Circles and Lines: A Sermon by the Reverend Andrea Abbott, November 27, 2016
Preacher: Reverend Andrea Abbott
Opening Words: #468 We Need One Another
Chalice Lighting: #447 At times….
Hymn #134 Our World Is One World
Responsive Reading #466 Religion
Hymn#323 Break Not the Circle
Circles and Lines
Edwin Markham Outwitted
“He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic , rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him in.”
I don’t know how many people were here two weeks ago but if you were you heard Ronna read a story about a little boy who feels left out of his family’s preparations for a fair. He is so upset he runs away but, as he stops to say good-bye to each of the storeowners that are friends of his, he finds that he is able to help each of them. He helps the mechanic see if lights are working on a car, he helps the butcher hang sausages and the baker wrap bread and, at the end of the day, when he goes home, he brings things that help his family get ready for the fair.
While I was listening to the story, my cynical mind was updating the story, wondering how a child today would find a way to feel useful. Would a car dealer allow a child into the repair area? Unlikely. Insurance violation. Would the bakery department at Tops allow a child to wrap bread? Health Department violation. They’d be shut down. Same for the meat department. And in all cases, think about the violations of the child labor laws.
The world has gotten bigger and more impersonal since the time referred to in the story Ronna read, a time some us remember, a time we can feel nostalgic for, whether we remember that time or not. In many ways, the picture that the story presents is a story of an America which may have really existed or may have only existed in our collective imagination, but it is a picture that has woven itself into the heart of how we see ourselves, a picture of independent people, working for ourselves, but ready to cooperate in community endeavors, kindly people who will stop what they are doing to help a child, or, indeed, anyone in need. It is the small town America celebrated in so many stories, in literature, in Norman Rockwell’s pictures. We think of ourselves this way but, look just outside this church and see the reality of life in small town America now. See the shuttered stores, the abandoned houses. It is hard to know the people in the town when everyone is constantly moving, looking for a better place, perhaps something nearer work or a place where they can find work at all. There are remnants of community but it is a shadow of the close knit communities many used to call home.
We are not the only people to feel this contrast between the way things were and the way they are, or the way we imagine they were, since we often see the past with rose colored glasses. We are not the only people to feel that we live in a new world that we don’t understand and in which we have very little part to play. The recent publication, Strangers in Their Own Land, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, examines the lives of people in Louisiana who have seen their lives transformed out of all recognition by the effects of giant oil companies and their subsidiary industries. While the oil companies brought jobs and a certain amount of prosperity to this impoverished state, it did so at the cost of rural communities with settled ways of life and culture. Both the infrastructure built by the oil companies and the resulting pollution had rendered many communities uninhabitable. The effects of Hurricane Katrina were also still felt in the area. Both natural and human disasters had virtually wiped out the fishing industry that had been part of that area for centuries and had left behind a legacy of cancer and other diseases, blighted natural areas that were mourned by many of those she interviewed and homes so damaged or toxic that they could not be sold and were abandoned. What mystified the author, a sociologist from Berkeley and a self-described liberal, was that the people who had been most affected by these events were also the most likely to resist any kind of governmental intervention. They were incredibly hostile toward environmentalists and supported the very policies of deregulation which had allowed these catastrophes to happen.
They did not doubt that the large oil companies had destroyed their beloved environments, their communities and even the lives of those they loved. They simply felt that this was how progress happened and that they had sacrificed so that many people could benefit from what the oil companies did. They saw this sacrifice, even of their own health and their loved ones’ health, as something to be endured, something to be proud of.
The author, who comes from a very different background and set of assumptions, wanted to understand why and how these people could see the same set of events that she did and come up with such different conclusions. For me, that, too is one of the defining questions for our country, how has it happened that we do not understand each other? How can we have become so separated from each other that we can no longer talk to each other? What are we throwing away when we can no longer hear each other’s perspectives?
The heart of the book is the author’s attempt to encapsulate the way the people she got to know saw the world. She calls it the deep story and describes it this way:
What is a deep story? It’s a story that feels true to you. You take the facts out, you take judgment out. It’s as felt.
You’re on a—waiting in line for something you really want at the end: the American dream. You feel a sense of great deserving. You’ve worked very hard. A lot of these guys were plant workers, pipefitters in the petrochemical—you know, it’s tough work. So you’ve worked really hard. And the line isn’t moving. It’s like a pilgrimage up, up to the top. It’s not moving.
Then you see some people cut in line. Well, who were they? They are affirmative action women who would go for formerly all-men’s jobs, or affirmative action blacks who have been sponsored and now have access to formerly all-white jobs. It’s immigrants. It’s refugees. And from—as felt, the line’s moving back.
Then they see Barack Hussein Obama, who should impartially be monitoring the line, wave to the line cutters. And then you think, “Oh, he’s their president and not mine. And, in fact, he’s a line cutter. How did he get to Harvard? How did he get to Columbia? Where did he get the money? His mom was a single mom. Wait a minute.”
And then they begin to feel like strangers in their own land. They feel like the government has become a giant marginalization machine. It’s not theirs. In fact, it’s putting them back. And then someone in front of the line turns around and says, “Oh, you redneck,” you know. And that feels insult to injury. It’s just the tipping point at which they feel not only estranged—I mean, demographically they’re getting smaller. They feel like they’re religious in an increasingly secular culture. Their attitudes are denigrated, and so they’re culturally denigrated. And then the economy begins to shake. And then they feel, “I need another leader.”
The author checked this “deep story” with the people she had come to know and received affirmation that this was indeed how they felt. So this wasn’t someone using her own projections about other people’s feelings and it wasn’t someone putting words in other people’s mouths. This had validity for the people she was writing about.
In this church I think we understand some of how that deep story feels. Some of us may come to different conclusions but many of us either have felt some of this story or know intimately people who feel this way. This has become the deep story for much of America. If it isn’t your deep story, it is a view of the world that we will have to understand and reckon with. And we, too, have our own deep stories, born out of an economic system that has left many people behind.
Never before have such glittering prizes been offered to a steadily shrinking group of people. Never before have so many people been left as human wreckage in the wake of technological change and a global economic system. One way or another, we are all affected. The author of this book has little in common with us and yet much of her concerns are reflected in the principles of this church. When the Arlie Hochschild talks about the religion that the people in this book call on, it is fundamentalist Baptist or Pentecostal in form. And yet, aren’t we also a religious body? We are not secular, even though we may not appear different from our secular neighbors, the people who find any church, even ours, irrelevant to their lives.
Religion is composed of deep stories. The deep story of the line is an old, old story and one which is reflected in religious language in general. It finds its way into translations of scripture, hymns, prayers, etc. It is a story that taps into our ideas of how the earth was created, how it is managed and how we humans fit into that story. In the oldest stories, the ones we are most familiar with in Judeo-Christian history, God is the creator and from the beginning there is a hierarchy which has God at its head, then heavenly beings in their own ranks, seraphim and cherubs and angels, etc., and then humans, with man (I mean man) over women who were in charge of children and then the lesser animals who themselves ranged in ranks below us and of whom humans were in charge. This is the reason for God and Jesus being referred to as Kings and Lords. They were imagined as divine rulers that mirrored the secular rulers below. The heavens were, physically, above the earth and earth was above the regions of the dead, later called Hell. It is a story of a line, a line of authority from Heaven to Hell, a line in which some people get to the head of the line and some aren’t in any line, but are cast out. It is a story of the line from ruler and judge to ruled and judged.
As you can see, this line, the idea that everything is in some kind of a line, still occupied our imaginations even after democracy became more of an ideal than autocratic rule. The idea that all people were at least created equal disturbed the idea of a line, with all people in their appointed places, and replaced it with the idea that people would be given a chance to improve their lot by going forward in the line, by being able to reach the dream, the American dream. The American dream of prosperity. That is part of the deep story we sometimes believe without much questioning.
The problem was that this idea didn’t quite change the old notion that some people belonged a little further up the line than others. It didn’t question that some people started at a different point on the line just by virtue of their family, their ethnicity, their gender, their sexual orientation, their ability. Those aspects of the line were invisible. It was simply assumed that the line was the way things were and people were entitled to be where they were and that, if they followed some unspoken rules, they would proceed at a steady pace toward some goal. Above all, the deep story, linked as it is to the older, deeper religious story, didn’t question the idea that there was a line at all. Lines, with their heads and their ends, was the only way something could possibly work.
Universalists, from their earliest beginnings, upset the idea of the line pretty badly. First of all, we denied that there could be Hell; we rejected the idea that a loving God could condemn his (and it was his) children to eternal torment. No one stood first in line to get into Heaven and none were left at the end or left out. Secondly, as we matured, we insisted that all religions had insight and that all contributed to the total of human wisdom and understanding. One was not better; no one was first in line. These understandings put at grave risk the unspoken assumptions that only white Christians, American or Northern European in particular, were always to be first in line. Essentially, there was no line. It can be hard to set aside the stories in our heads, particularly the stories that we have been told all our lives, the stories that most people believe. It takes more than saying that the stories aren’t right or aren’t necessarily true. It’s a bit like a song stuck in our heads. It takes another song to drive it out. And so, when we realize that stories are just that, stories, and one story is not necessarily the whole story, we need another story to drive out the old one, the one about the lines, to let us see things a bit differently.
What replaces the story about the line? What is our deep story to tell?
I think our deepest story starts a bit like this: We see that the world is not made up of lines. Oh, there are people standing in lines, lots of lines, and it’s easy to see why people feel they are in lines. It’s easy to see why people feel that they aren’t wanted, that they have no purpose, and, as more and more people are left out of the economy, that they aren’t even in any line anymore. They’ve been shoved completely out of the line and are watching it move on without them.
That is the way it feels. But there are other stories and we have a different story to tell the world. In our deep story, we look and see that around the people standing in lines is the wide, round circle of the earth, holding out its arms to everyone. And we notice that people stay in the lines even though no one is making them stay there, no one but themselves. And they are fighting with the people who are on the edges of the lines and they are fighting with each other to get ahead in the line. But then someone starts playing music. And we realize we are at some kind of ceremony. Maybe it’s a wedding. Or a child dedication. Or just a party. But it’s something where we are all together and all enjoying each other’s company. And there are tables filled with food and drink and there are more musicians and everyone starts dancing, because this is a dance that everyone can do, old, young, all different ethnicities, all different abilities. We are dancing in a circle. People teach each other different steps. And as more and more people join the dance, people clasp their hands and let them in. And the dance changes steps and goes faster and then slower and more and more people join the dance but it doesn’t matter how many people there are, it’s just gets better and better as the circle gets wider and wider. Everyone is needed in the circle, no matter how many people there are. Everyone has a purpose, everyone makes the dance better. Everyone’s contributions are there to make the world better and the lives of everyone in it better. No one has to push or shove to get a place. No one is at the head of the line. No one is at the end. Because in a circle there is no head and no end. People leave and we mourn them and more people are born and they, too, join the circle. Round and round the circle’s turning. Sisters, brothers, all. That is our deep story. A story that, like a circle, has no end.
Which story do you want to live? Which story do you want your children—or any young person you care for– and your children’s children and their children to live? Which story will you work for?
Hymn # 212. We Are Dancing Sarah’s Circle
Closing Words:# 646 The Larger Circle Response #123 Spirit of Life