But in case you weren't paying attention, there were some secular events going on yesterday as well. We had the Big Game yesterday, in which the Kansas City Chiefs, representing the great state of Kansas, beat the San Francisco 49ers. And if that wasn't enough, we also had Groundhog Day yesterday. For those of you who don't know, Groundhog Day is a day in which certain towns have a celebrity groundhog who may or may not see his shadow when he emerges from his burrow. The conceit is that if the groundhog sees his shadow, then there will be six more weeks of winter. If he does not, then there will be an early spring.
Now, as I said, there are several groundhogs all plying this trade, from Punxsutawney to Shubenacadie to Balzac, and they end up having varying predictions that are all over the map. It's a fun thing to do, and to keep up with, but here's my prediction as a human being who lives in Regina SK. Ready?
We will have six more weeks of winter. Guaranteed.
How do I know? Did I see my shadow or something? No, I sure didn't. And for the record, 31st of January here in town I saw people wandering around the city in shorts, but I'm still predicting a longer winter. And the reason for that is that I have lived on the prairies for almost my whole life, and after enough years of living on that Canadian prairies, you start to notice a pattern. And that pattern is that beginning in October, things start to get cold, and they don't tend to get nice until April. In reality, you can't expect things to get nice until the days start to get significantly longer in April, or sometimes into may. The odds of having a spring that starts anywhere before the middle of March is extremely unlikely. As I say, this is based off of almost 4 decades of the exact same results, over and over again.
If you repeat something often enough, you start to get a pretty good handle on it. And that's what the movie Groundhog Day is about. If you haven't seen Groundhog Day, go ahead and watch it. It's pretty good. The plot centers around a weatherman, played by Bill Murray, who covers the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. He hates it, and has essentially open contempt for the entire festival. After a day of having contempt for the people, town, and festivities, he finds that he and his crew can't leave town, and have to stay overnight. And when he wakes up, the day starts again, the exact same way. Over and over and over and over again. The day doesn't change, no matter what he does. He tries driving out, killing himself, going to jail, and nothing changes. The day always plays out the exact same way. And over a long enough time, after having enough repetition of the same day over and over again, Bill Murray starts to get it right. He lives the day essentially 'perfectly,' and ends up finally leaving that day upon the realization that he has gotten it right.
This story is a good one to tell when we are thinking about the presentation of our Lord in the Temple. For in the Temple, Jesus meets up with Simeon and Anna, two people who had been in the Temple for years, dedicating themselves to the Lord and His service. These are people who have been living out the history of Israel in their lives. Simeon and Anna were older people, who had been hearing the same stories year in and year out. And they had lived through numerous Passover festivals, and had seen lots of baby boys brought to the Temple to be redeemed as well. And this redemption was a way of remembering and retelling the passover story again and again within the family, with the clear instruction that when your son asks you why you do these things, you tell him that it is because the Lord brought you out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and so on. These were stories that the people of Israel told one another all the time, they were repeated every year, every time that they had a firstborn male, human or animal, of their household. And these stories were told very frequently indeed, to the point that the Passover became the single most important, foundation story of the Hebrew people. The story of freedom from slavery, the story of liberation from captivity, of God stepping into history with a mighty arm to free his people from captivity is a story that had to be told over and over again, or else the people of Israel would be tempted to forget it. But more than that, as they continued to tell the story over and over again, as it was told not just through Simeon and Anna's lives, but through the lives of the nation of Israel as a whole, it became clear that the good people of Israel were not just recounting an event that happened in history, they were looking forward to what that event meant for all of them forever. The story of the Lord's Passover wasn't just a story of a moment in time for a few people, it was a story that prefigured a much bigger conclusion.
Upon the arrival of Jesus Christ, Simeon recognized him for who he was, not just a child who would be redeemed with two turtledoves like all the rest, but rather the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. This is not a boy who had to be redeemed, but rather a boy who would, himself, do the redeeming. Once you tell a story often enough, once you internalize it and make it a part of you, and you become significantly better at working out what it is all about, from every angle. After all, if you hear the story of the Passover once, you may think that it is a story limited to a single moment in time, when God stepped into history and rescued a people. But if you keep on telling it, you will realize that something else becomes clear as you hear it again.
A lot of people have a lot of ideas as to what the movie Groundhog Day is all about, but I'm going to let Harold Ramis tell you through God's gift of the internet.
Harold Ramis was a Jewish gentleman, and according to him, the story of the movie was the story of the Torah. That is, the stories of the Bible do not change. If you're on a one year series, or a 3 year series, or if you're just doing your devotions, you'll notice that even though the stories don't change, you experience them differently. That is, the story of Jonah moves from being a story about a man and a fish when you're a child, to a story of avoiding God's call as a teen, to a story of God's insistence on his love for your enemies as an adult, to a story of God's grace applying to his children as a parent. Same story, but you find different things in them. Simeon had heard the story of the Passover countless times, had seen countless boys come to be redeemed, and then all of a sudden, even though it was the same story, same ritual, this time it meant something different. This wasn't just the story of one child, or one nation, this was the story of the world being redeemed. This was the story of the king of kings, the Lord of Lords, the salvation of the world, the light to the nations. The Passover story was identical, had not changed, but now Simeon could see what it was about all along.
It had always been about the redemption of humanity. The celebration of the Passover meal was a way of prefiguring the arrival of Jesus Christ. Once Jesus had arrived, then the story became wonderfully clear, as though you had finally seen the two silhouettes instead of a vase, and now couldn't see anything else.
That's part of the reason we tell the same stories over and over again. So that as your lives change, the grace of God can speak anew. And if you don't believe me that that can happen, try a test case. Go read Calvin and Hobbes if you're a parent, and see who you identify with now. Apply that case to the scriptures next. Think about the Lord's prayer when you were a child, how you understood that your daily bread came from God, and how he grants you all you need of body and soul. But then, when you're a parent, go back and think about it again, and realize that the Lord's prayer means something more now. You know what it is like to lay your life down an hour at a time for your family, to give to them without them noticing what goes into their survival. All of scripture works that way, and the way that God speaks to you changes, even though the story does not. It's why we, and Christ himself, tell you that you have to continue in his word, and if you do you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
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