But Not Groundhog Day

But Not Groundhog Day--September 7, 2016

"Then Jesus said to them all, 'If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." [Luke 9:23-24]

This whole thing called "the Christian life" is about starting over daily.  Daily. Like you are born all over again with each sunrise.

Sometimes religious folks get hung up on some dramatic one-time experience of starting over--call it conversion, call it a Damascus road experience, call it an altar call, or what-have-you.  But really, Jesus himself has in mind something that happens not just once in a lifetime, but new every day.  With each morning, the call is there to carry a cross and follow him--to live lives of self-surrender for the sake of those around us, to act in ways that give ourselves away without stopping to think about "how we are going to get paid back" for our efforts.  With each new day, we are called to start over again.

But... it's not a daily re-start like the 1990s-era Bill Murray vehicle, Groundhog Day, that oddball romantic comedy in which his weatherman character for some reason has to live the same day over and over again until he 'gets it right,' sort of, and wins the heart of Andie McDowell's character.  As tempting as the idea might be to us to have the chance to re-do a day we messed up on, that is not the Christian hope. The Gospel isn't some magic button to get to re-do our bad days or undo our mess-ups.  The Christian faith is not a religious version of Back to the Future, either.

Rather, it is the possibility of newness that owns all those mess-ups or tangles or heartaches of the past.  They are part of what has brought us here, to this moment, and this day. And that means that if all my mess-ups brought me here, and here is where Jesus has held me, then in some very real sense Jesus embraces and loves even the things I can only regard as mess-ups. And so on this day, we start over--not from scratch, and not like it is Groundhog Day and all of yesterday has been forgotten, erased, or thrown into the void--but from where we were when we laid our heads down on the pillow last night.

That also means that the Christian hope is decidedly not about trying to get "back" to some mythical past moment (usually imaginary, or at least remembered through rose-colored lenses) when we imagine things were 'better.' The way Jesus offers is not a way backward to some previous time when things were "great," and anybody who is selling a way back to some imaginary 'greatness' of the past has at best confused the Gospel's hope with the plot of Groundhog Day... and at worst is just knowingly selling snake-oil to dupes.   Do not listen to those charlatans offering a way (they are never quite clear on how to do it, by the way) to go back again to some "great" time in the past. That is a dead-end.

Jesus never talks about re-establishing "the good old days," and he never offers anybody the chance to erase the mistakes of their past from the memory of history.  Rather, when Jesus opens up the door to starting over, it is always with clear-eyed vision of being exactly where you really are... and heading forward in a new direction. And what makes it 'forward' is that it is the direction that Jesus is going.  And Jesus is always walking the way of self-giving love--the way that looks like a cross. 

Wendell Berry puts it well.  The poet writes:

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are

that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over the grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

When we find ourselves trapped in personal dead-ends, the promise of Jesus is not that he will lead us through some secret back-door into the past to get back to some time before our mistakes, or back to some imagined glory days again when things were "great." Whatever the moments of feeling stalled out--a prospect for a job that didn't pan out, the wreckage left after a divorce, the empty place in your heart after a death, the sorrow of seeing your kids hurt from having a door close in front of them, the wistfulness of looking at your life, of looking at the whole world, and saying, "This isn't how it was supposed to go..."--whatever those moments are of feeling stuck in a dead-end, the hand of Jesus is pulling us. But not backward, as if to try to undo the twists and turns that have brought us here. Only forward. Only more and more on the same path of Jesus--the path of "giving yourself away," which is to say, a cross.

The call is daily to start over--but not back to the same starting point, back to some point behind us. The call to start over comes right here--right where you are.  Yes, some things in our past are unchangeable, some moments irreversible, and yes, some opportunities have come and gone and will not come again.  Some doors are closed.  Pretending that Jesus will cross his arms and blink to transport you back to some day when you were, what, thirty? Twenty-one? Seventeen? to make a different choice or do things differently or avoid the messes you have come through now, well, that is just not how Jesus operates.  Jesus does not whitewash our past; he redeems it. He does not erase who we have been; he embraces who we have been, because he loves the whole you--not just work-in-process you of today with all your self-improvements, but the you of your worst moments and biggest failures, as well as the you waiting out in the future, too.

Today, we are born all over again.  Today we will start over--right where we are, because that is where Jesus meets us.  And, as the poet says, today, we have less and less reason not to give ourselves away.

Lord Jesus, take our hands, and lead us. Not backward in some misguided attempt to make things like some "great" time of the past in our tinted memory, but forward with you, as you teach us to give more and more of ourselves away.