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.

Emily Dickinson and the Jealousy of God

I.

Jealousy is a potentially ugly emotion. I think if jealousy is a warning, a reminder that some important boundaries are being crossed, and it leads to healthy confrontation of that situation; then, it’s in order or, at least, understandable. Unchecked or left to stew, jealousy can become or lead to something deadly, literally.

Regarding someone or someones with whom we think we have a special, a primary, relationship that we don’t want to share with anyone else--at least not nearly at the level we are connected to that someone or those someones--I think a measure of jealousy is normal and even healthy, but as soon ownership forms in the relationship in which we are investing ourselves, jealousy is in a position to become a destructive force in the relationship. We all know relationships that have ended because of jealousy that gets out of control.

This kind of jealousy is comprised of suspicion and possessiveness, mistrust and distrust; eventually it leads to spite, hatred, explosive ill will. Yet, the destructive side of jealousy is so well known and accepted that it has stood as the backbone of a sometimes successful courtroom defense known as a crime of passion.

People who become controlled by jealousy are obsessed with the notion, the suspicion, that the person or persons They love are sharing love at the same level with others. A spouse or partner has the right to expect her or his significant other not to share their level of intimacy with anyone else--unless, of course, they sign on from the beginning for an “open relationship” or an “open marriage.” If that’s what you sign up for, put the jealousy on the shelf because shared intimacy is precisely what you’ve agreed to.

In my marriage and in other serious, adult relationships I’ve been a part of, there was no way I was going to share the physical and the other deeper levels of intimacy with anyone but my beloved; nor would I have sat idly by while someone else was trying to have the same kind of role I shared with my beloved. If that works for some folks, good for them. I’d not be critical of how they choose to live. That’s none of my business. My hat’s off to Hilary for hanging onto Bill, and my hat’s off to Elizabeth Edwards for kicking John to the curb.

One of my favorite movies starring Dolly Parton is “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” Dolly plays Miss Mona who runs a house of ill repute with an iron fist. She’s out in the middle of rural Texas somewhere, and her establishment is called the Chicken Ranch. As you can imagine, in a small Texas town, there are a variety of responses to the presence of the Chicken Ranch there. The religious and political conservatives publicly at least are repelled and repulsed by it, and they are constantly seeking to close it down. Others find no fault with it, and some are quite happy that it’s there. One little old lady suddenly shows up on screen in the middle of a debate on the subject, and she says that she’s grateful for the Chicken Ranch; when her husband gets to feeling frisky too often, especially on Saturday evenings (I think she said), she was thrilled that he’d give her some peace only because the Chicken Ranch was nearby. She was grateful for Miss Mona and “the girls” who kept her husband busy and happy anytime she had a “headache,” which came on at least every Saturday evening.

Jealousy may be related in part to possessiveness, as I said a moment ago, and it may also be related to insecurity on the part of the one who is jealous. Keep in mind that I think some behavior legitimately calls up jealousy; again, the thing is, it’s pointless to let yourself be stuck at the point of jealousy. Jealousy is an alert or a warning that should be acknowledged, that should lead to a discussion with the person whose behavior has created the jealousy, and then released. Love cannot long survive if being chocked off by jealousy. On the other hand, behaviors that constantly create legitimate jealousy will also kill love at its core.

In addition to jealousy related to an ostensibly intimate love relationship there are other types of jealousy. Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal Complex theory is based on his psychoanalytic perception that children from the ages of 2 and a half to 6 years or so desire the exclusive love of the parent of the opposite gender to them. He says it’s perfectly natural, and healthy children grow out of it; but before they do they have likely wished for the death of the parent of their same gender in order to do away with the “competition” as it were. If Freud were correct, I think it’s pretty scary in this high tech age where they can actually figure out how to make their wishes come true, even if it’s as easy as finding the parents’ supposedly hidden guns.

I must confess that I am given to jealousy. My marriage had its troubles, but trust wasn’t one of them. I never worried about infidelity, and I never believed that Lindon conducted herself in the presence of other men in any way that would have remotely suggested that she would have been interested in an alliance that would have broken the trust we had in each other.

As a divorced dad, however, I was doing most of the child rearing as many of you know. They boys often got very little time with their mom even though I’ve seen them beg with tears in their eyes. When they did get that time they so craved, I was known to feel jealousy on occasion. That is very small of me, and I’m not proud to admit it; but it’s true. I didn’t want anything to upset the complicated equilibrium we’d established. Besides, I was the better parent, and I wanted everyone involved--especially my ex-wife and my children--to know that beyond the shadow of any doubt.

I’ve been known to be jealous when more students sign up for a class taught by one of my colleagues than have signed up for one of my classes. I’m a really petty guy, huh? I’m jealous if one of my church members attends another church, unless she or he is visiting out of town. I’m also jealous of other activities that interfere with our Sunday morning Gatherings.

I’m jealous of mega church pastors who half prepare their sermons and preach hellfire or inconsequential fluff and still manage to gather crowds in the hundreds or the thousands. Not every week, but sometimes.

I’m jealous of religion authors who have nothing to say, but who can sell thousands of books in a heartbeat while I carry my two dollar royalty checks to the bank twice a year. I hate the publishers who say of my query or manuscript sample, “This is fantastic! Sorry we’re not publishing this kind of material at this time.”

Well, I can’t let my jealousies keep me from moving upward and onward with a healthy attitude about the opportunities that are mine, which are worth much more than the material wealth and prestige others in my business have received by preaching and teaching what Bonhoeffeur called “cheap grace.” Perhaps you are a little surprised that I feel some of these jealousies from time to time, but what we have a really hard time believing is that the great God at the center of all life also has a jealousy problem. Emily Dickinson said so, but long before the Belle of Amherst put it to poetry, God Godself owned it in the literature we now call scripture. Scripture, I said!

II.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830. Her 180th birthday is on the horizon. She was very attached to her home and her hometown where she would also die on May 15, 1886. Most members of her family belonged to the Congregational Church, which had been very, very important in early American history, but she never joined that or any church.

The family was well-off financially speaking and all of them well educated. Going further by far than most women of her day, Emily had not only a solid secondary education, but also a year of study at South Hadley Female Seminary, which became Mount Holyoke College.

The house in which she was born and in which she died--though she did not live in the house during several of her younger years--was built by her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson. She called it “the Homestead.” After her studies, Emily Dickinson moved back home, into that house, and lived there for the rest of her earthly life.

Emily never married. She took care of her parents in their older years and was a companion to her sister, Lavinia, who also chose never to get married and who, like Emily, lived with family her whole life. The degree to which she was a hermit is contested by some Dickinson scholars who point out that she simply loved and felt at home at the Homestead and saw no reason to leave except under extraordinary circumstances. Her gift for poetry is, however, not contested though in her lifetime neither she nor many others who read what she wrote took her to be a great poet. Now, some have called her the greatest American poet of all.

In William Luce’s one-woman play, “The Belle of Amherst,” performed by Julie Harris hundreds of times practically all over this country, he has Dickinson say: “Words are my life. I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I lift my hat when I see them sitting on a page” (Act 1).

By her written record, Emily Dickinson wrote some 1800 poems. As they piled up, she began to preserve several in handwritten journals. Failing eyesight slowed her down beginning in 1864, but she continued writing until her final illness stopped her.

Emily Dickinson never published a volume of poetry.

The few individual poems of hers published during her lifetime were published anonymously. There is no scholarly or historical consensus as to why she preferred that her poems not be published.

I believe that one of the signs of a great writer, poet or other, is that what drives them to write is not the hope of fame or fortune, but rather the joy of the writing itself. Same thing for many people in the creative arts. A potter in New Orleans once told me that he took no joy whatsoever in making an interesting vegetable drainer he’d designed, but they sold exceptionally well compelling him to make them by the stacks to keep the money flowing and so that he could “afford” to work on other more complex and perhaps less popular items. Emily Dickinson didn’t need the money, and if there were any truth at all to the tendencies she may have had to enjoy her relative isolation, she may not have desired fame in the least.

Dorothy Oberhaus described Dickinson’s writing as in the “poetic tradition of Christian devotion.” I’m not exactly sure all that Oberhaus may have meant by that except that some pious types have penned their praise of God in poetic format; not all did, however. Many of the religious poems so produced have become words to the hymns we sing.

Richard Wilbur saw nothing conventional in Dickinson’s religion-based poetry. He said that what resulted and what we today read as religiously-themed was “a precarious convergence between her inner experience and her religious inheritance.” The fact that she never joined any church and, from what we can tell, didn’t attend services with any regularity, means that we have no idea what her religious inheritance was though we’d be on solid ground, I’d think, if we assumed that a good bit of it came from her faithfully Congregational family members.

Some readers of Dickinson see no appreciation for religion at all in Dickinson’s poems. Some of those who make understanding her work their life’s work say that regardless of how nice a comment may sound on the surface Dickinson, at times, radically challenges what she knows of Christianity and, for that matter, all religious dogma.

Professor Jay Ladin says this about Dickinson and her view of God, which he says is fundamentally an ongoing quarrel with God:

Dickinson’s quarrel with God reflects the full panoply of human disaffection. But though Dickinson’s God rarely seems to make her happy, she never breaks off the affair, never rejects the idea that, however incompatible we may be, human and Divine are made for each other....[W]hat is at stake in Dickinson’s religious poems is not God’s existence, but God’s accessibility, responsiveness, accountability, comprehensibility, and concern for the human condition.

Similarly, Dickinson scholar, Kathleen Norris, says of Dickinson,

Finding herself unable to contain her religious feeling within the bounds of orthodoxy, she spent a good part of her life battling God directly....It was her confrontation with religion that helped shape her life and poetry...,[A]nd like Walt Whitman she developed what can rightly be called a “heterodox faith” that had little to do with churches or doctrines and a great deal to do with inner experience as well as nature itself. Dickinson seeks contact with God outside rather than within the church, by her own means and as an individual soul rather than as one of the swooning flock of converts. In doing so, the poet's work becomes dramatically subversive, undermining traditional authorities and traditional definitions of meaningful spirituality.

With these scholarly perspectives in mind, let’s hear the little poem again in the hopes of having reached a place of better understanding, especially the last comment I read from Kathleen Norris: “...the poet’s work becomes dramatically subversive, undermining traditional authorities and traditional definitions of meaningful spirituality.”

God is indeed a jealous God —

He cannot bear to see

That we had rather not with Him

But with each other play.

The Bible declares that God is a jealous God, and we are going to look at that in a few minutes; but right off the bat we can see that Dickinson can’t be spouting off orthodoxy in a poetic manner. She takes God’s jealousy to be as childish as one child becoming jealous because two others are playing with each other but not with her or him. We humans can be petty--not always of course; we can be amazingly generous, understanding, and magnanimous, but some of us sometimes can be ridiculously, pettily jealous of others who seem to be getting the attention we want. Many of us want to think more highly of God, and we should. God is not a human or a humanoid. God’s feelings, if God has feelings, are not like our feelings.

My older son, Jarrett, who majored in poetry in a high school for arts students and who started as a poetry major at Sarah Lawrence College gave his brief interpretation of the Dickinson poem:

I think she reduces God to childlike behavior, something immature: being jealous for not being able to play with others. Perhaps he's jealous of us for being human; perhaps he wants to participate in his own creation?

Jarrett’s partner, Joseph Faura, jumped into the family project as well:

I think she means that the Judeo-Christian god who is exclusively alone and supersedes any other god is a jealous one because "he" does not accept any other deity as worship-worthy and punishes the followers that even think of doing so.

I think we’ve gone to the heart of Dickinson’s work.

III.

Is God a jealous God? I’d have to say know. God is not human and feels nothing the way we feel it. Perhaps God doesn’t even “feel” at all. But if so, God isn’t petty, and God doesn’t crack the whip when human beings fail to do things God’s way. As I said earlier, though, the Bible tells you just the opposite of what I’m telling you.

The second of the ten commandments lays it all out:

You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the parents on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me, and showing loving kindness to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

So God is jealous, according to this commandment, when those who have been obedient to God forget about that and choose, instead, to create idols so that they can worship gods and goddesses other than the one God of the Hebrews, Yahweh, to whom they were rightly, originally connected.

In reality, those who were putting words in God’s mouth were the ones who were jealous, jealous that their fellow Hebrews were worshipping other gods, whom they would all eventually take to be false gods, but they weren’t jealous just for the heck of it; they were jealous because they were afraid. They were afraid that if enough of the Hebrews turned their backs on God, God would punish the whole nation. Therefore, they took the liberty to say, in essence, “If God spoke audibly, this is what God would say: stay away from those other gods and the religions that have built up around them.” Preachers have been putting words in God’s mouth ever since.

Little reclusive Emily Dickinson thankfully challenged the notion that God is jealous when we interact with other humans. Ministering to/working with people in their pain is exactly what we should be doing; God is in no way jealous of that. The fact is, God can only be a jealous God when we build our God as one of us because we know we’d be jealous if someone who had expressed interest in us was out chasing around after others right on the heels of their desire to be connected to us.

These elaborate systems of punishment that would grow up culminating in an eternal burning hell, were developed by the same folks or their children who came up with the idea of a God with jealousy problems to begin with. Certainly there were those who may have believed sincerely in a jealous God, but the God they kept coming up with was mostly made up of their projections of what they’d do if they were God.

The question has to be raised then, “If all Emily Dickinson wanted to do was to express her disbelief in a God who gets jealous as the result of human inability to commit, why a poem written sarcastically stating the opposite of what she really believed?” We can’t answer that, but we might speculate about why. Maybe her family came home from another Sunday service at the Congregational Church where most of them attended, and at Sunday lunch they went over the high points of the sermon. All she could do was to express her views respectfully in front of her family members and, then, as soon as possible, get to her paper and pen and jot down a quick sarcastic response. Remember that she wasn’t publishing her views; her astounding collection of poetry was published after her death.

There is one other item to bring up in order for us to understand both the biblical view of God and Emily Dickinson’s poem, “God Is Indeed a Jealous God.” In the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, there’s a verse that begins with these words: “For your Maker is your husband....” Frequently, ancient Israel is portrayed in what became scripture as the spouse of God. Even if metaphorical, the truth behind the metaphor justifies the notion that God could be jealous when we humans, collectively God’s spouse, prefer the company of one another to the company of God, and on that note there is no denying that humans mostly favor human company to divine company so Dickinson’s assessment was right in keeping with the biblical message. The sarcasm, however, challenges the biblical notion, and it should.

God as a jealous God or God as capable of jealousy is a primitive picture of a humanized God by people who had no capacity for seeing, much less believing in, a God who is above jealousy and, in fact, isn’t bogged down with human ways or feelings at all.

Emily Dickinson:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church --
I keep it, staying at Home --
With a Bobolink for a Chorister --
And an Orchard, for a Dome --

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice --
I just wear my Wings --
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton -- sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman --
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at least --
I'm going, all along.