By Rev. Nate Klug
Editor’s note: Rev. Klug, co-minister at First Parish in Lincoln with his wife Kit Novotny, gave this sermon on November 10, 2024.
There’s an ice-breaker game that I learned from my wife Kit. It comes from the improv comedy world, and it offers a great way of sharing a little about yourself in a group but not getting too carried away.
The person who’s speaking follows a prompt. They begin: “I could tell you a story about…” But — and this is the key — they don’t actually tell the story. All they do is complete that first sentence: “I could tell you a story about the time when I knocked my front teeth out on the playground as a kid.” Or, “I could tell you about the day last year when I knew the Celtics might actually win the championship.”
This week, if I were playing that game — if I were in the mood to play a game — I might say, “I could tell you a story about how I felt when I woke up on Wednesday morning and checked my phone. I could tell you about one of our daughters bursting into tears at the breakfast table. I could tell you about the articles I’ve read since then trying to explain what happened. I could tell you how I learned that one party’s candidate earned about the same number of total votes as the last time he ran, in 2020. And one party’s candidate earned many millions fewer than in 2020.
“I could tell you how I learned that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The majority of people in the richest country in the world right now lack the privilege of turning their work and their time into any kind of savings for the future. I could tell you many stories.” And you, of course, could tell me yours.
Part of the beauty and the challenge of a democracy is the plurality of stories contained within in it. “I hear America singing,” Walt Whitman wrote, “the varied carols I hear.” As you might know, during the Civil War, during the greatest test this country has faced, Whitman volunteered as a nurse. His younger brother George was wounded in the fighting. Walt rushed to Washington to find him. He ended up staying three years. He visited and cared for over 600 people. Sat with soldiers in the hospital. Helped them get letters home. “And with the dying,” Whitman wrote, “I generally watch’d all night. I took up my quarters in the hospital… and slept there.”
Those three years, Whitman went on, “I consider the most profound lesson of my life. I can say that in my ministerings, I comprehended all whoever came my way, northern or southern, and slighted none. It has given me my most fervent views of the true ensemble and extent of the States.”
The true ensemble and extent of the States. Whitman’s America is not ours, of course. And yet I find something useful in Whitman’s curiosity, his appreciation for the vastness and strangeness of our country and its ongoing capacity to surprise.
I know some of us feel lost today. Some of us may feel like we don’t recognize the country we were born in or have lived in for many years. Listen to the historian John Ganz’s argument about the cultural fragmentation that’s taken place in America: “We are accustomed still to thinking of this country at its post-World War Two self dominated by the struggle over the definition of common sense and what is ‘normal’: Prime time. Must-see TV. The water cooler. That’s gone now.”
We should think of the United States today, Ganz argues, as being more like the country Whitman knew in the 1800s — not a unified nation but a patchwork of small movements and coalitions. Without anything like a central culture.
Some of us may feel lost. And if I can get preacherly for just one moment, I would say: listen to that feeling. Don’t try to push it down or get rid of it. For our November worship theme, we are focusing on “The Stories We Tell.” We need stories in order to live, as Kit said last week. We need stories to get our kids to fall asleep. We need stories ourselves to keep getting up in the morning.
And yet that bewilderment we may feel right, now the estrangement, the sense of lostness… If we really listen to those feelings, then we have to admit we don’t have a good story to tell right now. We don’t have a good story to tell about America right now, and the values that its major parties represent and what it’s supposed to stand for in the world. The stories we would like to tell about our country right now — they are not the stories we can tell.
It’s humbling, isn’t it? To feel a little speechless, to not know what to say. At a moment like this, our spiritual traditions remind us of two essential things. First of all, they remind us that a confounded silence is always a better response than more platitudes: “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace.”
Here’s another translation of that same passage from the prophet Jeremiah: “My people are broken and they put on Band-Aids, saying, ‘It’s not so bad. You’ll be fine.’” In Dearborn, in Youngstown, in Uvalde — things are not “fine.” Better right now to sit in confounded silence than repeat another platitude.
The second thing that our spiritual traditions teach is that our speechlessness always has the potential to become a fertile space. Silence when it is a humble silence has always been this powerful place of spiritual regeneration.
Think of the Psalmists. So many times, God drags them from death-like silence back into life. Or think about the silence of the followers of that rabbi named Jesus the day after his crucifixion. Think of that first morning as the women walked back towards the tomb with rags to dress his body. Nothing seemed possible. And then everything became possible — but only because I think they had gone so far into silence. Only because they had been willing to step down into that humbling place of admitting, “I don’t know any more. I can’t explain this.”
Or think about the speechlessness of Fanny Lou Hamer in Mississippi. Ever since she found out that she was allowed to vote, Hamer had been trying to get her country to listen to her. She’d been through literacy tests and made-up rules about tax receipts. Her boss had fired her. She’d been beaten up in jail. But now, now in 1964, Fanny Lou Hamer had traveled to the Democratic National Convention. She gave a speech there. She sounded a little like Whitman, a hundred years before: “I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
Think about her despondency when even after achieving that platform, the Democratic Party denied her coalition’s bid for delegates. It took four more years until the party included those Black delegates at the convention. But finally they did. And in 1968, Hamer represented her country herself. Nothing seemed possible. And then everything became possible.
I saw a note this week from a writer named Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. He’s a colleague of William Barber; they work together on the Poor People’s Campaign. Wilson-Hartgrove wrote this: “I am a disciple of Jesus in the church that learned to pursue beloved community for all people under the rule of Jim Crow authoritarianism. We’re not headed into the future I hoped for. But we are not without witnesses who’ve shown us how to live in times like these.”
If you can’t make much sense out of this country right now, don’t try to — yet. If you don’t have a good story to tell about America, don’t tell one — for the moment. But find those witnesses who speak to you. Become a collector of their stories — stories that are familiar and comforting, yes. But also collect stories that are very different from your own. Seek out those stories you might not understand fully, or be comfortable with. Be like Walt Whitman as he cared for those veterans from the North and the South. Try to “comprehend all” and “slight none.”
And slowly, maybe, out of this stunned silence we will be part of building something new. As Whitman put it “We’ve got a hell of a lot to learn before we’re a real democracy. We’ll get there in the end; God knows we’re not there yet.”
Amen.
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