Bernard H. Cochran

Pullen Memorial Baptist Church

August 19, 2007 – Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK. . . . . . .TWAIN

Mark Twain’s conclusion that “if Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian” gives one the distinct impression that he was not enamored of organized Christianity . Much before Ghandi, who found Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount inspiring, the institutional Church, both he and Ghandi, found less so. Peter DeVries’ chief character in The Blood of the Lamb, Don Wanderhope, describes himself as a “reverse pilgrim” -- fleeing the City of God of his strict Dutch Reformed, Calvinistic upbringing. All his adult life Samuel Clemens similarly resisted the Biblical and theological straitjacket of his stern Methodist and Presbyterian beginnings.

            Essentially a self-educated man, early on Twain was not taken seriously as a writer because he was regarded as a “mere humorist.” Many, but not all, of his observations regarding human pretensions and shortcomings are humorous. If truth communicated through humor seems perhaps antithetical to worship and if Twain himself were here now, he’d probably encourage us to lighten up a bit -- though not necessarily agree in every regard.

            It may seem questionable to identify Twain with the Gospel. For one thing, he was an inveterate but not invertebrate swearer -- swearing was in his bones. His wife, Olivia, refined, gentle, pious, waged a continuing battle to persuade him to stop. Once in frustration she uttered a string of curse words in the hope he would realize how crude and disreputable they sounded. His reply:

                        “You know the words, my dear, but you don’t know the music.”

He smoked -- though in his day smoking was regarded as more sinful than lethal. He complimented himself on the fact that he didn’t begin until he was nine. A pipe, then a cigar, became his constant companion. Reluctantly, he cut down from 40 to 4 late in his life due to failing health.

            He drank -- a great deal in his younger years, although he expressed disdain for problem drinkers who destroyed their talent. Writing about legislators, he described whiskey “taken into committee-rooms in demi-johns and carried out in demagogues.” His addiction was not total, however. After a lengthy stay in Germany, he concluded that he “would rather decline 2 drinks than 1 German verb.” He drank less so later in life until overwhelmed by tragedy at the end. Three of his four children died early and tragically; he lost a fortune on foolish investments; then he lost Livy, in her 54th year. Not a model for handling tragedy, his despair was almost crippling for a time. But the awareness of the enormity of his grief might be helpful in handling our own. He concluded that humor, strangely enough, derives not from joy but sorrow.

                        He played the devil’s advocate -- literally. He was an advocate for Satan -- not Satanism -- because he thought there ought to be a level playing field. You see, Satan is never allowed to speak for himself. The book was written by opponents. After all, he stated, anyone who is “the spiritual head of 4/5 of the human race and the political head of the whole of it” must be someone with commendable persuasive skills. He was even conflicted regarding his own ultimate destiny: “Heaven for climate; hell for company.”

Moreover, recent literary and historical research has suggested the possibility that he may have been gay -- married with children, notwithstanding. He took countless extended trips with individual male friends. Artemus Ward, a nationally known humorist and known gay had a continuing friendship and addressed Twain in a letter as “My dearest love.” If genes are connected, surviving letters reveal a torrid love relationship with Twain’s oldest daughter, Susy, and a female Bryn Mawr classmate. It isn’t important to resolve the matter except to say that worst-case scenario -- or should one say best? -- if true, Twain simply joins a long list of women and men of letters, artists, musicians, theologians, closet gays all, for understandable reasons, to whom the world is deeply indebted. Toleration of gays, as we know, is a minority, commendable, but limited virtue -- which will one day move to affirmation, indeed, admiration for the courage required to live authentically, responsibly, without apology.

            Clearly, Twain was not an orthodox champion of the faith and would appreciate our not referring to him as St. Mark. It is noteworthy, however, how often the Bible and theology became the subject matter of his writings. His daughter, Clara, later wrote of his obsession with “the undying topic of religion.” He had many ministerial friends, including Twitchell, a Congregationalist minister and life-long friend; another was a southern minister who dared preach abolition in the South before the Civil War. He stated that he found ministers much more pleasant when “off duty.” He confessed that he once seriously considered becoming a minister himself but realized he lacked the one essential qualification -- religion. He might have observed that hasn’t been a stumbling-block in a fair number of other instances. If I suggested that his writings were sermons, that might seem a bit extreme, but that was his own term, upon later reflection.

            Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Letters and Papers From Prison, acknowledged that in a German prison camp “a Christian instinct often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious,” not from a desire to convert them but rather “in brotherhood.” The religious types were given to praying during an air raid: “O God, keep us safe from the bombs,” while the religionless, no less hopeful of safety, were more often given to selfless acts of courage and kindness. Bonhoeffer developed the concept, “Religionless Christianity,” not a contradiction in terms but authentic faith shorn of its inauthenticity.

            It is in this sense that Twain might be considered a prodigal son, and in his own inimitable way, an interpreter of the Gospel. He felt liberated from his Presbyterian fundamentalism by reading Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Paine’s object of scorn, however, was the Anglican Church, not so much God or faith. Twain’s relationship to God has been described as more like a “jilted lover,” especially when he felt God’s indifference to his own and, seemingly, to all human suffering. Since God requires honesty before assent to theological propositions, Twain was more honest than assenting.

            The theology of his upbringing was in many respects untenable and eminently lampoonable. He took on the Church with the only tools at his disposal, withering wit and biting satire. He was clear that “Before the power of laughter, nothing can stand.” The Biblical defense of slavery and the damnation of non-elect infants caused Twain to describe his sister-in-law, Molly, as “saturated to the marrow with the most malignant form of Presbyterianism.” He once described a feeling that was “almost as good as the one you get when church is over.” He gave his hearers permission to laugh at matters typically regarded as sacred and off-limits. Mark Twain, literally Mark 2, was a depth of 12 feet, easily navigated and safe for a river boat, though Twain himself was never safe.

            His popular lecture on the Sandwich Islands described the missionaries confronting a problem that had been skipped over in divinity school -- how to establish a proper spiritual rapport with a completely naked congregation. They solved the problem in ways better left to your encounter or re-encounter with Hal Holbrook’s “Mark Twain Tonight.”

His first major success, Innocents Abroad, was a scathing account of the overweaning piety of an assorted group of some 65 travelers to Europe and the Holy Land. Twain reported that he wept at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem when he discovered the tomb of his revered ancestor, Adam. He would have agreed with my firm conviction that the Garden Tomb is the site of Jesus’ burial, not the Church of the Holy Sepulchre -- there are Easter lilies growing everywhere at the Garden Tomb. His opposition to “sham sentimentality” and “a personal hatred for humbug” leap from the pages. His “indignant sense of right and wrong” is pervasive.

            Twain has been accused of being a racist; indeed, several times Huckleberry Finn was banned from libraries and schools. Civil rights activists were critical of over 200 uses of the “N” word and Jim’s Negro dialect. True, Clemens inherited the racist attitude of his Missouri upbringing during slavery but his conversion was complete. He wrote with intense feeling regarding slave families torn apart in slave markets and lashed out at slave lynchings -- commonly accepted in the South. The name, “Nigger Jim,” on the lips of Huck captured the common expression of the day and in Huck’s case was a term of endearment. Huck’s sentiment that Jim was “really white inside” was not Twain’s sentiment but captures the prevailing attitude that amounted to a racist, back-handed compliment which he exposed.

            Indeed, Huckleberry Finn was the first, if not only, 19th-century anti-racist novel in American literature. Twain wrote: “I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices. . . no color prejudices, caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being -- that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.” The bar one? -- Indians, which he never fully overcame.

            Upon hearing about a steamboat explosion, Aunt Sally asked:

            “Good gracious, anybody hurt?

            “No’m, killed a nigger.”

            “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

Racist, or a not-so-subtle attack on prevailing racial attitudes?                  Huck’s well-known willingness to go to hell for the sin of helping Jim escape is made even more poignant by his recognition that had he been raised like a good Christian, in sunday school and church, he probably would never have been able to make that decision.

            At the height of 19th-century imperialism at the hands of England and America, at some personal and professional risk, Twain took a consistent, anti-imperialist stance. He openly opposed Teddy Roosevelt and President McKinley and the Spanish-American War, allegedly waged for the freedom and independence of the natives, after which we assimilated the Philippines and put down native opposition. In the Boer War he sided with neither the Boers nor the British but with the natives, unjustly treated by both. “The War Prayer,” on your worship guide, says it all. In another connection he added: “There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

            Twain’s judgment of England and America is amazingly contemporary: “I think that England sinned when she got herself into a war in South Africa which she could have avoided, just as we have sinned in getting into a similar war in the Philippines.” Sinned?

A war we could have avoided? A mere humorist?

            Unpublished until long after his death, Twain spoke “from the grave” by means of his brief but side-splitting Letters From the Earth. The archangel, Satan, banished from heaven, visits planet Earth and writes back to his cronies what he has discovered about man. The Bible they would find incredible, especially Noah’s Ark.

After untold hours gathering his menagerie, male and female, including several million species of insects -- and trying to keep them from eating one another -- a messenger arrives, reporting that a stampede is on the way, all determined to sail, pairs or not. Noah has been delayed getting a typhoid fly which a benevolent deity wanted us to have. Just as Noah sets sail, the stampede adds its noise and confusion to the cries of thousands of helpless men, women, and children lifting imploring hands in prayer to an all-wise, all-loving God who is sending the rain down in torrents.

            The deity that Mark Twain rejected was the “caricature” presented in the Bible, as proclaimed in Twain’s day and, in many respects, our own. We might say to Twain -- and more recently to Hitchens -- tell us about the God you don’t believe in and we probably don’t believe in that God either.

            Recently the Roman Catholic Church declared that, just possibly, unbaptized infants might not be excluded from the kingdom of heaven just because unbaptized. The statement made clear that there is no certainty, “just hope.” This faint glimmer of inestimable theological progress was, regrettably, 100 years too late for Twain but, we’re told: “These things take time.”

            You may regard Twain as an enemy of the faith, however lovable. If so, the Church has never been more healthy than when it has been able to laugh at itself -- and exchange sincerely-held misconceptions for truth. However, we learn from Matthew’s Gospel that not all who say, “Praise the Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven. It may be, however, that someone who said:

                                “Holy Christ, Almighty” --

frequently in response to injustice, to sincere but mis-guided beliefs, to racism, to human insensitivity to suffering, and to imperialism masquerading as bringing freedom and democracy -- may well enter the kingdom and, just possibly, help lead us there.