Did you ever think there might be a fault line
passing underneath your living room:
A place in which your life is lived in meeting
and in separating, wondering
and telling, unaware that just beneath
you is the unseen seam of great plates
that strain through time? And that your life,
already spilling over the brim, could be invaded,
sent off in a new direction, turned
aside by forces you were warned about
but not prepared for? Shelves could be spilled out,
the level floor set at an angle in
some seconds’ shaking. You would have to take
your losses, do whatever must be done
next.
When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen
to lie in what you trusted most, look not
to more solidity, to weighty slabs
of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered
beam to save the fractured order. Trust
more the tensile strands of love that bend
and stretch to hold you in the web of life
that’s often torn but always healing. There’s
your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth,
your room, your precious life, they all proceed
from love, the ground on which we walk together.

Robert R. Walsh, “Fault Line,” from Noisy Stones: A Meditation Manual, Skinner House Books, 1992

SERMON: Fault Line – Rev. Eric Banner

Have you ever found yourself saying, “But, that’s not who we are.” Found yourself so struck by something that’s been said, or done, that you can’t quite believe it’s actually happened? You thought you knew how the world was, and then something happened and you had to go back and question what felt like everything. It’s the kind of experience that shakes our world. Coming face to face with the world not as we thought it was, but as something that seemed like it was part of the past, or part of someone else’s experience, but not our own. “It’s not the American way…”

In moments like that, it’s easy to want to reach back to a past that seems somehow more stable, more solid, than what we’re experiencing. Maybe that past is just a few years ago, or maybe it’s decades, or centuries ago. Whenever it was, it was when we, and people like us, were right, and the world was right, and things were safe and secure.

In those moments it’s normal, natural, to want to draw the picture of how we want to be seen, how we want to be known, and to turn to the people we trust to assure us that WE aren’t like that, to affirm that WE are different, special, exempt, somehow. That it is our very specialness that protects us. And when it happens, when the very protections we thought were solid are stripped away, it’s a feeling that shakes us. Like an earthquake in our sense of who we are, and what we can count on.

It’s like a fault line in our lives we didn’t even know was there.

The reading this morning is from a collection in one of our UU meditation manuals, published back in 1992. But I’ve been thinking about it this year because I’ve been thinking about the thing that so many of us have been thinking about. The question of what to make of those times when the world has seemed to shift, and we don’t know what to make of it.

“When the great plates slip and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen to lie in what you trusted most,” wrote Rev. Robert Walsh in his collection, “Noisy Stones.”

And the more that I sit with it, the more I find myself struck by the way that part of what is going on in our public life feels so hurtful, so scary, so painful, because our expectations about what it means to be an American are shaped by the same kinds of feelings as has shaped so many of us in our private lives.

We love, or hate, what happens in centers of power because it feels as if our politics has shifted from being about ideas to being about identities. We elect people not because of their competence in solving problems, or building coalitions, but to stand in our stead, to represent not our shared interests, but our ideologies. We want them to hate the people we hate, to love the people we love, and to tell us that we are the right and true ones who represent the faithful inheritors of an exceptional tradition, and that all who oppose us are not just wrong, but that they are somehow less than worthy, or in American, that they are not who we are. Which means that when enough people disagree with us, when we lose, and when power is wielded to destroy what we thought we had built, we wonder, in private and in public, just who the collective we is. And whether we belong, at all.

So this week I wanted to come back to that reading because I wanted to offer a short series of messages inspired by a book that came out a decade ago by the Christian theologian, Walter Bruggemann. If you haven’t heard of him, and I’d be willing to bet he’s not high up on the reading list for most of our members, he’s widely regarded as one of the leading lights in his field, and he passed away earlier this summer at the age of 92. He dedicated much of his scholarship to questions about the prophetic imperative, and for him that work meant reading books from Hebrew scriptures that told the stories of kings who hoarded wealth and power while common people struggled, or starved, and watched their very lives and livelihoods be stolen away from them, a story recorded in scripture, but hardly unique to any one people or one time on this planet.

We, too, as Unitarian Universalists, have long been concerned with the prophetic imagination. One of our beloved hymns, “The Fire of Commitment” has us sing out –

“From the dreams of youthful vision comes a new, prophetic voice,
Which demands a deeper justice built by our courageous choice”

It is not the only song we have that envisions us as prophets of a new age, truth tellers who call it like it is and stand against the oppressions and evils of our time. The word appears repeatedly throughout our hymnals, and our writings. For decades we listed as one of our sources the “Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.”

But Bruggemann found himself wondering what those prophets of old might say to the world today, and though his source texts are not my source texts, his theology is not my theology,

I think there is still much there to be held in this time when we feel so often like the world has shifted beneath our feet. In times like these there are at least three kinds of voices. There are those, quite obviously, who think the shift is the good and right thing, or at least the necessary corrective to a tragectory that has gone badly off course. There are others that downplay the significance of it all, telling us either ignore the shifting as just a minor thing that will work itself out without too much pain, if we just put up with it. And there are those who tell us that we need to hope for the best, who insist that what we most need is a hopeful message that sees a brighter future dawning in three easy steps, which won’t require us to ask any hard questions.

The prophets do none of these.

What I appreciate about Bruggemann is that he holds a place for hope, but he recognizes that if we start there, without first doing other work, without first naming the truths that got us where we are, then we become, not his words, but mine, hope mongers, offering the gauzy vision of something different, without understanding how it was that we got here, and therefore without understanding what it will take to get us out of here.

His book was titled Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks – Reality, Grief, Hope. And in that order. For him the crisis that triggered the consideration of what those prophets meant was the shock to America’s system that came on September 11th, 2001. He suggested that it was in that moment that the ideas of American exceptionalism ran right into the reality of a world that was more connected, more interdependent, than not. A world in which what happens to the least of these has repercutions for everyone.

In some ways that appeal to reality is part of what distinguishes the sides in the great contest that is alive in our world today. It has likely always been so. The conflict between the dreamers and the realists. But before I lose you, I say – not always in the ways it’s so often protrayed.

The liberals have been seen as the ones who are the dreamers, ungrounded in the facts of the world as it is, the conservatives the ones who “get things done.” But such a presentation is all too tidy for the reality I see, and I think that the easiest way to point it out is to call your attention to two pieces of poetry, each one beloved by one side, and denigrated by the other, each about this nation we call home.

“America the Beautiful,” by Katherine Lee Bates, and “Let America Be America Again,” by Langston Hughes.
One side of the debate that is alive right now is a call back to an imagined simpler time, another is a call forward that says we must yet be what we have not yet been.

Depending on who your group is, the words written on Pikes Peak by a white English professor who had just taken a cross country journey train trip to teach at Colorado College, just an hour south of here, words about purple mountains majesty above the fruited plains might tell you everything you need to know about America. That it is good. And filled with goodness. And always has been. And always will be.

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

This is one way of telling the story of who we are, and have been, and always will be.

It is a claim to patriotism and love of country that acknowledges, though only in passing, our every flaw, but doesn’t dwell there. It is the dreamers version of our nation, one that looks out from the highest peaks and misses the details that are present in the lived experiences of specific people and communities in favor of something quite different.

For people who do not ever want to talk about the challenges we face, for people who think that dwelling on the things we have done wrong, for people who are convinced that we can do no wrong, America the Beautiful is a rousing reminder of our greatest calling. But, for others, including me, and perhaps you, it ignores too much. It erases something important about the American ideal, and the American dream. The way it has always been a work in progress, hopefully moving forward, but sometimes moving back instead.

Langston Hughes wrote his poem some years after Katherine Lee Bates wrote hers. And he too, started with a call to the mythic, singular idea that had animated American imaginations,

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

But from those first lines, you can hear something different. And then, in the kind of parenthetical that was not common in poetry, at least not in his day, he drops a rock on the framing he has put before us, “America,” he wrote,

(America never was America to me.)

As a black man, writing in the Harlem Renaissance, the grandson of enslaved people, the son of a man who had left his family to move to Mexico in an effort to flee the terror and trials of racism in America, Langston Hughes knew in his bones that we were not a nation only of alabaster dreams, but also of much darker stuff that needed to be named to be addressed. That we were a nation where law and order was often synonymous with power and violence, instead of freedom and opportunity. He wrote –

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)

Which brings me back to this time and the shifting faults that convulse through our country. We have lived a long time in a land where tension has built up along old lines, unseen, and unnoticed by many. But they have broken open. A fight is on not just about who we are, and who we ought to be.

On one said there is a claim of divine sanction, divine chosenness, protection from the vagaries of history that is offered to us for being on God’s side. Not so different from the assumptions of old that the temple and the sacrifices to the Lord on high would protect the kings, the powerful and prosperous. A claim not so different from the assumption that the ones in power were in power because they had divine right, divine protection.

I’m reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s comment when asked, in the midsts of the civil war that was literally tearing our nation apart, if he thought God was on the Union’s side, he said that his “concern is not whether God is on our side, my greatest concern is to be on God’s side.”

That might not be your language. But our concern remains the same. Love and justice, both in equal measure.

I feel like I’ve danced around what I want to say too long. What I want to say is that as much as what is happening in our nation now hurts, it’s not new, it’s just a reversion to what we thought we were past. We built a national narrative on our own exemption, our own freedom from facing the consequences of our choices, because there was always going to be margin to protect us from our own faults, or other people, not us, but someone else to pay the price of our success. Someone else to do the work, instead of us.

The truth is, our history is filled with beauty, and littered with ugliness, and both have always been part of who we are. Violent force to get our way is as American as apple pie. Narcissism is present in us just as much as it has always been part of the human experience.

It’s why, though I don’t share the theology present within them, I go back to those old Biblical stories, because I see them as a way of struggling with what it means to be human. I see them as a centuries long conversation about how to navigate power and relationship and morals and values and life and death.

The reality we must face is that we aren’t that different from those ancient people, and neither are those whose values we oppose. It’s all part of the mix of humanity, and we ignore it to our peril. This is part of what universalism means. That while we are loved, so too is everyone else. That while we have the power to choose goodness and life, we are not the chosen people, nor is anyone else. We’re all in it, together.

Bruggemann, in writing about the indictment contained within the ancient prophetic writings said that the collapse of what those people thought was true, their own protection from accountability, was “an opportuntity to review all of the covenental failures of the power structure… (a) refusal,” he wrote, “evident in arrogance, pride, and self indulgence, as they imagine they are the center of the universe and not accountable to anyone for anything.”

“The dominant culture” he asserts, “has, in it chosenness, failed to love (thy) neighbor, and so has failed to regard the weak, poor, and vulnerable as legitmate members of the community. The elite have manipulated the markets, paid low wages, foreclosed on homes, and managed the economy in their own interest to the detriment of others.”

So what do we do with that?

A willingness to name reality as a first step is the same impulse that has animated the religious imagination within our faith, and others, for generations. It is the same impulse that brought us history texts that tell the truth about how awful chattel slavery was, that lifts up the voices of the displaced peoples who lived on this land before the railroads carved it to pieces, an impulse that tells the hardships of coal miners dying of black lung disease and collapsing ceilings before workplace safety laws were put in place, to say nothing of climate legislation. It’s the reminder of how dangerous the closet was, and how constrained women’s lives were before they were seen as whole and independent people in the eyes of the law.

Some people would rather we not tell those stories. Those stories ARE ugly. They were ugly when they were happening. And it is their ugliness that calls us not to ignore them, but to remember them, and vow to not repeat them.

And the reality is, the same forces that made those things true in years gone by can always come back and make them so again. The price of freedom is eternal vigilence, said John Philpot Curran more than 200 years ago, and it remains just as true today. It might not sound hopeful, but if Bruggemann is right, and I think he is, we don’t get to hope unless we travel through those realities first.

So, yes, we’re going to get to hope in a week or two, but we won’t rush ourselves there over the bodies of those who have been crushed, and are being crushed, by tyrant kings. False hope is too fragile survive the trials and tribulations of this world.

What I want you to leave here today knowing is two things. First, that if you feel like the world has shifted beneath your feet, you are not alone. You are surrounded by people who feel much the same way. By people who know that authoritarian tendencies are dangerous to liberty, that what touches one of us touches all of us, that prophethood isn’t about crazed hair crying out on a mountain, but about the daily commitment to saying another world is possible, if we will make it so.

And secondly, to remember that naming the reality of what has been is not a fault, but is instead the way to fixing what has gone wrong, and can go wrong again, of offering a true prophetic voice, so that real hope, true hope, can rise for everyone. It’s like Langston Hughes said in the final words of his poem:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!