (and status) within our communities or in our family.
Communities in which which we have lived most of our lives.
Beliefs and prejudices that we grew up with that we have never examined.
What can Pharaoh teach us about when and how to let go?
Something will tell us when it is time
Pharaoh had Moses — a voice that kept coming to him to say, “Let my people go.”
You and I will hear a voice. It may be a doctor’s voice, a spouse’s voice, a child’s voice, a friend’s voice, or that voice inside our heads. It will say, “Time to let go.”
For many years, I was part of a committee that interviewed and guided people who felt “called” to become ordained clergy in my denomination. That may sound like religious mumbo-jumbo to you, but bear with me.
Most of these folks were going to have to let go of good jobs in order to go back to school to prepare for a profession that is usually underpaid and overworked and that carries a psychic load that few others in our society have to bear. That is a big jump. The only thing that sustains people through that change and in the practice of pastoral ministry is a deep inner conviction that this is what they are meant to do.
We asked if they were hearing that inner voice?
We got all kinds of answers. Some people had visions rivaling the Prophet Ezekiel. Others heard a still, small voice.
We also asked if anyone on the outside was saying the same thing?
Some people only heard the outside voice — a parent or spouse telling them they should become a minister. Others only heard the inside voice. No one else thought they would make a good pastor. We were most sure of the people who heard both voices.
We were even surer if they had a history of resisting those voices.
If we are smart, we will ignore the voice at first, like Pharaoh did.
Pharaoh didn’t rule Egypt by obeying every crackpot carrying a staff who criticized his policies.
You didn’t get to where you are by stopping every time the going got tough, leaving a relationship at the first argument, or changing your mind every time someone told you that you were wrong.
Most of the pastoral candidates we interviewed confessed that they kept thinking they were mistaken — or God was. They were there because they couldn’t shake the feeling that this is what they were supposed to be doing.
If we are stupid, we will continue to ignore the voice even after it starts to cost us, like Pharaoh did.
Pharaoh, famously, suffered — and Egypt suffered — through nine plagues, including the death of the first-born in every household, before he let the Israelites go. Pharaoh illustrates this truth:
“There is that law of life, so cruel and so just, that says that we must change or else pay more for staying the same.”
Norman Mailer, The Deer Park
One day I stepped on the scales at the doctor’s office and the nurse said cheerfully, “198. First one under 200 today.”
I was there because my acid reflux was so bad I began worrying about getting esophageal cancer. I had been ignoring my body, my doctor, the scales, the mirror, and reality itself. It was costing me too much to stay the same. I was as dumb as Pharaoh.
I weigh 148 this morning because I let go of eating meat, dairy, eggs, salt, oil, and sugar. It wasn’t easy, but I also didn’t do it all at once. In fact, it has taken me twenty years to make these changes. Ninety percent of the credit for that is that I eat every day with someone who has made getting healthy her life’s mission.
Letting-go-time is when we move from jail to joy.
Your first act of letting go — birth — happened because you could not grow anymore in your mother’s womb. It was a good place for you, until it wasn’t. When b’Shalach came, you and your mother both let go and you were free to grow into the mature adult you are now.
We have to leave Pharaoh behind here. He did not see letting go of his slaves as a growth experience, although it could have been.
Every time I have let go of something in my life, I have grown. That’s how I wound up on the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparenting Network. It is both a great honor and a source of much amusement when I think about where I came from.
I grew up as a conservative evangelical Methodist. I still think I’m a conservative evangelical Methodist, although many of my conservative evangelical friends would disagree so much that they want to start a new denomination that will keep out people like me. They think I am “tossed about by every wind of doctrine”.
Instead, I kept running into people of faith that led me to realize:
God is not a Methodist.
God is not a Protestant.
God is not a Christian.
God is not a White heterosexual male.
I didn’t even know that I believed some of those things until I let go of them. But, every time I let go, my heart grew, and my God got bigger.
When our son, Jim, decided to convert to Judaism and marry, Rachel, a Reform Rabbi, it was b’Shalach, letting-go-time, once again. We don’t celebrate Christmas and Easter with our grandchildren, but that’s OK. We get to celebrate Passover and Yom Kippur. Our lives are larger because we have Jewish grandchildren, which makes us Jew-ish grandparents. It was only a few more steps to doing the Torah study that night.
One final story. Four years ago, Jacquie and I started talking about the possibility of moving to New York City to be closer to those grandchildren and . . . to be in New York City. One more adventure. But, that meant letting go of a house that we had spent years (and thousand$) to make our own. It meant letting go of a neighborhood and city we loved. I, newly retired, and still reeling from having let go of a job I loved, was resistant.
Jacquie said, “Today’s joy is tomorrow’s jail.”
What time is it in your life?
In some ways, it is always b’Shalach, letting-go-time. We let go of every breath. We let go of every day when we go to sleep. It may have been a good day, but we have to let go.
Indeed. Life is like the monkey bars on the playground. If you don’t let go and reach out, you just stop and swing there. You have to keep letting go in order to reach the next one.
That’s the secret of life. The day will come to each of us when we will let go of our last breath and reach out for whatever joy lies beyond. That will be easy or difficult depending on how much we have practiced letting go.
