I.

Most ancient tribal groups have believed that goddesses and gods inhabited the created order. This was very common and led to the widespread practices in what is generally called “nature religion.” That’s a fascinating study all by itself, but it’s not our focus today--just an important jumping off place.

The jump from divinity inhabiting nature as a whole and/or specific created items such as sun and moon and trees and stones to divinity inhabiting humans was quite a jump, and probably the first humans thought to be imbued with a measure of divinity probably were chieftans and/or shamans, medicine women and medicine men. The idea that all humans might be imbued with a little bit of divinity in them, a spark, could have come from Gnosticism and/or what became Hinduism, the oldest organized religion in world history. One scholar of the Hindu religion made these comments about the essence of that faith tradition:

What can be said to be common to all Hindus is belief in Dharma, reincarnation, karma, and moksha (liberation) of every soul through a variety of moral, action-based, and meditative yogas. Still more fundamental principles include ahimsa (non-violence), the primacy of the Guru, the Divine Word of Aum and the power of mantras, love of Truth in many manifestations as Gods and Goddessess, and an understanding that the essential spark of the Divine (Atman/Brahman) is in every human and living being, thus allowing for many spiritual paths leading to the One Unitary Truth.

If this brief summary of a Hindu core is correct, then it’s the divine spark in every living being, human and other, that accounts for the many spiritual paths at work in the world at any given time all of which are leading to One Unitary Truth. Is that Truth a rational conclusion or is it God Godself? Many of us in Christian tradition say, “God is love,” but some Hindu’s may say, connecting their conclusion to the divine spark concept, that God is Truth or that the many goddesses and gods taken together comprise Truth.

In a 1947 Time magazine article, Dr. Peirre du Nouy, a biophysicist, had this to say about the divine spark concept:

Consciousness of one’s tremendous responsibility in the great evolutionary process is the mark of a more highly evolved human being. Let every person remember that the destiny of humankind is incomparable, and that it depends greatly on the divine will to collaborate in the transcendent task. . . . And let people above all never forget that the divine spark is in them...and that they are free to disregard it, to kill it, or to come closer to God by showing their eagerness to work with God, and for God.

When I am informed that a biophysicist is about to speak, I tend to close down, assuming that there’s no way I’m going to be able to comprehend what she or he says, but I think I followed Dr. du Nouy well enough. Let me repeat what I heard and see if that matches up with what you heard.

Humanity has a role in the evolutionary process; an awareness of that responsibility is a sign of a human being who is more evolved than a human being who passively waits and watches through life. Human destiny is determined both by divine and human involvement. Humans do well to remember that there’s a divine spark in each of them, which they may kill or disregard or use with eagerness in working with God to help humanity reach its greatest potentials.

Those religious groups that see a part of God or a divine spark in every human being treat all humans with honor and respect in so far as possible while those religious groups fixated on human beings as fundamentally evil creatures, depraved to the core, are going to see humans as not very likely to succeed at anything worthwhile. The effects of evil in the world seem to create more ripples than do the effects of an act of goodness; another way of saying that might be: it takes more acts of good to undo evil than it takes acts of evil to destroy good. That may or may not be true either way; if there are any truths in it either way, a good bit of making that determination depends on perspective and experience.

We could take the 9/11 attacks as a quick and easy example. Though planned well, the actual attacks in three places happened in a relatively brief amount of time, but we are still cleaning up and trying to recover nine years later. How does a race of people even go about trying to recover from genocide? The effects are so devastating that at times, those attacked simply give up and give evil the victory; the most they think they can do is to try to start writing a new chapter in the life of what’s left of their people.

Today is Protestant Reformation Sunday in many churches because the last Sunday in October is as close as we can come on Sundays to October 31--the actual day in 1517 when Father Dr. Martin Luther made public his 95 points of conflict with the Roman Catholic Church in which he served as a professor and part-time priest. So Luther loved the Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and he--as many of us are inclined to do--saw only the good in it and none of its flaws. Admittedly, there are very few flaws at Silverside so looking for them is a time-consuming and usually futile task, unless we get a hard rain. So the longer Luther served within the priesthood, the more flaws he saw in the church, and though enamored with much that the Church had done and its great potential, he eventually saw some of those flaws turning into evil acts, for which he held his powerful Pope accountable.

Luther’s challenge to the Pope was not originally any effort whatsoever to begin a new expression of monotheism. He wanted to purify the Church he loved. He wanted the Pope to hear his challenges as points for debate--not blatant, slap you in the face, criticisms. That is not how they were heard, however, and the Pope fought back. For quite some time, Luther’s life was literally in danger, and he was kept hidden away in a castle for the most part for a long time.

Luther’s bottom line concern was that the Church, in many of its practices, was intentionally abusing emotionally and financially its constituents, most of whom were quite poor. Still, the church was constantly coming up with ways to try to force the peasants to give up money they didn’t have unless they made the children go without dinner for a week at a time. The most grievous of these abuses, in Brother Martin’s mind, was the selling of indulgences--those certificates that promised limited time in purgatory for those who had died and who were already in purgatory paying for their earthly sins before being given news of their permanent assignment: heaven or hell. You could buy one of these for yourself and for living relatives as well. There was the assumption that the shorter one’s stay in purgatory, the less likely a sentence of an eternal hell would be pronounced. Who wouldn’t want one or several? Talk about great stocking stuffers!

The Church was bilking its whole membership, but especially the peasants who had no education and no source of information except from the parish priest whom they heard preach Sunday by Sunday. It was a shameful scandal.

Luther came to believe that the only way to be saved from hell was to affirm God’s grace and to rely on that grace. There was no way to buy God’s favor in this world or the next. He knew his Pope and the papal staff were desperate to get St. Peter’s Basilica built--at any cost. This is where many of those indulgences dollars went. Luther began to preach against indulgences. He encouraged people he knew not to buy them, and in a challenge to his fellow priests, Luther asked, “If we really could pray the souls of the departed out of purgatory and save them from hell, how could we keep ourselves from offering up such prayers at all times? If we were real pastors, and if we truly had that kind of power, we would never rest because we’d be in prayer all the time, night and day, for those in danger of an eternity in hell. It’s devilish to put a price tag on a pastoral act that, if authentic, would save people’s souls.”

I’m not sure the Roman Catholic Church and many Protestant Churches as well have ever caught on to their primary role, which is to serve the people; not to be served by them. Anyway, this 600 year old series of acts of evil are still being cleaned up in some places; in other places, yet today, indulgences are still being sold.

II.

The passage read today as our reflective reading is one of the scriptural segments rarely quoted, much less used as a sermon text. It is truly an ignored part of the little bit we have of Jesus’ teachings.

While the Romans had complete political authority over the Jews, they, the Romans, did allow the Jews to mediate their own cultural and religious issues, within reason; that is, as long as everything was handled in such a way that no big trouble was caused. Under certain circumstances, for example, the Jewish leaders could arrest a sister or brother Jew on charges that she or he broke a Jewish religious law. Jews could not, however, pronounce the death penalty; that fell to Rome alone in terms of how Rome dealt with the multiple cultures over whom the mighty Empire ruled. This is not to say that if the Jews got together a vigil ante and rubbed out an anonymous or relatively anonymous Jew such as a woman caught in the act of adultery that Rome would care, and, no doubt, many a blind Roman eye was turned away from just that kind of violence. Same thing when Herod ordered the slaughter of the innocents: all the little boys two years of age and under living in and around Jerusalem. Rome didn’t care; that meant less disgruntled Jews to deal with in the future. Still, officially, Rome had to pronounce the death penalty and did so or chose not to do so with any Jew who was well known whose execution might cause an attempted uprising. This is why, Jewish threats to do away with Jesus notwithstanding, Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor acting on behalf of the Roman Emperor at the time, Tiberius Caesar, had to give the go ahead for Jesus’ crucifixion.

When we speak of Jews being against Jesus, we’re talking about a handful of Jews opposing him. There was no mass hatred of Jesus and, thus, no widespread desire to do him in. Even if some Jews were troubled by Jesus’ theology, they didn’t want Rome to exercise its power against a daughter or son of Abraham. Still, there were a few; many or most of them in key leadership positions within first century Judaism; who wanted him dead, and on more than one occasion they threatened him in precisely that manner. We see it in the unpopular passage before us today.

In this case, what was making the ranking Jews irate with Jesus with the utter intimacy he believed he shared with God leading him to mention and proclaim the oneness they shared. This was not Jesus claiming to be God; rather, the oneness to which he referred had to with commonality of purpose and the uniting bond they shared. Jesus, by no means, thought or taught that he was one and the same as the great Creator God. Even so, that is what some of the Jewish leaders heard when Jesus would say things such as, “God and I are one,” and if that were what he said, they believed he should die for having violated blasphemy laws. The Romans couldn’t have cared less about Jewish theological standards, and they weren’t going to give thumbs up to the death of a Jew just became some other Jews accused him or her of having a faulty theology.

Jesus wasn’t the most well-known person in his time and place; he was no celebrity, but enough Jews knew about him and supported his teachings that Rome knew the Jews would come out swinging at them if they put Jesus to death. If they were going to do that, they would have to plan all the details with great care, and carry out the deed in such a way that other Jews would learn the lesson that they couldn’t carry on the way Jesus had if they expected to live to draw another breath.

So we pick up our story at a point where Jesus had spoken out about his special closeness to God a second time, and some of the Jewish leaders had their thugs and body guards picking up stones with which they would, on signal, put Jesus to death. Jesus, on this occasion, tried to take some sense into their heads. He reminded them that in God’s power he’d been able to do some mighty works such as healing the sick.

The Jewish leaders who had made themselves monitors of Jesus’ behavior said, “Yep, you’ve done some good works. Lots of faith healers do good works. The difference is: the others aren’t blasphemers, and you are!”

They went on with their accusations, “You are making yourself God,” and Jesus was tired of arguing with them so he didn’t deny their claim at this time. Instead, he plays a little scripture game with them since the ancient law was supposed to be their life. He says, “If I were claiming to be God, it should be alright with you since in your own scripture God Godself says to human beings, ‘You are gods.’” They were stunned. They were speechless. Jesus knew his scripture, and he was exactly on target. Like many religious leaders today among Christians, the Jewish leaders there with Jesus were hoping not too many Jews knew about that seemingly heretical scriptural blurb from their worshipbook, the same worshipbook used by their forebears in the first great Jerusalem Temple. I’m talking about the book of Psalms.

I’m reading now from Psalm 82, verses 1-6:

God has taken God’s place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods God holds judgment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk around in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. I say, “You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you....”

So, in context here, one of the psalmists envisions God as taking God’s seat with other members of the divine council; it’s clear that this particular psalm was written before the ancient Hebrews had moved all the way away from polytheism and had fully embraced monotheism. They were still in that long transitional period that scholars of religion call “henotheism,” which means that the God of Israel was the dominant deity for them but that they had not yet come to the place where they were willing to out and out deny the existence of other deities. Therefore, while, for them, their national god, Yahweh, sits at the head of the council’s table, there are other gods on the council. Monotheism had not yet been fully and completely embraced.

Yahweh, as chief god but not only god, is spewing forth words of judgment. God accuses God’s people of being unjust; they prefer to show partiality to the wicked who are powerful than to the powerless, those who can’t do a thing for them; can’t return any favors; can’t pay back any loans. In their weakness, they are also ignorant; they don’t understand that what they’re doing is wrong. God says to God’s people, “Doing justice and explaining why to those who don’t is your duty; after all, you are gods, children of the Most High.”

Because God is their spiritual parent, some kind of way, they being children of God have certain specific responsibilities; some of those responsibilities include doing justice while trying to wipe out injustice and telling those who don’t know how to live as children of God just how that works. The God of one of the psalmists says to God’s people, God’s children: “You are gods.”

This is exactly what Jesus was referring to, and yet again, he left his detractors red-faced for failing to be able to follow through in proving their intellectual or spiritual superiority over him. They are ready to kill him, or at least make him think they’re going to, for speaking about God in terms that were too familiar for their comfort levels, and Jesus says, “It’s odd for you to want to kill me for talking about my oneness with God who once said to God’s children point blank, “You are gods!”

This time, he’d really made them angry, and they were all the more eager to kill him even if it meant facing Rome’s ire. To stay alive he had to escape, which he did, but not before confronting them with a piece of their own scripture that they didn’t want to hear or have others hear--God saying to God’s people, “Since you’re in God’s family, you, too, are gods; you are gods by birth.”

III.

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 on Long Island. His father was a Quaker carpenter. His mother was a Dutch farmer’s wife who worked on the family farm alongside slaves the family owned.

His poetry was often controversial, and his major, lasting collection, Leaves of Grass, was often banned. More than a few readers thought Whitman was too blatant about sexual matters so they protested and refused to buy the book.

Theologically, he was likely a pantheist. The except of his poem, “Song of Myself,” on which we are focussing today seems to peg him as a pantheist. A pantheist believes that all is God; everything you see all taken together is God. Every part of the created order taken as a whole is God. The word, “panentheist,” literally means all in God or God in all. A panENtheist, in contrast to pantheist, believes that there is a part of God in all aspects of the created order, humans included, but that there is more to God than what is collectively in the whole of humanity.

Walt Whitman was known for ignoring meter in his poems, but producing poems with a melodic quality nonetheless. Here’s a sample:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and

----knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

And that all men ever born are also my brothers... and the

----women my sisters and lovers.

Whitman lived for many years just up the road in Camden, New Jersey, which is where he died in 1892 of complications related to a stroke. He would surely be surprised at what an undesirable place it has become.

The very long poem from which we pull a small excerpt is titled “Song of Myself,” and it was the first poem published in his famous collection called Leaves of Grass. Dropping right down in the middle of the poem, we find these words:

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from,

The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it.....

Before we dig in here, Chris Highland who has studied Whitman extensively, explains a bit of what we have just heard:

Whitman is divine, if divine means “connected to the vine” of relationships that hold the cosmos together. And he reminds us of our divinity, the sacredness of all life. And this does to “faith” and religion what few have the ability to do: transforms it all, absorbs, recycles and renews into compost to grow something better, something greater. And Whitman not only prepared the way; he brought the Good News, the holy book–the only one that brings life because it is Life: Nature. “We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return.” This is our repentance, our conversion, our salvation, and our own terrestrial, natural divinity.

Whitman’s sense of divinity isn’t that it’s simply a spark in all people. He sees himself and others as fully divine, inside out. All parts of him are divine, and all bodily functions are divine because of the sacredness of the whole created order including the totality of a human being. Our connection to the sacred natural world created by God is what makes us divine. This parallels Jesus’ sense that all people are divine because they, by birth, are automatically children of God and, thus, have divinity in their physical/spiritual make up.

Does that sound pretty good to you, or is it a burden, even to contemplate? Some people like the idea that there’s something divine about them; others are scared to death of the mere thought. To what degree am I related to God? Is God completely other than any one human being or humanity as a whole? Is there a mere spark of divinity within each human being, which connects to God within us and ties us to every other human being? Is there some kind of divinity with which are born simply because we are born into this world not only as children of our parents, but also as children of God? Or are we, with all other parts of the created order, fully divine because nature is itself God, and God Godself is nature?

Ching Hai said:

A fully divine person is a fully-human being. A fully-human being is fully divine. Right now we are only half a human being. We do things with hesitation, we do things with ego. We don't believe that it is God who arranges all this for our enjoyment, for our experience. We separate sin and virtue. We make a big deal out of everything, and accordingly judge ourselves and other people. We suffer from our own limitations about what God should do. Understand? Actually God is inside us, and we limit God.

Amen.

Phillis Wheatley and Racial Equality

I.

Here’s a special Bible verse from Hebrew scripture, the book of Exodus--the great treatise on freedom for God’s people--that you may want to begin including in some of your recurring devotional readings:

When a slave owner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner's property (Exod. 21:20-21).

Things weren’t improved by the time of the New Testament era as this excerpt from the book of 1 Peter reveals:

Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh. For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God's approval (1Pet. 2:18-29).

So, what the slaves were being told was to endure their punishments when the master corrected them for some wrong doing AND to endure with equal patience and lack of objection when the master punishes them just because he, the master, is in a bad mood and needs someone to catch the brunt of his frustration.

One of the few first-person accounts of a slave recollection of how she or he got from there, Africa, to here, the Americas, came from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789.

At last, when the ship we were in had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow. The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. Happily perhaps for myself I was soon reduced so low here that it was thought necessary to keep me almost always on deck; and from my extreme youth I was not put in fetters. In this situation I expected every hour to share the fate of my companions, some of whom were almost daily brought upon deck at the point of death, which I began to hope would soon put an end to my miseries. Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself; I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs. Every circumstance I met with served only to render my state more painful, and heighten my apprehensions, and my opinion of the cruelty of the whites.

Ironically, and I wish I could take credit for how all of these things come together as they do, one of the headlines on the front page of today’s newspaper reads: “The ugly truth of slavery and church.” The church defended slavery in this country to the end. There was no revival or spiritual awakening causing them to reconsider their evil views; it was only a matter of brute force in a war that had brothers and other relatives fighting against each other for the ability to make the decision on the country’s behalf.

Earlier this year, there was quite a round of discussion going on among Delawareans, from the Governor on around, about the degree to which present-day citizens owed apologies to slaves and their descendants. Many people were saying, “I can’t help what my ancestors did, and though I disagree with what they did an apology from me means nothing.” Others were saying, “While it’s clear that my forebears made decisions to enslave people, something I have opposed my whole adult life, there is something at least symbolic when I say to the descendants of those whose ancestors suffered at the hands of mine, “I’m so sorry that happened, and I will certainly live my life doing all I can do to undo the residue of such a horrible set of decisions so in that regard my apology does mean something.” If you don’t willingly apologize, Mrs. Clarence Thomas might phone you very early in the morning to demand an apology from you on behalf of any persons of color she may know.

If slavery were strictly a phenomenon of the past, suitable for study only in history lectures and textbooks, you could decide whether you’re up for a history lesson this morning before deciding how to plan your nap during the Gathering time. Before you go, though, let me remind you that slavery is still a reality in our world, and if you think it has nothing to do with you, well, you’re wrong. If you buy chocolate that isn’t made of Fair Trade cocoa beans, you are supporting the slavery of children in the Ivory Coast. The Ivory Coast is one of the few places in the world where cocoa beans can be grown with consistency; it is the number one export for the small nation, and poverty plagues the country. The combination of poverty and the demand for chocolate-makings from the First World often cause parents, to keep the rest of the family alive, to sell one of their children to cocoa bean industry as slaves.

The three worst offenders are Hershey, the M&M/Mars Company, and Nestle. All of these companies buy cocoa beans from companies that plant and harvest cocoa beans with child slave labor. When we know the truth, the word “chocolholic” takes on new meaning.

The issue of the Harvard Gazette released online yesterday, reprinted a February 19 article covering a speech given by Luis CdeBaca, who directs the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. Before taking on the job he now has, CdeBaca was a Federal Prosecutor. In the course of his speech, he revealed that slavery is alive and well on Planet Earth today.

Examples of modern-day slaves could be the workers who make our cotton shirts, pick cocoa for our chocolate, and harvest shrimp for our dinner plates while imprisoned aboard ships at sea. Enslaved prostitutes--more than 1.3 million worldwide--also provide the labor force for much of the world’s sex trade.

While in that prosecutorial role, CdeBaca had a hand in sending 100 sex traffickers to prison and freeing 600 sex and garment workers who’d been kept in involuntary servitude. This is unimaginable for most of us!

Quoting CdeBaca,

Trafficking in humans is a crime akin to murder. It’s a crime akin to rape, and to kidnapping. Worldwide, there are more than 12 million people who exist in some form of slavery, part of a shadow economy that turns a $32 billion annual profit for traffickers. About a tenth of those are in what experts call commercial sex servitude. Yet in a typical year, nations around the globe initiate only 3,000 prosecutions against traffickers, an unforgivably low percentage.

He insists that countries worldwide, if they want to stem the tide of slavery or do away with it altogether, have to get to the root causes of what makes human trafficking flourish. There are some 192 countries in the world, and at this time 136 of them have signed the United Nations’ ten-year-old protocol against slavery, but he says that nothing much will change until criminal prosecutions escalate around the globe.

II.

In 1761, Phillis, a little African girl about seven years old, was purchased as a personal slave in Boston by Susannah Wheatley, whose husband, John, was a tailor. Evidently, Phillis’s only memory of Africa was of her mother performing some kind of water ritual as the sun was rising one morning.

Her biographers have speculated that she came from Senegal or the Gambia; her native people may have been the Fula who were Muslim. Because she was so young, historians of African slavery believe Phillis was kidnapped and brought to what is now the United States aboard one of the dangerous, putrid slaving ships. More about that in a moment.

Little Phillis learned English quickly--reading, writing, and speaking. Phillis, obviously, was naturally intellectually gifted; and her teacher, Mrs. Wheatley’s 18 year old daughter, Mary, a whiz as a tutor. It is reported that Phillis could read any part of the Bible, even those tough sections, in a little less than a year and a half.

Without in any way applauding the institution of slavery, the Wheatley family must be complimented for recognizing Phillis’s gifts and giving her opportunities to develop them. In that vein, they arranged for Phillis to begin studying Latin and English Lit when she was 12 years old. She was particularly intrigued with the poetry of Pope, Alexander that is, and Phillis took it upon herself to attempt her translations of the poetry of the Roman writer, Ovid.

Given the Wheatley family’s religious leanings, Phillis was thoroughly indoctrinated into Puritanism. Again, not to praise any aspect of the institution of slaveholding, the Wheatleys at least regarded Phillis as a human being worth leading into relationship with God; not all slaveholders had such a high view of slaves--tending, more often, to equate them with soul-less animals for whom a relationship with God was impossible.

Phillis was 20 years old when she was sent to England as the servant to the Wheatleys’s young adult son, Nathaniel, who had to be in London on business. While there, her talents could not be kept secret. Lady Huntingdon became her patron, and this support allowed Phillis to get together a poetry collection for publication, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. This made Phillis Wheatley the first African American woman poet ever to be published.

One of the most beloved hymns in the English language is “Amazing Grace.” Folk singers have sung it as have the great stars of the Metropolitan Opera. Congregations large and small have sung its words for centuries, typically inspiring congregants to sing forth with great gusto. Here come Progressives like me to botch it up for everyone who was singing the hymn just fine until we came along with our criticisms. Soon, it will be time for my annual reminder that the wise men could not have made it to the manger and, in fact, didn’t see Jesus until he was about two years old; but I won’t spoil that fun now. We’ll wait until Christmas hits.

The film, “Amazing Grace,” one of the most moving films I’ve ever seen, tells the story of the process of British abolition of slavery and shows us how this widely known hymn is directly related to the liberation of slaves. Captain John Newton, eventually the Reverend John Newton, is the key figure in the story and the composer of the words to the hymn. The words that offend bleeding hearts like me are much more palatable when we understand why Newton chose the words he chose for his hymn.

Newton was born in London in 1725, the son of a commander of a merchant ship, which sailed Mediterranean waters. When John was eleven years old, he went with his father on one of journeys and would make six voyages altogether with his father before the father’s retirement. In 1744 John got a job on a the H. M. S. Harwich. Finding conditions on the ship absolutely intolerable, he deserted. Since he’d signed on for service he couldn’t leave until the journey was over. Newton was recaptured in some port town, publicly flogged, and demoted from midshipman to seaman, the lowest position on the rung.

He continued hating life aboard the Harwich and arranged to have himself traded to serve on the crew of a slave ship. This ship went to Sierra Leone, and for reasons never made absolutely clear as far as I know, Newton signed on for a term of service as a servant to a slave trader. Not surprisingly, the slave trader treated him like like a slave; this included beatings any time he displeased his master.

Again, details are sketchy, but early in 1748, Newton’s freedom was secured by captain of another ship who’d known Newton’s father. Afterwards, Newton worked his way up in the seafaring world and eventually became the captain of his own slave ship.

You can imagine that he wasn’t all that drawn to religion, though his mother had given him some religious instruction when he was a little boy. Once on a trip back to England with a ship full of slaves to be sold, a horrible storm relentlessly attacked the ship. Newton had never been more frightened. He was certain the ship would sink, killing him and all of his crew and cargo.

Not on speaking terms with God for very long time, he cried out and begged for God’s mercy in the crisis. Whether or not his desperate prayer had anything to do with the final outcome or not, we can’t know, but the storm did calm; and all were saved. Newton, for the rest of his life, called this his “great deliverance.” By that, he meant not only his physical deliverance, but also his spiritual deliverance. He continued in the slave trade for a little while after his conversion; however, he saw to it that the slaves under his care were treated humanely. Eventually, he gave it up altogether.

He made his way into the Christian ministry, and as the years went along he eventually became blind. This did not keep him from preaching regularly and becoming a writer of hymns. One of those hymns was “Amazing Grace,” and when you understand the background of his life and the impetus for writing hymns in the first place, “Amazing Grace,” makes perfect sense--theologically and otherwise. The final stanza that begins, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years...,” was not written by Newton and was added later by an anonymous writer.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Now, you may not want to think of yourself as a wretch, but Newton could not get over the part he’d played in human trafficking and suffering. He was blind when he wrote the hymn, but claims in the words to be able to see. Of course, he’s talking about the truth of the value of all human beings.

T'was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

How ironic that God’s grace both taught Newton’s heart to fear and relieved those fears. Naturally, he talking about fearing something more than a storm at sea; more properly, he should have feared the fact that he nearly missed out on the meaning of life altogether.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

He’s not making up dangers or exaggerating his retelling of his life’s experience. He might have died at sea or been beaten to death. He might have contracted one of the diseases that plagued and killed some of the slaves aboard one of his ships. But the same grace that taught him to fear what is really fearsome and the same grace that relieved his fears got him home in more ways than one.

III.

Here is a prosaic reflection on her views of slavery. We will come to her famous poem shortly.

...the divine Light is insensibly chasing away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa; and the Chaos which has reigned so long is converting into beautiful Order, and reveals more and more clearly the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably united, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one without the other: Otherwise, perhaps the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian slavery; I do not say they would have been contented without it, by no means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call love of Freedom; it is impatient of oppression, and pants for Deliverance--and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert that the same principle lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get him honor upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite, How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive power over others agree I humbly think it does not require the penetration of a Philosopher to determine.

Now, let’s hear her poem on the subject once again, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”:

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

Some few Africans eventually did well for themselves here on these shores, some even while they were still slaves; more, of course, when they were freed. Phillis Wheatley was one of those who did WHILE she was a slave, and if this poem is any indication of her overall view of her life, the greatest blessing that came to her, having been forced out of Africa, was an introduction to God shown the world in the ministry and teachings of Jesus from Nazareth.

Wheatley claims that she knew neither God nor Jesus nor redemption, a way to be in relationship with God. Of course, we have to remember that she was only seven years old when the slave traders kidnapped her from the loving arms of her parents and sold her to Mrs. Wheatley; under the circumstances a turn of good fortune for sure. That, essentially, is the message of the first half of her poem.

The second half of her poem about being brought from Africa to America is concerned with racial prejudice and how white people known to her, most of them anyway, treated her with disdain and even hatred just because her skin color was not white. It was “sable” in hue, she said. Sable is a beautiful color, but to the racists, the “colour” of the sable race is a “diabolic die.” Just because of the color of their skin, they are regarded by many as diabolic, as evil.

The poem ends with a reminder to Christian racists, if there can really be such a thing, that persons of color, those much more black than sable too, are afforded by God all the privileges white folk are offered and some day will be on their way to heaven, same as the finest and most influential of whites.

Let’s not overlook that little phrase there, “black as Cain.” That could be a play on words, but it isn’t necessarily. Cain and Abel were the first two sons born to Eve and Adam. Cain was jealous of his brother, Abel, and he killed him. In that sense, Cain could be black like a bad guy, black with guilt.

In the eighteenth century, however, another view was widely held. When Cain slew Abel, God stepped in and told the rest of humanity that it wasn’t up to them to punish Cain; it was up to God to take care of that. God, thus, places a mark on Cain so that people who might want to do him in for killing off his innocent brother would be reminded that Cain was God’s problem and God’s project. Somehow, someone came up with the idea that the mark of Cain was God’s making Cain’s skin black, a physical trait that would be passed on to Cain’s descendants.

Wheatley knew that theological point of view. She didn’t debate it; she simply reminded detractors who thought she deserved to be a slave because of the color of her skin that people of all colors will be a part of God’s family in the next realm. If you were so racist that you’d say, “If black people are going to be in heaven, I don’t want to go there,” that would be your call and your freedom to make such a call. Imagine dark skinned people like Jesus and Paul and Mary Magdalene making it to heaven despite the color of their skin, which no one in their era raised as a possible preventative.

Imagine Juan Williams on a plane bound for glory with fully-garbed Muslims, and imagine NPR as the only option for your listening pleasure. Oh my!

The Pastor's Words on the Occasion of the 175th Anniversary: "Duties of the Hour"...Again!

“Duties of the Hour”...Again!

I. President Lincoln and Silverside Church

Legend has it that on July 8, 1835, while tolling the death of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Marshall, the liberty bell cracked. Three months later, a little bit south of Philadelphia, a new church was born out of a church that cracked.

First Baptist Church of Wilmington had taken a stance not at all uncommon in those days among churches of various denominations that a church’s primary responsibility was to praise

an all-powerful God who didn’t need mere mortals struggling to advance God’s cause; thus, a missions program was not only superfluous, but also potentially offensive to God. Christian

education was not held in high esteem for many of the same kinds of reasons. Education was held in contempt by many of the Baptists at the time, especially as the growth of Baptists was most pronounced on the American frontier; few people were educated formally, and many folks were distrustful of an educated clergy. If the preacher didn’t need education to preach Gods word, why did the lay people?

Baptist historian and educator, Walter B. Shurden, has pointed out that between 1820 and 1840, the Anti-Missions Controversy rocked frontier Baptists. From the frontier, the controversy rippled in all directions. Even in Delaware, the First Baptist Church had embraced anti-missions and anti-education

positions.

This didn’t suit the whole membership. A small pro-missions/ education group pulled out of First Baptist Church to establish Second Baptist Church. About three months after the liberty bell had cracked, Wilmington’s Second Baptist Church was born. In 2000, Second Baptist Church became Silverside Church. When Second Baptist Church was established in 1835, Baptists in the United States had only been organized to do any cooperative work since 1814. There weren’t multiple Baptist denominations as exist today; instead, there was really a single Baptist denomination. The Baptists were regionally identified and invited to send messengers to a denominational meeting every three years. Baptists who participated in these meetings were identified as members of the Triennial Convention. Though not all participants in the Triennial Convention were pro-mission people, the Convention itself was, and a good bit of the Convention’s business had to do with supporting missionaries.

When, shortly before Second Baptist Church of Wilmington turned ten years old, the Triennial Convention met in 1845 at the First Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia, the Baptists from northern states expressed unwillingness any longer to support missionaries from the southern states who owned slaves or who, if not slave owners, were supporters of the institution of slavery. The result was another crack. Baptists in the North and Baptists in the South would no longer be connected.

The groundwork was laid that year for the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the plans were ratified a year later at a meeting in Richmond, Virginia, of Baptists from the South. The Baptists from the South established their own foreign mission board and home mission board; they would send whomever they pleased as missionaries--slaveholders or not. Baptists in the North were still known as Triennial Baptists and wouldn’t have another name until 1907. After the split, they began establishing independent societies to accomplish their work. In Washington, DC, on May 17, the Triennial Convention took over the Baptist Education Society, the Baptist Home Mission Society, the Baptist Missionary Union, and the Baptist Publication Society and became the Northern Baptist Convention. The Governor of New York, Charles Evans Hughes, was elected the first Northern Baptist Convention president, continuing his job as Governor while he served.

Jump back a bit. Speaking in reference to the eighth pastor of Silverside Church, President Abraham Lincoln said: “That one, little, loyal, clear-headed Baptist minister of Wilmington, James S. Dickerson, saved Delaware to the Union” (James Stokes Dickerson: Memories of His Life, p. 108). Dickerson’s antislavery sentiments reflect the congregation’s longstanding commitments to inclusivity and social justice that prevail to this day.

Wilmington, Delaware’s Silverside Church has had twenty-three pastors in its 175 years. I am the twenty-third. Its eighth pastor, the Reverend J. S. (James Stokes) Dickerson, served Second Baptist Church (now Silverside Church) from 1861-1865; Dickerson was admired by many antislavery citizens, the most notable of whom was none other than President Lincoln.

How President Lincoln knew about Dickerson’s efforts to support him in his antislavery efforts, we, today, do not know. Somehow the President knew about Dickerson and Second Baptist Church. One recorded meeting took place on a rail car. President Lincoln, on his way to Philadelphia, had the train stop in Wilmington to pick up the Delaware’s governor and Reverend Dickerson to ride with him and have conversation about the war.

II. The Most Famous Sermon in Silverside’s History

On Saturday April 13, 1861, the day after Fort Sumter was attacked, Dickerson decided he could not preach, the next morning, the sermon he had planned to preach. He went to his study at the church that Saturday afternoon and wrote out a full manuscript for a new sermon to be preached in its place. He went with “a heart fired with loyal zeal and fully alive to the character and magnitude of the struggle that had commenced between freedom and slavery, loyalty and treason, government and anarchy” (James Stokes Dickerson: Memories of His Life, p. 104). The sermon, entitled “The Duties of the Hour,” went down in history. In a long and colorful preaching career, that sermon would be remembered more than all the others Dickerson had or would preach.

On Saturday evening, Pastor Dickerson met with several of his congregants whom he knew shared his perspectives on the slavery issue. Not all members did, and certainly not all of the political leaders of Wilmington supported his antislavery stance. Dickerson asked his supporters to see that the pulpit, the next morning, would be draped with an American flag. Even his most ardent supporters were unsure of the wisdom of taking that step, but before the sermon was preached on Sunday April 14, 1861, some brave parishioner or parishioners saw that it was done. “A few, and but a few, rallied nobly to his support. Some of his members, knowing the excitement that prevailed in the community, asked him if he would like to have an armed guard by him in the church. He declined the proposal, preferring to trust God and the right for his protection. Some of the brethren, however, without his knowledge, arranged that an armed force should be present, both to shield him from attack, and the church from threatened injury” (James Stokes Dickerson: Memories of His Life, p. 106).

A large crowd gathered the following morning to hear J. S. Dickerson!s sermon; plenty of those in attendance were enemies to Dickerson and his cause; some, his “violent opposers” (p. 106). Dickerson prayed fervently for his country and sang with high energy the patriotic hymns of the day. He preached his sermon eloquently. A few of the listeners walked out on him as he preached against slavery. He paused as each one exited “in recognition of their withdrawal” (James Stokes Dickerson: Memories of His Life, p. 107). There was no violence.

We have no transcript of the sermon itself, nor any other reference to the content of the sermon beyond what Mrs. Dickerson mentioned in the biography she wrote of her husband’s life. We know that the duty of the hour in his mind when he preached the sermon was to call people to take up the dual causes of standing against slavery and implementing the freeing of the slaves. Though the controversial stand taken by Rev. J. S. Dickerson bought him the antagonism of several church members, many of whom were lost to the membership of the church, Dickerson did not mince words, and he did not back down.

This style or pattern has become a standard for Silverside Church and its leadership. This was never the church for those who wanted their ears tickled, those who wanted to come to church never to be challenged, those who wanted the Sunday hour to comprise the sum total of their spiritual duties for the week.

In a sense, some version of Dickerson’s sermon has been preached many times by several his successors in the Silverside pulpit. Members of this church, even in times of membership and financial scarcity, have risen to the occasion when it was time to affirm the rights of women in society and the rights of women in ministry; the congregation has stepped forward to feed the hungry and house the homeless; the congregation has joined other citizens of Wilmington to say that the poor need decent, safe housing--not shacks and shelters. This congregation has welcomed gay and lesbian members and friends, and prayed fervently for peace through many a war.

If that sermon, “Duties of the Hour,” were preached today, what would we be challenging ourselves to take a stand on?

1. Well, the poor are still with us, and in the present economy lots of people are poor who never thought they would be. One matter, in this regard, on which we must take a stand is integrity and fairness in government and big business so that the dollars of the un-wealthy masses are utilized fairly. We cannot have the government or big business stealing from us.
2. The battle against racism isn’t over, and no where is that more evident than in how the President of the United States is treated by fellow workers on capital hill--from the Supreme Court to the House and to the Senate.
3. We must never become complacent about war. Whatever you believe about Jesus and whatever it is about his teachings that captures your attention, we cannot overlook his commitment to peace. To the degree that he is our model or our rabbi, we must pray for and act for peace.
4. The church must take a hard and fast stand against all violence and bullying--whether it’s happening on the roadways, in our public schools, in the privacy of someone’s home, or via the technology we have created.
5. Health care for all is a basic right. We have to continue implementing that and not let it be lost so that what is left is what we had before--overpriced healthcare for the privileged only.
6. We must take a stand against ridiculous political rancor that allows those in elected office to collect their pay from our tax dollars so that they can argue and fight and scheme instead of trying to solve real problems.
7. Finally, with full respect for freedom of speech for all, this church must take a stand against religion-based superstition and theological violence, which includes affirmation of scripture that portrays God as a terrorist and Jesus’ death as a mandatory, God-planned event; necessary in order for God to love humanity.

Amen.

Carl Sandburg and Manufactured Gods

I.

All gods envisioned by human beings are manufactured gods, manufactured by the humans who envision them. They may not end up being shaped into a material object we can see and touch, but most of us have mental images of the God we’ve created, nonetheless. The fact that God is incorporeal--that is, spirit and, thus, non-material--has always frustrated a fair number of humans who have decided through the ages that God is more comprehensible if we create something visible that can represent God to us. Whatever the motivation, all three monotheistic religions have officially forbidden the creation of objects intended to look like God or to be used in worship, presumably, to remind worshipers of the invisible God they are worshiping. Creating an image of the invisible God was considered idolatry because eventually many people lost the ability to distinguish between the invisible spirit God and the god who’d been presented as an image by a potter or a carver or a painter or a metallurgist. Thus, the second of the ten commandments:

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments

.

We used part of this same passage last week to help us ponder what Emily Dickinson meant by her sarcastic little poem, “God Indeed Is Jealous God.” By coincidence, we’re back here today to study in greater detail the idol-making concerns themselves.

Chances are, the God of the book of Exodus, from which these words are taken, didn’t just dream up these warning words to present to innocent people who’d never given a thought to shaping an idol, even if it was supposed to be an idol to represent Israel’s own God, Yahweh. In all likelihood, God as the writer of Exodus told God’s story, had already run upon several situations in which God’s people were creating idols to Yahweh and, as they did before moving toward monotheism, to other deities of which they’d not been able to let go. They didn’t just awaken one day and universally declare themselves monotheists. By the time the ten commandments were completed not everyone in Israel was ready to give up multiple deities for one God, which is why the language remained as it did: “You shall have no others gods [plural] before me.” If everyone was already sold out to monotheism, there’d have been no need for this language.

Unlike my mother who believed in anticipatory moral instructions and warnings, the God of the book of Exodus likely knew of a few guilty idolators whose wrongs were being addressed in the commandment with ripple application to those who hadn’t tried it yet, but may have thought about it. Many of you know that my sister and I took piano lessons on Tuesday afternoons, and mother had to drive us the five miles from Halls Crossroads to Fountain City where Mrs. Mildred Newman gave piano lessons in her home. For some reason, Mom decided that she had a captive audience and would use it to wash anything out of our brains that might lead in time to moral misjudgments and wrong actions. If you know that much about my background, then you also know Mom wasn’t particularly original in her choice of lecture topics for the week. Halls Crossroads was such a small town that no more than one sin was committed there in any one week period, so that usually was the sin on which she based her traveling sermon that week.

If not original in choice of topics, she was certainly original in her way of explaining things to us and giving us appropriate warnings of what would happen to us if we failed to heed her motherly directives. My little brother hadn’t yet been born, and I was away from home by the time he got to the age to receive his teachings so I don’t know how it worked for him. He has certainly turned out to be a exemplary husband, father, and church member; and an honest businessman to boot so it worked. I suspect he picked it up by osmosis, though. As the baby in the family, I don’t believe either Mom or Dad ever believed that he was capable of any wrong anyway.

For Kim and me, however, it was a different story. We took piano lessons for several years so until I was 16 and could drive us to our lessons, we had Mom’s automobile sermons. She meant them for our good, of course; and we knew that. We still didn’t want to hear them every week, though, although sometimes it was comical. Now and then, she’d pound on the steering wheel, in a way a preacher might pound on a pulpit to punctuate her or his points. When she did that, we’d pound our seats to match her rhythmic pounding, and when that made her angry, Kim and I would laugh for the rest of the trip.

There were repeats from time to time, especially warnings about the necessity of teetotalerism; the dangers of dancing--especially dancing that made you jiggle your privates or that had you holding your partner too close to your own body, which would bring on an odd kind of tingling that would lead to no good; and, speaking of that, her third favorite repeating topic was creating babies out of wedlock. There were times, many times, when we got sermons on things we’d never even thought about doing until we heard Mom’s sermon or sermonette, depending on how fast traffic was moving that day.

It didn’t bother Mom in the least that we sometimes gave her a hard time. She took it as her parental duty to try to give us some values to live by, and any mature person at some point has to look back with gratitude to anyone who cared enough to try to help you shape ethical principles by which you will live. Thanks, Mom!

The ancient Hebrews weren’t any more adept at envisioning an invisible spirit God than we are so some of them made idols, and that only led to more problems from God’s point of view. See, no matter how lovely an idol is, it’s not living, and, thus, does a most inadequate job representing a living God. It works just fine for a dead god or a god who never lived, but it doesn’t work for a living, dynamic God who simply can’t be reduced to any human-made object.

There must be some reason the God of the Hebrews, the Christians, and the Muslims decided to remain invisible or hidden.

We humans aren’t happy about that, though, and as a result we have continued trying to manufacture our God or gods--both in terms of the look we want for our gods and in terms of personality traits and powers.

As Islam developed, one corrective it wished to make was undoing trinitarianism since that promoted, in the minds of many, polytheism. Furthermore, to avoid even the slightest hint at idolatry, Islam forbade the creation of any living being in art. There was to be no creation of any physical likeness of Muhammad--not paintings, no statues, no mosaics. But this principle went further as there was to be no using of any living thing reproduced artistically in any form. If you were to visit the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, as some of you probably have done, you would see the beauty of colored tiles and mosaic patterns, but they are abstract; no live being--human or animal--has her or his or its image recreated on the interior or exterior of that shrine.

Since no one had ever or has ever seen God except in a vision, no one can say much of anything about God’s appearance. No one has seen God and lived, according to the teachings of the ancient Hebrew scripture. Nor could anyone have ever seen God since God is spirit, entirely spirit. Therefore, if anyone tried or tries anyway, we know that she or he is imagining or hallucinating.

The descriptions of what people see when God comes to them in scripture are, for the most part, colors, shapes, and sounds, but these are all symbols and metaphors. They are not God and are not to be used to create an image of God.

From the fourth chapter of Revelation:

After this I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” At once I was in the spirit, and there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne! And the one seated there looks like jasper and carnelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald. Around the throne are twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones are twenty-four elders, dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads. Coming from the throne are flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and in front of the throne burn seven flaming torches, which are the seven spirits of God; and in front of the throne there is something like a sea of glass, like crystal.

II.

Carl Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and one for a biography he wrote about President Lincoln. He failed at a number of job efforts and never finished his undergraduate education. He was admitted to West Point, but flunked out within two weeks because of his math and English test scores. Yet, he died at the ripe old age of 89, a gifted and widely recognized writer.

He once defined poetry as an echo asking a shadow to dance. That definition alone is highly poetic to my ear.

This sampling of Sandburg is suitable to the season. He called this poem, “Autumn Movement.”

I CRIED over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, not one lasts.

Sandburg didn’t have a Sunday School understanding of God, to say the least. Here’s one of his poems titled “Prayers of Steel”:

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.

Let me pry loose old walls.

Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.

Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.

Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

I don’t follow everything he might have been trying to say or imply in this poem, but I take heart in my uncertainty because Sandburg said that he had written several poems he himself didn’t understand.

God, prayer, and a few lesser religious themes show up in several of his poems. There’s not a whole lot to go on in trying to assess his theology, but I think he was ambivalent about God’s role in the scheme of things. He once said he thought a baby was God’s opinion that the world should go on. That’s a tender thought, but not all his images of God were tender as you’ve heard.

Sandberg kept himself open to religion, I gather, but he was particular. He said, “I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.” I am guessing he is slamming preachers here whom he sees never doing anything but running their mouths.

Our poem for today is critical of religion or of some approaches to religion, but in its way quite sophisticated theologically:

THEY put up big wooden gods.

Then they burned the big wooden gods

And put up brass gods and

Changing their minds suddenly

Knocked down the brass gods and put up

A doughface god with gold earrings.

The poor mutts, the pathetic slant heads,

They didn’t know a little tin god

Is as good as anything in the line of gods

Nor how a little tin god answers prayer

And makes rain and brings luck

The same as a big wooden god or a brass

God or a doughface god with golden

Earrings.

I don’t know how familiar Sandburg was with the Bible, but there are some possible biblical allusions that might have informed a part of his imagery here. For example, the book of Daniel makes reference to idolators who “drank the wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone” (Dan 5:4 NAS).

We know that the writer of the book of Revelation relied heavily on Hebrew scripture including the book of Daniel so it’s interesting to find this comment in the book of Revelation:

...the idols of gold and of silver and of brass and of stone and of wood...can neither see nor hear nor walk... (Rev 9:20 NAS).

This is from one of those scary passages in the book of Revelation, which ultimately are overridden by hope. We have a reference here, very much like the reference in the book of Daniel, to people creating and worshipping gods made with all kinds of non-living materials. Naturally, such gods are powerless, and yet people through the ages have built them to have something to look at that reminds them of their deity.

They keep changing the materials out of which they construct their deities, hoping that a new kind of material will make a better god; of course it’s fruitless. Sandburg’s poem follows a progression of creating false gods. The first ones are big wooden idols. The next ones are brass; they don’t work so well either. Next, humanity constructs a humanoid god, a doughface god with gold earrings. It could be the very height of idolatry when humans decided that God looked like them, but a doughface option is hardly complimentary. A doughface refers to a lazy entity that drags down society. Sandburg says, idolators become so haphazard or desperate that they stop even thinking about what they’re doing.

The brass god was better than the doughface god with earrings. The doughface god represents a god created by idolators who not only is unable to help humanity, but in fact is a drain on humanity; it’s a false god who pulls all of us down, but she or he has nice earrings nonetheless. Sandburg concludes by mourning how little humans know about the gods they create.

Manufactured gods are essentially all the same, the doughface god being a noted exception. If you’re going to make use of a manufactured god instead of finding your way to the invisible but real and living God, Sandburg’s poem says that we might as well keep it as cheap and simple as possible. The little tin god can do all that a big wooden or gleaming brass god can do for us; it can answer some of our prayers and bring rain, and it can bring us luck. Sandburg is poking fun of people who create idols and then rely on them. In the end, the magnificent idol as well as the two-inch tin image can do absolutely nothing. Like the writer of the book of Revelation says of such manufactured gods, and Sandburg surely agrees, “...the idols of gold and of silver and of brass and of stone and of wood...can neither see nor hear nor walk.”

So why do we refuse to give up the business of manufacturing gods, the art of creating idols? Why isn’t the God who is spirit good enough for some of us, if not all of us?

John Bach said, “Idolatry isn’t good for anyone; not even the idols.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson painfully pointed out that we “boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.”

III.

The stories in the book of Exodus that juxtapose Moses’ receiving of the ten commandments from God Godself with the impatient Israelites awaiting his return, but unable to wait as long as it takes they, with the help of Moses’ brother and right hand man, Aaron, create an idol that will blatantly defy God’s command not to worship other gods and not to create idols representing such gods; that’s a common sense thing because if you create it, eventually you’ll become enamored of it. It will become your god to a much greater degree than a hidden god, an invisible god, a spirit god will ever be.

When God didn’t deliver on the timetable they had set for God, they simply went back to the ways of worship to which they’d grown accustomed before they ever knew there was any one God to know or even to think about. This is one of several reasons giving God our to-do lists doesn’t work. Beyond that, God doesn’t do windows.

While Moses was at the top of Mount Sinai communing with God, Aaron was supposed to be acting as God’s leader for the people of Israel. They really shouldn’t have needed a babysitter, but many groups of people do. Individually, they do fine and keep themselves out of trouble, but when you put them in groups their behavioral patterns tend to change--and not always for the better. This is why the discipline called Sociology was born. Psychology isn’t enough; it focuses on the individual, but in most cultures people function in groups so an analysis of individual behavior only answers some of the questions about why people do what they do.

We’d like to think that people affiliated with those groups committed to the God about whom Jesus taught us would do better in groups than praying alone in the desert as the Desert Fathers did in the early centuries of institutional Christianity. And, sometimes Christians in groups--same with Jews and Muslims--have done great deeds for the common good. Sometimes, though, and we know sadly is so from a mere cursory reading of Church History, groups claiming to behave according to the standards Jesus said God had established have criminalized God by claiming that God led them to do the evil deeds for which they themselves are not willing to take responsibility.

To prove this point, we could begin with the Crusades of the Middle Ages. The crusades were military expeditions launched against the Muslims by the Roman Catholic Christians in an attempt to regain the Holy Land. The Crusades are typically dated

between 1095 and 1270. They helped make the era one of the most violent periods in human history--until modern technology became a part of war.

The starting point of the Crusades was on November 18, 1095, when Pope Urban II opened the Council of Clermont with a stirring speech calling on Christians and anyone else willing to help the Christians to restore peace in the east. “Restoring peace in the east” was a euphemism for killing off the Muslims who at that moment were in control of the Holy land.

The Pope made it a truly religious war, and we have seen plenty of those since. His speech propelled the faithful to action; of course, there were perks. People who had committed sins for which they thought they’d never be forgiven, for example, were promised forgiveness if they fought.

Those who went forth to fight often sewed replicas of crosses to the garments because the Pope had told them they were fighting to save all that Jesus had sacrificed for. The mission was to kill off enough Muslims to be able to retake the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem. While they were at it, they decided, for no extra charge, to kill off a few Jews along the way. And, of course, everything they did, they did in God’s name.

Christian complicity with Hitler to eradicate Jews and others whom he deemed unsuitable to his super race is near impossible to imagine, but Protestant pastors and Roman Catholic priests--not all of them, but plenty of them--hailed Hitler and agreed that the descendants of those who pushed Rome to kill Jesus deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth once and for all. There were so many problems with that scenario that it would take us hours to unravel, but I’d just point out a major fallacy in Hitler’s reasoning and in the reasoning of many of the professionally trained clergy who encouraged his cause. The Jews didn’t kill their fellow countryman, Jesus. The Romans did. In groups, people aren’t always interested in the facts; being in a powerful mob is rush enough, even if the cause is wrong.

The Supreme Court is now getting to decide whether or not the small membership of the Westboro Baptist Church, following the teachings of its leader/pastor Fred Phelps, has a right to protest at the funerals of our military heros who have lost their lives in the war in Afghanistan--formerly in the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Their warped theology is that God hates homosexuals and that our country has become lax in hating as God hates. They believe that God is punishing our nation by allowing our military personnel to die at the hands of foreign enemies so even though many of the military heros who have given their lives for the cause, which is questionable at best, were not in agreement with the war in which they died a death is one more warning from God that “God hates fags,” which is the website of the Westboro Baptist Church. In other words, soldiers trying to protect American citizens and American interests, at least that is what they’ve been told, should die because they are interfering with God’s punishment of the United States of America. I’m sure you see their clearcut logic here.

To protect America and its interests is to say that homosexuality is OK; a godly American would refuse to fight in these wars and would let the punishment God is trying to inflict come without interruption on us because we’re only getting what we deserve for not joining God in hating fags. Therefore, it’s perfectly in order, they say, to protest at the funerals of our military heros who in defending American interests are defending homosexuals who need to be either saved or slain to protect the common good.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this past Wednesday from both Westboro Baptist Church and from the father of a marine killed in Iraq who suffered the Westboro protests at his son’s funeral. He had already won damages by a lower court, but that decision was overturned by an appellate court.

This Westboro activity is group mentality. This is what groups do that individuals can’t do alone.

Moses was at the top of Mount Sinai communing with God, and the meeting took longer than planned. The people at the base of the mountain awaiting Moses’ return got their heads together and pooled their gold. Aaron helped them shape the gold into a calf, which they immediately made their god--manufactured gods, and an altar was built so that the golden calf could be properly worshiped.

We are still manufacturing gods. We have a war god who leads us into war and who joins us in hating our enemies. We have a national god whose name we call every time we say the pledge of allegiance to our country’s flag. We have a school god who is prayed to in many public schools, law or no law, every morning in the presence of children whose parents are against having their children exposed to the theology of the principal or of whoever writes and prays the prayer for the day. We have a money god who is honored with the slogan, “In God We Trust,” on our currency; this is the closest we come to an actually manufactured god.

Sandburg was too clear when he wrote of “a little tin god [who] answers and makes rain and brings luck.” Amen.