if you take someone’s story, you take everything

City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco

If you take someone’s story, you take everything. (Lk. 24.13-19, 28-32a)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

September 11, 2022

In 1939, a man named Clell Pruett stood over a bucket holding a copy of a newly-published book by John Steinbeck. The book was entitled The Grapes of Wrath and Pruett didn’t care for it. In the book, Steinbeck told the story of Oklahoma migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl in search of a better life in California. The migrants faced hardship at every turn, including violence from California landowners when they finally arrived, exhausted and penniless. Pruett thought the book made Californians like him look bad. He hadn’t read it, but he had heard about it on a radio program. That was enough for him. He dropped the book into the bucket and set it on fire.

John Steinbeck was also a Californian. He had worried that the book might be banned for its salty language, but he may not have imagined people would begin burning it. He may not have been prepared for the situational irony, either. Clell Pruett burned The Grapes of Wrath in Kern County, which had been the destination of the migrants described in the book.

At the same time The Grapes of Wrath was being burned and banned, it also became a bestseller. The book was picked up by millions of readers, who sat with its story of hardscrabble humanity and tough, ordinary love trying to survive in a country where the little guy barely stood a chance. The year after it was published, The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize.

Yet the real hero of the story was not Steinbeck, who wrote such a powerful book. And it certainly wasn’t Pruett, who would just as soon burn it as read it. The real hero was a quiet librarian named Gretchen Knief. After the Kern County board of supervisors voted to ban The Grapes of Wrath, she wrote to them and urged them to change their minds. Knief risked her job to do it, but she wrote passionately against censorship. What the supervisors had done, she said, was “a vicious and dangerous thing” that was also ultimately futile. “Ideas don’t die,” she wrote, just because a book is banned. Knief didn’t succeed in changing the supervisors’ minds at the time, but all these years later you can find The Grapes of Wrath in most any library, including the one in Kern County. Sadly, there are other books you won’t find.

We may seem a long way from the book burnings of 1939, but in the last couple of years we have seen an extraordinary increase in book bannings. According to The New York Times, “The American Library association, which tracks challenges to library books or resources since 1990, previously documented roughly 300 to 350 complaints annually. . .But in 2021 alone, the association noted 729 complaints.” In other words, attempts to ban books have more than doubled. What’s even more striking is the types of books that are being challenged.

By a large margin, the books being banned tell the stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ people and they tell the stories of Black people and the sustained struggle against systemic racism in this country. So the stories of LGBTQ+ people and the stories of Black people are being pulled from the shelves. They are not yet being burned in buckets outside. But there’s little difference between a California farmer burning a book he hasn’t read and a suburban mom demanding that Alison Bechdel or Toni Morrison be stripped from the library, their voices silenced and their stories erased. Which is what’s really at stake.

Banned Books Week, which begins September 18th, isn’t a religious holiday. But I’ve chosen to bring it to us on a Sunday because it gets at something that, for us, is an article of faith. In this church, we believe that every person’s story is sacred. And we believe that creating space to tell and to hear, to be and belong, to know and be fully known, is deeply religious work. Here I don’t mean religious as in institutional work. I mean religious as in the root of the word, religio, the same root as ligament, that which binds or holds things together. We understand here that we are bound by our common humanity. Yet we also honor our many different stories and the wisdom born of such different experiences.

We say in this church every Sunday that whoever you are, and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here. And by this we mean whatever your story is, it is welcome here. So whenever we see attempts to ban, censor, or erase someone’s story, we understand it as the deepest possible affront. If you take someone’s story, you take everything. Conversely, if you make room for someone’s story, you make room for everything.

Of course, we would think this. We are a people of stories. Our sacred texts are mostly stories. Sure, there are some laws and some letters in there, but the stories are what we remember most. Stories of faith and grace, stories of struggle and doubt, stories of suffering, surprise, and everything in between. And at the heart of Christianity lie the stories of Jesus, both the ones he told and the ones told about him. This morning we’ve heard an excerpt from Luke’s story about Jesus.

The story is drawn from the very end of the book. Some characters are walking together. They’re not Dust Bowl migrants on their way to California, but they are struggling a bit. Jesus has died, the great teacher of peace and teller of stories, and they’re grieving. In the story, Christ, now understood to appear in the stranger’s guise, turns up to walk alongside them. They don’t recognize who it is.

So they walk and tell stories until the day runs out, then they stop and sit down for a meal. And only then, when they break bread together, do they recognize that it’s him. As the story goes, Christ vanishes and the characters look at each other bemused. How could we have not known? All of a sudden, it seems so obvious. But isn’t that how it goes with many of us?

Isn’t it only through the telling of stories. . .isn’t it only through the sharing of experiences. . .isn’t it only through listening to each other and sitting down to share bread and company that we ever truly recognize the sacred in our midst? Isn’t the holy, whatever that is, simply revealed to us in the human? We have long said so in the liberal tradition. God is still speaking, says our progressive denomination. But we don’t mean in a voice from on high. We mean in the story of every person. In an old gospel. In a banned book. In a gay voice. In a Black affirmation. In The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck’s book has a number of scenes where characters break bread and tell stories. But there is one that is unforgettable. The migrant Tom Joad talks with the wayward preacher, Jim Casy. They aren’t eating; they’re passing a bottle of unnamed liquor. Joad is listening to Casy explain why he stopped preaching. He had more than a few heretical thoughts. “I’ll tell you one. . .thing,” Casy says, “. . .[and] it’s the most unreligious thing, and I can’t be a preacher no more because I thought it an’ I believe it.”

“What’s that?” Joad asks.

Casy [looks] shyly at him, “If it hits you wrong, don’t take no offense at it, will you?”

Joad assures him that he won’t. And so Casy continues:

“I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road,” he says. “I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men and all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang. Maybe all [people] got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent—I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

Joad’s eyes [drop] to the ground, as though he [cannot] not meet the naked honesty in the preacher’s eyes. “You can’t hold no church with idears like that,” he [says]. “People would drive you out of the country with idears like that.”

What a beautiful thing to read in a formerly banned book. A subversive religious conversation between two people who realize that the holy spirit is the human spirit and that we’re all just part of one big thing. But they know that if they say that out loud, it will cause a lot of trouble. People will run you out with ideas like that. People will get mad at words like that. People will burn books like that. Which is all the more reason we should read them.

Because we believe every person’s story has a little truth in it. And when we listen to all of our stories together, we can begin to grasp a much greater truth.

With this in mind, friends, let us each find new stories to read this month. Let us listen to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ stories. Let us listen to Black stories. Let us listen to migrant stories. Let us listen to indigenous stories. Let us listen to every kind of story. And let us say that this listening is part of our religion.

Whoever you are, and wherever you are on life’s journey, your story is welcome here. We would love to listen to it.

Amen.

(See Lynn Neary, “‘Grapes of Wrath’ and the Politics of Book Burning,” National Public Radio, September 30, 2008, accessed online at https://www.npr.org/2008/09/30/95190615/grapes-of-wrath-and-the-politics-of-book-burning, Erika Hayasaki, “How Book Bans Turned a Texas Town Upside Down,” The New York Times Magazine, September 8, 2022 accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/magazine/book-bans-texas.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare, and John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.)

if you want to pray for workers. . .

If you want to pray for workers. . . (Matt. 20.1-16)

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

Sept. 4, 2022

As the history goes, the first Labor Day was celebrated in New York in 1882. It had been organized by a man named Peter McGuire of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. McGuire wanted to honor workers with a parade. He chose the date because it fell in between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. On that first Labor Day, around 10,000 workers marched in the city.

When the day became a federal holiday, it had less to do with honoring workers than distracting attention from their concerns. After the 1894 Pullman strike followed by unemployed workers’ riots, President Grover Cleveland proposed the Labor Day holiday, mostly to move attention away from May Day (May 1st), which was associated with leftist movements worldwide. So Happy Labor Day, everybody. It was brought to us by the business-friendly Cleveland administration.

Nowadays, of course, no one knows that. Labor Day is barely associated with workers at all. Business seems to have won. A week or two before the holiday, we start seeing flyers and advertisements about Labor Day sales. We are encouraged to shop, to spend, to compare and consume. Anything but take a break from our labor and honor the workers who make the country run. But if we wanted to mark the day differently, we could.

I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll mark the day by saying a prayer for workers. A prayer in words, I suppose. But more importantly, a prayer in actions, in advocacy, in footsteps. . . If I want to pray for workers, if we want to pray for workers, then we might begin with all the workers who are underpaid and underinsured. If we want to pray for workers, we might think of all the workers who are essential. If we want to pray for workers, we might think very seriously about all the workers threatened by the growing extremism in our country. There are too many such workers to name, but let us begin with three.

If you want to pray for workers, pray for obstetricians and gynecologists. They who walk into the sacred spaces of examination rooms. Quietly these doctors work while others rant and rave to the news cameras outside or on the floor of statehouses. Pray for our OB/GYNs as they care for their patients, all the while receiving threats and harassment. Pray for them as they continue to follow their Hippocratic oaths, even in states where lawmakers now criminalize their ability to protect their patients and save lives. If you want to pray for workers, protest politicians getting in between doctors and their patients.

If you want to pray for workers, pray for librarians. They who line the shelves with books teaching us about our history, sharing with us a world of stories. Patiently they check and recheck books, answer questions, guide readers to resources. Pray for them as they are hounded by those who would censor what is on the shelves and erase stories they don’t like. Pray for the librarians now resigning all over the country saying they were trained to celebrate knowledge and to share it, not to have security walk them to their cars or find hateful notes in their home mailboxes. If you want to pray for workers, show up at the library with a word of gratitude and the county council with a word of support.

If you want to pray for workers, pray for poll workers. They who give of their time during every election to ensure that the voting machines are running and every eligible voter can cast a ballot. Tirelessly they set up and break down equipment, oftentimes late into the night. On voting day itself, they receive each person, one by one, find their name, help them to the booth. They assist with provisional ballots, take ballots to the car window for those with health needs, and pass out stickers of encouragement at the end. They also endure shouts and threats, conspiracy theories, and an increasingly angry and agitated public. If you want to pray for workers, go to the polls with an awareness that the people working there are the real patriots, giving hours and days of their time so that everyone’s voice can be heard.

If you want to pray for workers, then look to all those around us who are essential. See the love and care they put into their work. Watch how they are threatened these days. And stand with them.

If you want to pray for workers, then you aren’t the only one. Our faith tradition cares for workers. And the figure at its heart, the itinerant rabbi Jesus, told stories that were themselves like prayers. If you want to pray for workers, listen to this:

The kin-dom of heaven, the beloved community, Jesus said, is like a bunch of workers. Some began to work in a vineyard early in the day. After a time, the owner of the vineyard went to look for a few more. He invited a second group of workers to begin work. A few hours later, he invited more workers, and so on. Five times during the day, the owner of the vineyard hired on more workers to help. At the end of the day, every worker was paid the same.

The workers who had worked the longest were angry. Why do they get the same as us? We worked all day in the heat and they just got here? To which the owner of the vineyard replied that he had done them no wrong. I have paid you what we agreed, he said. What’s it to you if I’m generous to all? After Jesus told the story, he added his own subversive phrase to the end. So the last, he said, will be the first, and the first will be last. If you want to pray for workers, remember that.

Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. But that’s the point. Parables, as biblical scholar Paul Duke notes, aren’t supposed to make sense. They are supposed to surprise. They come to us as mysteries, subversions, tales told to disorient us altogether and jar our minds into thinking about things completely differently. Why should everyone get paid the same when they worked different hours? we ask. It doesn’t matter, hints Jesus. That’s the wrong question. A better question is why don’t we treat every worker with dignity? Why don’t we give everybody what they need? Why do we fall for these ideas of competition, scarcity, and zero sum? The beloved community isn’t like that at all. In the beloved community, there is enough for everybody.

If you want to pray for workers, read the entire parable as a kind of prayer. Let it surprise you, disorient you, and open up new ways of thinking. Let it change you in the way Czech writer Franz Kafka intuited. If we only followed the parables, he said, then we ourselves might become parables. Which is to say, we ourselves might become more surprising, more subversive, more open to new ways of thinking. My goodness, what a prayer that would be.

So if you want to pray for workers, if we want to pray for workers, then let us do so. Not just this weekend, which was approved by business interests, but maybe on May Day, which was not. Or maybe on Sunday, when we tell disorienting stories. Or maybe every day, when we affirm, in faith, what Dr. King put so well on one of his last visits with the sanitation workers in Memphis. Anyone engaged in work that serves humanity, Dr. King said, and is for the building of humanity, is doing work that has dignity and worth. And such workers themselves are dignified and worthy. Every obstetrician, every librarian, every poll worker, and every person in between.

All of us are workers in the vineyard. And if we want to pray for each other, then the prayer should never be, why did they get as much as I did? The prayer should always be why doesn’t everybody get what they need?

Friends, it is a deeply countercultural prayer.

Amen.

(See the “Labor Day” entry at Encyclopedia Brittanica online, Paul Duke, The Parables: A Preaching Commentary, Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, and Martin Luther King, Jr., “All Labor Has Dignity” in The Radical King, ed. Cornel West)