Today, we continue our series on three lives in the 20th century
that exemplify power and integrity. Last week, we looked at Martin Luther King.
Next week, we will discuss Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
This week, we take up Carl Sandburg. Perhaps you are thinking
that this is an odd person to lump with two of the most powerful theologians of
the 20th century.
If you think of Carl Sandburg, as I did until recently, as only
the guy who said that "The fog comes on little cat feet," I am
thrilled this morning to introduce you to the feisty Sandburg.
When he was 18 years old or so, Sandburg left his family home in
Galesburg, IL with a pocket knife and a couple of bucks to become a vagabond,
what they called back then a hobo. According to one book I read, there were as
many as 600,000 travelers on the rails in the 1890s.
Now, I preached a version of this sermon on January 4th in Ames,
while my colleague Brian Eslinger is on sabbatical. I left on January 3rd,
before the big snow came. Apparently, in an attempt, subconsciously, to immerse
myself in Sandburg's world, I left for Ames that day with a suit and a stole
and a sermon, but without my ATM card, without a credit card and with 3 dollars
in my name. A quarter tank of gas in my Jetta, not enough to get from Davenport
to Ames. Somewhere outside Iowa city, a woman at Sinclair found in her spirit
the generosity to let me pump five dollars of gas in my car. As a promissory
note, she held my Wesley Seminary identification card.
It was a remarkable feeling being totally dependent on the good
will of a total stranger.
Sandburg, as a young man, became a rider on the rails in order
to be a young stranger among odd strangers. I went off to Ames, a total
stranger and heard their stories, and told this story of one man, Carl
Sandburg, a poet, a soldier, a singer, from my hometown, Galesburg and his
struggle with religion.
I have to tell you that I stayed with a delightful family, a
retired chemistry professor at Iowa State and his politically active wife. The
more we spoke, the more I heard that the entire congregation was made up of
physics professors and chemistry professors and a soft, slow feeling of dread
came over me. I'm going to preach on Carl Sandburg to physicists. Yikes. It
worked out beautifully.
I bring you greetings from Ames.
The reason I think it worked out beautifully is that this
congregation--200 members and 135 years old, and that fellowship, 50 years old
with 300 members--share something powerful in common: a kind of a break out in
a rash reaction to religious bunkshooters. I love this morning's reading. 135
years ago, a group of liberals came together in Davenport after hearing an
evangelist with the desire to never have to hear the kind of ridiculousness
that came out of that man's mouth again. What do you know about Jesus, they
said, several decades before Sandburg penned his poem about Billy Sunday, and
the First Unitarian Church of Davenport was born.
Growing up in Galesburg, I knew Sandburg as a mall, with frankly
not much happening. I knew Sandburg as a college, appropriately a people's
college, a community college. And I suppose I knew his house. Every school
child in Galesburg knows his house. And it was on the wrong side of the tracks
then, as it is now.
I knew his line about Chicago having broad shoulders and being a
hog butcher for the world (having been to Wrigley Field and Comiskey, an odd
thought to me. I sort of thought Downstate Illinois was the hog butcher for the
world, at least it smelled like it most August days). I didn't know much then,
and I know a bit more now. But what I've seen of him as an adult I like.
I think he has something to say to us, this informal,
non-joining, almost Universalist. This Sandburg that flexed his muscles with
words.
This morning I want to give you two pictures of Sandburg. The
first is negative, as in the poem about Billy Sunday. We have to get some of
the back story so that you might understand what is going on with Sandburg
around religion. He said no, loudly, to several things about religion.
The second part is going to be more constructive, more
productive. More enduring is this question: To what did Sandburg say yes?
All of this, simply to act as a springboard for the most
important question: To what, ultimately, do you say yes and no?
Let us begin.
Sandburg said no to organized religion. Sandburg's parents were
Swedish immigrant (Galesburg is so Swedish that even the doughnut shop I
frequented as a kid was named Swedough's, and in my more nostalgic moments, I
think of it as a holy place).
A sad story about why he said no to organized religion and to
attending church. His parents were Lutherans and worshipped at the First
Swedish Lutheran Church in Galesburg. In 1888, a young Augustana graduate, with
wavy blond hair, was about to be elected to the ministry of that church. But
just at that time, he was charged in a bastardy suit in a neighboring town. The
First Church did not wait for the verdict. They withdrew their offer of the
pulpit. The young minister, nonetheless, convinced some of the flock that a new
congregation could survive in Galesburg and so Elim Lutheran Church was
founded. Among the founders were Sandburg's parents, hard workers without a
whole lot of money. Personal notes on the mortgage from the founders were
taken. The young minister built up debt and rancor and soon was gone for
Chicago. Sandburg, so disillusioned by that ministry of fraud, never affiliated
with any organized church. (Someone came up to me after the service and said,
He didn't join an organized church, but did he become a Universalist?) No.
Our loss I suppose. He knew about Universalism. Lombard College,
where he attended for a time, had about 50 percent of its student body come
from Universalist homes. In talking about the students at Lomboard, Sandburg
said that their families wanted their children free from the creed drilling of
the many colleges teaching there is a real hell and you'll go to it unless you
watch your step. More about Lombard in a bit. For now, some more about his
argument with religion.
Early in his career, he went to work at some small journals in
Chicago, including a journal To-morrow, a magazine for people who think. He was
given column space in that progressive journal, and he went after a certain
prominent minister, Dr. Frank Gunsaulus, who filled the Chicago Auditorium on
Sunday mornings. One morning, Rev. Gunsaulus addressed the furor over Upton
Sinclair's book, The Jungle. He railed against socialists and those sympathetic
and said that it violated the natural order of things. And as he closed his
sermon, he shouted, The Great God is not a socialist! The great God is not a
communist!" To which Sandburg replied: Why did not the preacher, having
such close acquaintance with God and having authority to speak for the Supreme
Being, announce what God's politics are, whether Jehovah is a republican; a
democrat, or a bewhiskered and disreputable Populist. If Dr. Gunsaulus is sure
that Him who planted the stars and shut up the sea with doors is not a
Socialist, will he kindly inform a waiting world what God's politics really
are?
Sandburg disagreed vehemently with conservative religion. He was
direct. He offered a clear alternative, speaking of a God within, tying all of
his effort to a fierce commitment to humanity (Someone asked me recently, where
do you stand on the big idea of religion. That I hope someone says about me
some day). And while he spoke his mind, he continued to lift up a vision that
tied all of us to the same family. This is the great challenge, how to maintain
disagreement while honoring out common humanity.
His poetry shows a consistent theme, that we all share the same
primitive bones and tissues. That we are all kin to all the animals ever.
"I got a zoo. I got a menagerie, inside my ribs." Within that common
humanity there are things worth fighting about.
We have our contemporary Billy Sundays. We have people who rant
and rave and go nuts about Jesus. I think especially in the 80s that was true.
And the advice back then was to turn your volume down on your television and
watch one of these hate-mongering televangelists and observe the energy and the
body language. And then, while that image was fresh in your mind, go and read
the story of the adulterer who was brought before Jesus, and observe his
gentleness as he says, So you've brought this person here to be tried. Let the
one who is without sin cast the first stone. And he just writes in the sand, as
the crowd, crazy in lust for blood, slowly disbands.
Last fall, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found that
the ban on gay marriages in the Commonwealth was grounded in persistent
prejudice, I became enthusiastic. I wrote the 1000 word op-ed piece for the
Argus and the smaller piece for the QC Times, writing about the bible and its
unfortunate cooptation in the fight to justify a lot of things, a ban on
interracial marriage, patriarchy, etc. Now, I could have saved that for you
all. I could have saved that for the progressive clergy group. I could have
preached to the choir, so to speak. But I have to tell you, Sandburg gives me
courage and hope to speak publicly and forcefully. I will forever stand with
the inherent worth and dignity of each person, with the unity of all God's
creation. I will not be silenced in the face of abusive, exploitative, divisive
religion.
Billy Sunday, though, has changed a bit. Is a bit more
sophisticated, I dare say. When Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell sit together
after 9/11 in their distinguished suits and on their comfortable talk show set
and suggest that the acts of terrorism can be attributed to the embrace of
feminism and gay rights, I say no! I am a bit like the students at the
basketball games at Duke when a call goes against them, in unison they begin to
shout, We beg to differ. We beg to differ.
I will take my voice wherever freedom must be heard. Paul
Robeson said in his day.
Sandburg, in his day, wrote: Zest and audacity are the two prime
needs of the hour. You may be part of the greatest era known to humanity, but
there are always dangers, and the worst of these are conformity and
complacency. It remains so even now.
Sandburg's family was not wealthy. They could not afford for
Charles to attend high school, so after his 8th grade graduation, he was done
with public schools in Galesburg. He worked to support the family.
After his vagabond days, he came back to Galesburg and the
Spanish American war broke out and called him into service. As a celebrated
veteran of that war, he was able to attend Galesburg's Lombard College for
free.
Now Lombard was founded to compete with Knox College, which was
13 years old when the Spoon River Association of the Universalist Church voted
to establish a more liberal alternative to the sectarian (then) Knox.
There he studied those topics which interested him, English and
debate and newly founded sociology. He found committed teachers in this
unorthodox place, who believed in him.
I came across one reference by Sandburg to a theo-log, the term
used for divinity students at Lombard (our theological seminary in Chicago is
Meadville-Lombard, the Lombard part of the title is from this Lombard College
charter (Meadville Theological School of Lombard College). At any rate the
student was Japanese. Sandburg wrote that he was learning how to go back to
Tokyo or Hiroshima and preach that God loves everyone and will never send
millions of people to an everlasting hell.
That pretty much sums up Universalism.
You can see the influence of Universalism on his writings from
that time period. I will share a few with you.
A prayer from Sandburg that was published in the Lombard Review
reads as follows:
O, forces and potentialities passing in and about and through
us, we know we cannot pierce the veil of time and ask we may be generous in
looking forward. Give us to look at this life around us--the shapes that come
and go on every hand, the men and women struggling for power, for money or
bread--and give us to pick some bright, gay hope to carry with us through the
day.
Vouchsafe us the passion of those who know what they want and
put us close to the truth that the joy is in the journey and we reach no place
we shall not leave; that exertion is the law and we must use or lose our
faculties. Grant us in the presence of difficulty, a debonair fighting spirit
(now what a beautiful prayer is that!). And teach us too repose.
Give us to memorize all the happy, radiant faces we chance to
see, and all the brave, glad words we hear, and as we meet them, all the
ecstasies of storm and sunshine and heroic tragedy with which the world is
endowed. Nor bar us from thought, from action, courage, and a readiness for
agony or laughter, even to the last.
That is a classic Universalist prayer.
He graduated from Lombard with a high school degree. He left
Galesburg. In 1906, he attempted to make it as a lecturer on a lyceum circuit.
He wrote an advertisement for himself: Amid the noise and turmoil of human
affairs there is nothing grander than a quiet, strong, unselfish personality.
Fame is good and wealth is good, but they fade into nothing before a man or a
woman who is kind and radiant, with the touch of love, and the look of power
that come from the god within.
This I think, along with his love of nature and earth, captures
Sandburg's theology. In Cahokia, he writes: And he saw the sun, but he didn't
worship the sun. The sun was a sign, a symbol. He bowed in prayer to what was
behind the sun. He made songs and dances to the makers and movers of the sun.
I dare say, if Emerson and Whitman had a son, he might be the
early Sandburg. First we have the god within comment, very Emersonian. Now
listen to this early essay, "The One Man in All the World." I am as
good as any man that walks on God's green earth. I am also as bad as any
creature that ever transgressed a law of life. The spirit of all benedictions
is in me, and the germs of all crime. If it were not so, I could not see,
believe, love and aspire. I am proud, yes, I am proud, for I know no highly
useful person who does not think highly of him/her self. Above all other
privileges vouchsafed us earthly pilgrims, I place the privilege of work. The
brightest, most lasting happiness I know is that which comes from my earning,
striving, struggling, fashioning, this way and that, til a thing is done. Ay,
down in my heart somewhere is an odd little litany which says I am near the
source of all Good and all Power, because I, in my way, can do, shape and
create.
The poetic Sandburg.
There was a prophetic Sandburg. He likened people on the train
going to meaningless, low paid jobs to people on a ship that had capsized on
the lake, killing thousands.
In his youth, Carl's mother had told him that was talking like a
preacher and said that she wished he could be a preacher. Later, he told that
story to his Galesburg friend, Dr. Alan Jenkins of Central Congregational
Church. He said to Dr. Jenkins: I would be limited as a minister and could go
further writing outside the church. Dr. Jenkins replied: We need preachers
outside the church, in line with the Biblical prophets. And you have been a
good one.
For a long time, I was feisty all the time. I felt betrayed by
religion, exploited by it. How dare I be given the message, as a young person,
that some are inside grace and some are outside of it. For a time I was
paralyzed. It took the better part of my 20s to deal with that, and I was
introduced to Unitarian Universalism as a college student. I knew at that point
what I didn't believe in. I knew what I said no to.
I longed for something to say yes to. Which I found within
Unitarian Universalism. If you are like me, you may find it difficult to express
what it is that you say yes to. Sandburg helps.
Joy, Thanksgiving and Unity. Three Sandburg poems become
something of our benediction.
Joy.
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it
runs by as the apache dancer clutches his woman. I have seen them live long and
laugh loud, sent on singing, singing, smashed to the heart under the ribs with
a terrible love. Joy always, joy everywhere. Let joy kill you. Keep away from
the little deaths.
The response to joy, of course, is a deep gratitude, a spirit of
thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving.
For the gladness here where the sun is shining at evening on the
weeds at the river, our prayer of thanks. For the laugher of children who
tumble barefooted and bareheaded in the summer grass, our prayer of thanks. For
the sunset and the stars, the women that hold us, our prayer of thanks. If all
of this is lost to you, our prayer of thanks.
Cascading from a spirit of joy and a life of gratitude, the
recognition as Emerson said that we are all of us immersed in a gracious
reality, is a sense of connectedness with all of life.
This is Sandburg's enduring, Universalist, humanistic legacy.
This is the great Yes:
Unity.
There is only one horse on the earth, and his name is all
horses.
There is only one bird in the air and his name is all wings.
There is only one fish in the sea, and his name is all fins.
There is only one man in the world and his name is all men.
There is only one woman in the world and her name is all women.
There is only one child in the world and the child's name is all
children.
There is only one maker in the world and his children cover the
earth and they are named All God's children.
Sandburg was a great adventurer. His life was characterized by a
constant, hungry search, suffused with possibility. My hope for you is that as
you settle in on the great yes that you say to life you will know what it is be
surrounded by grace, sunshine, laugher and adventure and out of that will flow
this great awareness of joy, thanksgiving and unity.
May it be so.
January 15, 2004, Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa. Rev.
Roger Butts