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Good Evening Friends. It's good to be worshipping with you again tonight in the Zoom verse. So it should come as no surprise that one of the most revisited films of 2020 was groundhog day, The 90s

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Classic starring Bill Murray, who plays a cantankerous weatherman , caught in a time loop on what he considers to be the worst day of his life. Groundhog Day. Every day, Phil Connors wakes up in

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punk Soltani in the same bed in the same hotel at the same time with the same song Sunny and shares. I got You babe, playing on the radio with the same obnoxiously cheerful radio presenter, reminding

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everyone in case they've forgotten. It's Groundhog Day early into the pandemic when the days would bend and blur , it was easy to draw comparisons to Groundhog Day . Of course, those comparisons were mostly made by

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people like me with the luxury of working from home schooling Children from home and counting boredom as a hardship . But when I rewatched the movie, I was struck by how dark the story gets before it gets

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light again. At one point Phil feels so trapped , panicked and desperate, he tries to escape the time loop by jumping from a building, plunging a toaster into his bathwater and driving himself and the groundhog

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, Thelma and Louise style off a cliff, realizing that death offered no escape. He tries living without consequences, driving on train tracks, mocking a policeman and insulting women so insolent lee, they slapped him

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. But somewhere along the way, Phil turns a corner, he starts to realize his actions even if they leave no trace. The next day can change himself for the better. He develops a pattern of

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care that takes up his entire day. He saves a man from choking and a boy from falling from a tree. He helps a young woman get over her cold feet before her wedding and fixes the flat

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tires of a car full of elderly women instead of self serving goals. He chooses to learn skills that enrich his life. He makes ice sculptures, he reads, he becomes an excellent pianist. He chooses

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to flourish when Roger Ebert reviewed the film for a second time, he observed, there are a few films and this is one of them that burrow into our memories and become reference points when you find yourself

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needing the phrase, this is like Groundhog Day to explain how you're feeling. Then a movie has accomplished something exactly. Groundhog Day has borrowed into our memories and entered our lexicon as a way of describing the

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tedium of life. But if I had to guess What really made this 1993 movie one of the most popular of 2020, it wouldn't be the obvious parallels to pandemic life, but the deep transforming hope that

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after all this is over. We too will be better. I read a story recently about a young woman who had 25 spent a year living in a monastery unable to leave the grounds without permission. She

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spent her days milking cows, weaving cloth, tending beehives and singing liturgy. She chose to live there as did everyone else. But it didn't mean that the restrictions were easy to live with. She recalls

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what one of the sisters says about the narrow borders placed around their lives. When you can't change your environment, you have to change yourself. The ugly truth of transformation. We don't change when we want

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to or when we should or when we buy the book or to take the course or start the diet , whether we're trapped in a time loop or trapped in a monastery, it's when we can't escape that

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we have the greatest opportunity for change. Our story tonight is from the Book of Exodus, A title that has also burrowed into our memories as a reference point for escaping old worlds old lives and old pharaohs

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in the hope of something better. Of course, before this epic tale earns its moniker, it's a normal story about normal people who aren't looking for an escape. By the end of the genesis narrative,

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the Israelites were normal Egyptian residents having achieved favorable immigrant status simply by being related to joseph. But in just eight verses, everything changes now. A new king arose over Egypt who did not know joseph and

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just like that the Israel lights go from welcomed guest to feared aliens and oppressed slaves. In just eight short verses, Normalcy is nostalgia and not by accident because what the writers of Exodus. No. And

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I think what we're beginning to figure out is that change is the result of impossible conditions, not normal ones. Zan Romanov, a young writer of teen fiction, once said, hope isn't valid unless it's

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being espoused by someone who is keenly aware of the stupid, shitty, petty pointlessness of life. And what is more pointless then dropping a baby in a river. And what kind of shitty hope is that

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anyway? The kind of hope you hope you never need. Unfortunately, it's the only kind of hope that's ever changed. Anything worth changing. And that is where we are. After one of the most

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surreal years this country has ever had. We are now trapped with a question from which we cannot escape . What is worth changing? Are we the people worth changing? Is our country, with its pre

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existing conditions, untreated wounds and a heartbeat so irregular it doesn't know who it's beating for. Worth changing . Is the racialized violence embedded into our bones worth changing? What about the epic dysfunctionalities highlighted by the

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coronavirus? Are they worth changing right now? We are at an inflection point because the threat of infectious disease isn't going anywhere, It's an environment. We cannot change a reality, We cannot escape. And

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so we must choose. Do we flourish, transforming ourselves, our families, our churches in ways that enrich our society? Or do we do nothing? Same day, different pandemic. One of our most

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revolutionary living poets, Nikki Giovanni writes in her poem quilting the black eyed pea, we're going to mars because whatever is wrong with us will not get right with us. So we journey forth carrying the same

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baggage, but every now and then leaving one little bitty thing behind one day, looking for justice for prejudice, to slip. One day looking for hatred , to tumble by the wayside. Maybe one Day

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The Jewish Community will be at rest. The christian community will be content. The muslim community will be at peace and all the rest of us will get great meals at holy days and learn new songs and

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singing harmony. We're going to Mars because it gives us a reason to change. The poet captures our longing to live in a world other than the one we're stuck in. But thanks be to God,

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she says there's a Mars sure it's a few light years away and full of unknowns. But it's a new world, a reason to change how soothing it is. To imagine this mess, this death,

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this calamity one day being worlds away. But to think that a post Covid world has been predestined for us to one day wake up to is a fantasy . Because the post Covid world isn't out there,

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It's in progress. It's up to us. Do we go to Mars or do we stay here? Do we create more compassionate societies? Or is this one fine? Do we acknowledge deadly addictions, ecological

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collapse and white supremacy or some problems? Just too big, too expensive and too divisive to bother with ? What about the staggering rise in teen suicide? Well, we care about that on mars. Maybe

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mars is where we'll finally say some people are trends get over it. Maybe the church on mars will be woke caring more about bodies in the streets than bodies in the seats. But I guess we won't

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know until we have the courage to go in the first chapter of exodus. When the Israelites, comfort zones are replaced by twilight zones and there is not a shred of humanity left in Egypt. That dumpster

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world is brought back from the abyss by a small band of women who refused to accept a world without compassion, by first refusing to accept that they have no choice. Pharaoh, of course, isn't threatened

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by the female hebrew babies. And yet it's the women in this story who are the originators of his undoing the hebrew midwives ship ra and pula choose to preserve life rather than destroy it moses is mother under

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impossible conditions, choose is shitty hope over. No hope when she puts her baby in a basket and let's go, Miriam moses. His sister chooses to defy reason by making a plan with of all people

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pharaoh's daughter and of course, there's pharaoh's daughter who's supposed to tip that basket over and watch the baby tumble into the water. But who chooses instead to speak the truth out loud. This must be one

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of the Hebrew Children, she says the subtext being because no other mothers are reduced to this, making little arcs to save their babies from floods of hate . We think our choices and voices can't create a

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better future. Then look again at these women without whom we'd have no moses, no exodus, No liberation for the people of God. Sometimes stories get dark before they get light again before we realize that

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we have all the power. One of the most moving clips I've ever seen is an Oprah clip from the 80's and Oprah is interviewing a woman whose son has just died and the woman tells her that she

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crawled in bed with her son and as she held him, his last words were, oh, it's so simple meaning that what we're doing here is so simple. We are here to learn love to learn

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that even in the most impossible conditions, we can be midwives of a better way, a more compassionate way. We're going to take our last breath and say, why were we struggling all this time,

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feminist theologian Megan Waterson once said she knows how the story ends, and love is how the story ends . Because no matter what planet we wind up on , Love is our one destiny. Because love is

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the only thing that's real, The only thing that's ever been real. It's why we exist at all . It is the point of everything we experience. We are here to learn love and after every pyramid

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has crumbled and every pharaoh has done their worst. It will be the only thing left standing, because love is the most and only indestructible, inescapable force in the universe. Knowing this of course, does

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not erase pain, suffering, injustice, oppression. It does not undo, horror or make light of the impossible things that we have in front of us today. But it is the only thing with the

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potential to change us. And it is the one thing we can count on that. We know how this story ends and this dumpster fire, isn't it ? That is what I am holding on to today

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, and that is what will hold me for endless