September 22, 2024 – Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 61.1-3
Luke 4.14-21
Can’t Pray a Lie: The Barefoot Prophet
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Besides being the first day of autumn, today is also the beginning of Banned Books Week, the time of year when those radical militants we call librarians highlight and expose the dangers of censorship. I already spoke last year about banning books, and about those parts of the Bible some folks think should be off-limits as well. Did you know Martin Luther thought the Old Testament book of Esther and the New Testament letter of James ought to be cut out of the Bible? But this morning I want to zero in on one banned book in particular, a book I am in the process of reading for the third time. The first time I read it was when my mother gave it to me around age 12 or so; the second time I read it was for a freshman English course in college. And I’m reading it for the third time now because freshman English was more than fifty years ago, and because it will help me to read a new book I recently purchased, if it doesn’t get itself banned first.
Earlier this month I took a pilgrimage of sorts with my grandson Connor. There are not many brick and mortar book stores you can visit any more, but one of my favorites still standing is the Harvard Coop, which Connor and I visited earlier this month. The Coop, if you haven’t been there, is a huge three-story bookstore that has sat in Harvard Square since 1882. While I could have spent the entire afternoon browsing the shelves, Connor’s attention span is a bit briefer, so we were there for about ninety minutes, he in the hands-on children’s book room while I prowled the stacks. I usually come away with more books than I should, but this day there was one book in particular I was after, a book called James. Not the James Luther wanted to cut out of the New Testament, but rather a book by writer Percival Everett retelling of the story of Huckleberry Finn, one of the most popular and most read of all banned books, except in James, the story is told, not from Huck’s perspective, but from the point of view of his companion Jim, the runaway slave. And I thought before I begin James, it would be a good idea to reread Huck Finn once again, since fifty years is such a long time.
The history of banning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is as old as the book itself. In the very year Mark Twain published his classic, in 1885, the Concord Public Library refused to provide it for patrons on account of its “rough, ignorant dialect.” Today’s objections are different, yet, as is so often the case when attempting to justify censorship, they also seem to be contradictory: some object to its perceived racist language, while others are uncomfortable with the fact that it actually calls out racism, denounces slavery, and by the end, the black runaway slave becomes one of the book’s heroes.
At the heart of Huckleberry Finn is a principal that both of this morning’s Bible readings are emphatic about. Isaiah’s prophecy is a familiar one: “The Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to release the prisoners.” It is a vision and a mission of restorative justice that the church continues to proclaim to this day. It is also a vision and a mission that Jesus himself adopts and endorses at the very outset of his ministry: As Luke tells it,
“When Jesus… went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, he stood up to read… unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, and has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the yar of the Lord’s favor.’”
And Jesus concludes with these words, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, Jesus has taken up the prophet Isaiah’s mantle and has made the vision and mission of releasing the prisoner and setting captives free his own.
Setting the captives free, or one captive who stands in for them all, is a major theme in Huckleberry Finn, as Huck and escaped slave Jim make their journey down the Mississippi River in the hopes of reaching Illinois where slavery is outlawed. Which is not to say that Twain’s book is religious in any traditional sense of the term. In fact, more than one writer has suggested Huck’s is a journey “from religion to morality,” from religion to morality, a journey that rejects the conventional teachings of the church for something much more radical, and to Huck’s mind, more moral. Huck’s friendship with Jim caused a mighty internal struggle with the notion that slavery is an accepted part, not just of culture and society, but also of a large slice of the church itself, at least in Huck’s experience. It reflects Twain’s own cynical view of the church of his day, a view inspired, ironically enough, by a congregational minister most of us have heard of. Twain was familiar with the abolitionist teaching and preaching of Hartford’s Rev. Horace Bushnell, then minister of the city’s North Congregational Church. Bushnell was sometimes called “the Emerson of Hartford” for his unorthodox, pre-Unitarian preaching. He insisted that not all knowable truth can be found in the Bible, that there are greater moral imperatives and higher universal truths that sometimes must be considered. And it is worth noting that Bushnell was brought up on charges of heresy for his insistent and unorthodox brand of Christianity. This is where Huck found himself struggling. The accepted religious view, in his experience, was that slaves were the rightful property of their owners, and runaways must be captured and returned. To Huck, this just was not right. So he resorted to prayer, another recurring theme in the book; he had been taught that it is God’s will that a runaway slave be returned, and Huck prays for strength to do “the right thing.” But he could not do it; in his own words, he “can’t pray a lie,” so he chooses to go to hell, as he understood it, rather than turn Jim in. To put it another way, Huck rejected the conventional teaching of the church of his own day and experience, and chose the moral way instead. This is Huck’s journey from religion to morality.
His decision, to reject the church and preserve the freedom of a black man, may well be one of the reasons Huckleberry Finn is the object of so many book banners. There are times when the church forgets its core values, values like the ones both Isaiah and Jesus embraced, values like justice and equality and inclusion and plain old humanity, in the pursuit of a theoretical orthodoxy that for the sake of the institution regards the mores of contemporary culture over the needs of our neighbors. This is Huck’s journey “from religion to morality,” and for Twain, it is the journey that must be made. Because you cannot pray a lie. The church that endorses or even countenances slavery prays a lie. The church that does not renounce racism in all its expressions prays a lie. The church that does not welcome the stranger, the alien, the sojourner and the immigrant prays a lie. The church that will not feed the hungry or ignores the cries of the homeless or does not reach out to the poor or privileges one kind of love over another or is suspicious of people who do not look like itself, that church prays a lie.
And perhaps this more than anything is why some folks think The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should not be read by young people whose minds and morality are still in the formative process. Because like Huck, they are in grave danger of thinking for themselves. But in an age when social media and social pressure vie mightily to shape how we think and how we believe and how we ought to be suspicious of “the other,” whatever that other might look like, perhaps reading about different points of view, different ways of thinking and different ways of understanding the world and the people around us, just might lead us to the countercultural vision of an Isaiah, of a Jesus and of Mark Twain’s barefoot prophet Huckleberry Finn.
I think this is what Twain was trying to accomplish, and the fact that his book was banned almost from the moment it was published suggests he succeeded magnificently.