Monthly Archives: March 2026

The Life of the World to Come?

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FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Psalm 130

Romans 8:6-11

John 11:1-45

Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, your Son came into the world to free us all from sin and death. Breathe upon us the power of your Spirit, that we may be raised to new life in Christ and serve you in righteousness all our days, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” Ezekiel 37:5.

Scholarly consensus is that Ezekiel’s vision in the valley of dry bones foretells not a general resurrection of the dead, but the restoration of the nation of Israel following the end of its exile in Babylon. That is probably so. But I am not convinced that exhausts the meaning and interpretation of this powerful text. Biblical narratives, oracles, parables, prayers and poems have always pointed beyond themselves and their immediate context. That is why they continue to engage us centuries later. Like a snowball rolling down hill, the Bible gathers meaning and its texts deepen and expand through interpretation and application to ever changing circumstances as it rolls through time convicting, inspiring and comforting faith communities as it goes. It is fair to say, I believe, that Ezekiel’s vision turned out to be bigger than he imagined. That would not have surprised or displeased Ezekiel. He knew, as all true prophets know, that the words he spoke were not his own. They were God’s Words animated by God’s Spirit. As such, they have a life of their own. They have power to stimulate the imaginations of their hearers in every age and to and open their eyes to new realities. That is, after all, the whole point of prophecy.

Ezekiel’s vision, therefore, is properly understood and preached as a Resurrection text. But wait! Aren’t we still deep in the season of Lent? Aren’t we jumping the gun, preaching the resurrection of the dead more than a week before Good Friday? For better or worse, the texts leave us little choice. Even as Jesus approaches Jerusalem where we know he will meet arrest, condemnation and crucifixion, he raises Lazarus from death. Ironically, the raising of Lazarus turns out to be both the reason for Jesus’ triumphal reception at Jerusalem and the event that finally convinces Caiaphas and the religious leaders of Judea that Jesus must be put to death. At least that is John the Evangelist’s take. Death and Resurrection are inseparably woven together. In our lesson from the Letter to the Church at Rome, Paul points out that death to sin is the flip side of sharing in Christ’s Resurrection. The line of demarcation between life and death is not as clear and absolute as we are prone to assume.

The lessons for this Sunday illustrate the difficulty of preaching the Resurrection-which we are called to do even-and perhaps especially-during the Sundays in Lent. As I have noted before, the temptation here is to say either too much or too little. We moderns are prone to preach Jesus’ resurrection as a metaphor for something else, such as liberation from economic oppression, a well ordered democratic government, world peace-you name it. One of the characters in John Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, illustrates this approach. Updike’s story takes place in a state run home for the destitute elderly overseen by prefect Stephen Conner. Conner is a product of the New Deal. He believes in the inevitability of human progress through social evolution and the perfection of governmental institutions. Conner becomes engaged in a conversation among the residents about the afterlife. He shares his vision of “heaven on earth” formed in a future society where illness is overcome by advanced medicine; pollution eliminated through harnessing atomic power; and oppression defeated through the spread of democracy. Mrs. Mortis, one of the residents, asks him whether this heaven on earth will come soon enough for her to see it. Conner responds: “Not personally perhaps. But for your children, your grandchildren.”

“But not for ourselves?”

“No.” The word hung huge in the living room, the “o” a hole that let in the cold of the void.

“Well, then,” Mrs. Mortis spryly said, “to hell with it.” Updike, John, The Poorhouse Fair, (c. 1958 by John Updike, pub. by Random House).

I tend to share Mrs. Mortis’ sentiments. If the unsatisfied longings of billions for justice, peace, freedom and love never find fulfillment in God’s future, then for too many that future will have been a cruel hoax. Moreover, it is next to impossible for me to share Mr. Conner’s blithe optimism and his belief in the inevitable march of human progress under the shadow of a world slipping into fascism. His demythologized resurrection seems no less improbable than the real thing.

In the end, I do not believe our difficulty speaking about the Resurrection has anything to do with our inability to square it with modern science. Modern science has lost much of its enlightenment certainty in the face of ongoing discoveries and new theories undermining what we once believed were immutable laws. Increasingly, the questions posed by modern science are sounding ever more like those poets, novelists, philosophers and theologians have been asking for centuries. I believe our biggest problem with the mystery of Resurrection is that, well, it is a mystery. Even Jesus could speak of it only in parables. In a very real sense, when we say we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come, we do not know what we are talking about. A mystery can never be explained. If it could, it would no longer be a mystery. Its inexplicability in rational terms does not make it any less real, however. Mysteries are a very real part of our existence. But they can be apprehended only through the medium of graphic art, poetry, fiction, mythology and storytelling-and then only in small part. Contemplating mysteries always leaves us with more questions than answers. I believe that we modern Christians, schooled as we have been to equate reality with what can be proven empirically in the sterility of the laboratory, must re-learn the ancient art of living comfortably alongside mystery.

There are many imponderables when it comes to contemplating the mysteries of Resurrection and eternal life. What does it mean to live in God’s eternal now? Will there still be equations to be worked out, new discoveries to be made and growth in maturity and understanding? It is hard to imagine life worth living in the absence of such challenges. It seems obvious, too, that we need to change substantially if we are to live harmoniously under God’s just and gentle reign. Eternity will be anything but heavenly if we bring into it the grudges, animosities, prejudices, resentments and blood feuds that are so much a part of this life and so much a part of ourselves. Yet I wonder how it is possible to extract the experiences of pain, grief, loss and anger from our lives without uprooting the wisdom, patience and triumphs that come with facing these challenges which makes us who we are. Must we be so radically changed as to be unrecognizable to our present selves? Will our relationships with loved ones be somehow preserved, complicated as they are with selfishness, jealousy, envy and resentment? Will questions like these matter or even make sense in the life of the world to come?

Preaching ought not to attempt resolving these issues-as if that were even possible. Instead, preachers need to emphasize that the reign of God is not wholly a future state, but that it is breaking into our world even now. The world to come is woven together out of the fabric made from our common life together, our faithful witness to God’s reign in our preaching, teaching and works of justice, mercy and compassion. Eternal life is not merely a matter of duration. To live eternally is to live in faith, hope and love-the three things Saint Paul reminds us are eternal. I Corinthians 13:13. Every second lived within the parameters of these virtues is a measure of eternal life. All time lived outside of them is tragically wasted. In sum, precisely because we believe in the Resurrection of the Body and the Life of the World to Come, the way we live in the here and now is critically important.

Philosopher and teacher Alfred North Whitehead has been a powerful influence in my thinking over the years, providing me with valuable conceptual tools for interpreting the Scriptures. The following passage, which I know I have quoted before, has been enormously comforting to me and helpful in thinking about the Life of the World to Come.

“The wisdom of [God’s] subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system-its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy-woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image-and it is but an image-the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.

“The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.” Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality (c. 1979 by The Free Press) p. 346.

The message latent within Ezekiel’s vision is that, in the end, God will bring to completion in a future of breathtaking harmony what God began with the words, “Let there be.” Jesus assures us that we will be included in that future. That is not all that I would like to know about the Resurrection of the Dead and the Life of the World to Come. But it is enough.

Here is a poem by Sister Maris Stella that bears a striking resemblance to Ezekiel’s vision.

RESURRECTION

from the deep sea wrack

from the green light under the sea

from the coral caves men will come back

on mountain tops where

dropped from the air

or hurled

against the world

their bones grow cold

among the old

rock-frost above the tree-line

they will rise up with the divine

breath breathed into them again

as on the first of men

Adam, newly conceived of clay

on the sixth day

God breathed

even somewhere Adam will rise

opening again his eyes

on the world to find

nothing much changed but of a mind

that he was blind before

Abel, first-slain

having lain

longer in earth than any other man

and Eve with the look of the new Eve

upon her but still Eve

they will rise up having known

the terrible trumpets blown

would cry: this is the doom

this is the crack of doom

who will record the innumerable horde

in hope to see

what publican will mount into a tree

what wind

what weather what bird

will shout unheard

against the sound

of whole tribes and families growing up out of the ground

what earth does every spring

is only a hint of the thing.

Source: Poetry (April 1943). Sister Maris Stella (1899–1987) was born Alice Gustava Smith in Alton, Iowa, in 1899. During her junior year in high school she moved to St. Paul, Minnesota to attend Derham Hall High School. Smith graduated from Derham Hall in 1918. Two years later she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of St. Joseph and took the name Sister Maris Stella. In 1924 she received her undergraduate degree from the College of St. Catherine with majors in English and music. She traveled to England thereafter where she earned her master’s degree in English at the University of Oxford. In 1939, Sister Maris Stella published her first volume of poetry, Here Only a Dove. During the 1940s she continued to write poetry for magazines. You can read more about Sister Maris Stella in the Minnesota Historical Society website.

Learning to See with the Heart

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FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT

1 Samuel 16:1-13

Psalm 23

Ephesians 5:8-14

John 9:1-41

Prayer of the Day: Bend your ear to our prayers, Lord Christ, and come among us. By your gracious life and death for us, bring light into the darkness of our hearts, and anoint us with your Spirit, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

 “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” John 9:41.

According to Jesus, there is more to blindness than simply lack of sight. In fact, even a person born blind is capable of sight, while those with perfectly sound eyes can be utterly blind. The disciples were blind to the humanity of the man Jesus encounters in our gospel lesson, a man who managed against the odds to survive without sight in a world without a safety net for the disabled. To the disciples, this man was an abstraction, a theological riddle to be solved with sophistic arguments. Surely a good and gracious God cannot be responsible for such a dreadful circumstance as congenital blindness. “So what do you think, Jesus,” the disciples ask. “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” The disciples saw the man born blind with their perfectly sound eyes, but not with their hearts.

This kind of thinking is not unusual. Although we enlightened moderns are not inclined to attribute the misfortunes of others to divine wrath, we are often quick to attribute their suffering to some mistake, misstep or bad judgment on their part. In fact, there is a tendency to take perverse satisfaction in pointing out how easily the tragedies of others could have been avoided. “What was he thinking of, going into a neighborhood like that in the dark of night?” “What did she expect was going to happen, going to a frat party in that skimpy outfit?” “If he had thought for a single minute before answering that text, he would have recognized it as a scam.” I expect there is more than just meanness at work here. It is, after all, comforting to believe that we live in a universe where wise, good and prudent conduct is always rewarded and foolish, wicked and careless behavior punished. Such belief allows us to indulge in the delusion that we are safe from injury, tragedy and untimely death-if only we practice good sense and a modicum of decency. It blinds us to the reality that our world actually is one in which bombs incinerate teenage girls whose only crime was coming to school; tornados rip through towns leveling indiscriminately both churches and brothels; terminal cancer, starvation and violence afflict innocent children while vicious war criminals live into their nineties and die in peace.

Living in the light, as Jesus calls us to do, forces us to see things to which we might rather remain blind. Witness president Trump’s recent failed attempt to remove from President’s House in Philadelphia an exhibit that honored the lives of the nine people held there who were enslaved by President George Washington. Desperate to maintain the false mythology of a pure and virtuous America and its white founders, many among us would simply erase from our history the terrible legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and ideological racism. We prefer living in the darkness of comforting lies rather than in the harsh light of truth.    

There is a price to be paid, however, for such willful blindness. The real world, with all its unpredictable catastrophes, random tragedies and undeserved suffering affords those with eyes to see it opportunities to “work the works of [God] who sent [Jesus].” John 9:4. But for those who choose to remain in the false security afforded by what Jesus calls “darkness,” such opportunities remain forever out of reach. Blindness of willful complacency blunts the capacity for empathy and compassion, thereby deforming our humanity and preventing us from seeing with our hearts. This, not a mere infraction of some moral or religious code, is the biblical understanding of sin. Sin, according to Jesus, is the dangerous habit of willful blindness. It is a refusal to see what makes one uncomfortable, what challenges what one thinks one knows, what invites one into a larger understanding of what it means to be fully human. Jesus does not bother entertaining the disciples’ theoretical questions about the cause of the man’s blindness. Instead, he acts with compassion. He opens the blind man’s eyes and, in so doing, opens the spiritual eyes of his disciples. Unlike the disciples, Jesus sees the man born blind with his heart.

I have had to have my eyes opened numerous times throughout my life. I have had to learn over and over again to see not merely with my eyes, but with my heart. Through my wife’s debilitating injuries, I have come to a new realization of how thoroughly our society excludes persons with mobility challenges from full participation in our common life. Though it has been twenty-six years since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, numerous barriers to restaurants, doctors offices, municipal buildings, places of worship, museums, beaches and public parks remain, preventing or making it difficult and dangerous for persons with mobility challenges to access essential services as well as recreational resources-which they support with their taxes as much as the rest of us. In traveling with Sesle on the slow, difficult road of recovery and adaptation, I have learned to see public buildings of all kinds in a new way. I see now the barriers, obstacles and obstructions that make a mockery of signs reading “welcome.” I am also increasingly mindful of others experiencing difficulty with these barriers and opportunities for offering assistance. That to which I was once blind, I can now see.

What will it take to open our eyes? What difference would it make if we could see the Iranian school girls killed by our bombs, not as inevitable “collateral damage,” but as the daughters of dads who beamed with pride as they watched them recite their prayers, moms who dressed them, brushed their hair and sent them off to school with no clue they would never see them again. What difference would it make if enough of us saw the 350,000 Haitian refugees the Trump administration is desperately seeking to deport, not as a mere number, but as parents seeking the same safe environment we seek for our children, young people longing for the opportunity to get a basic education, families who wish only to live free from the scourge of gang violence? What difference would it make if we could see all people with our hearts through the eyes of Jesus?

Here is a poem by Howard Nemerov speaking to the willful blindness against which Jesus warns us and from which he would liberate us.

The Murder of William Remington[1]

It is true, that even in the best-run state

Such things will happen; it is true,

What’s done is done. The law, whereby we hate

Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue

But by the smoke, and not for thought alone

It punishes, but for the thing that’s done.

And yet there is the horror of the fact,

Though we knew not the man. To die in jail,

To be beaten to death, to know the act

Of personal fury before the eyes can fail

And the man die against the cold last wall

Of the lonely world—and neither is that all:

There is the terror too of each man’s thought,

That knows not, but must quietly suspect

His neighbor, friend, or self of being taught

To take an attitude merely correct;

Being frightened of his own cold image in

The glass of government, and his own sin,

Frightened lest senate house and prison wall

Be quarried of one stone, lest righteous and high

Look faintly smiling down and seem to call

A crime the welcome chance of liberty,

And any man an outlaw who aggrieves

The patriotism of a pair of thieves.

Source:  The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (c. 1977 by Howard Nemerov, pub. by The University of Chicago Press). Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. He also won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize. Nemerov was raised in New York City where he attended the Society for Ethical Culture’s Fieldston School. He later commenced studies at Harvard University where he earned his BA. During World War II he served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force as well as the United State Air Force. He was honorably discharged with the rank of Lieutenant and thereafter returned to New York to resume his writing career. Nemerov began teaching, first at Hamilton College and subsequently at Bennington College and Brandeis University. He ended his teaching career at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was elevated to Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of English and Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death in 1991. Nemerov’s poems demonstrated a consistent emphasis on thought, the process of thinking and on ideas themselves. Nonetheless, his work always displayed the full range of human emotion and experience. You can find out more about Howard Nemerov and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.  

[1] William Walter Remington (1917–1954) was an American economist who was employed in various United States government positions. His career was interrupted by accusations of communist espionage made by Elizabeth Bentley, a Soviet spy and defector. Remington was tried twice and convicted twice. The first conviction was set aside on legal grounds, but the second conviction on two counts of perjury was upheld. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison. In November 1954, he was murdered in his cell by fellow inmates at Lewisburg Prison.

The Power of Weakness

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THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT

Exodus 17:1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-42

Prayer of the Day: Merciful God, the fountain of living water, you quench our thirst and wash away our sin. Give us this water always. Bring us to drink from the well that flows with the beauty of your truth through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

In this Sunday’s gospel reading we find Jesus slumped against the façade of Jacob’s well, famished, exhausted and thirsty. The journey through hostile Samaritan territory from Galilee to Judea did not afford much in the way of comforts. The Samaritan villages along the way could hardly be expected to offer hospitality or even staples such as food and water to a band of Jewish travelers. It seems the disciples had to go some distance out of their way to get food-perhaps a detour into a more friendly Jewish enclave? In any event, Jesus was evidently too worn out to accompany them.

We are not accustomed to thinking of Jesus as weak, vulnerable and at the mercy of strangers. But that is the way the woman from Samaria found him. I can imagine the smirk on her face as she answered Jesus call for a drink, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” I can hear her thinking to herself or perhaps even saying, “guess you must be pretty thirsty mister high and mighty rabbi to beg a filthy Samaritan woman for a drink.” She must have been amused to hear Jesus offer her living water. “Well isn’t that just like one of you holier than thou Jews. Think you’re the one in control? Think you hold all the cards? Well guess what? I’m the one with the bucket. If anyone here is going to get water, it’s going to come from my bucket.”

Jesus then tells her to call her husband only to be told that she has none. Then, Jesus reveals that he knows her better than she thinks anyone could. It is here that I think the preaching of this story goes off the rails. Too often, the fact that the woman has been married five times and is now living with a man who is not her husband draws moral disapproval from us moderns. We assume that she is a floozie, a loose woman, an adulteress with a torrid sexual history. But that is hardly likely. In the first century, divorce was the sole prerogative of men and, as evidenced by Jesus’ dealings with religious authorities elsewhere in the gospels, there were some who believed that it was “lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause.” Matthew 19:3. The Samaritan woman might have been divorced due to a health condition that made her sexually undesirable. She might have been unable to conceive and bear children and thus incapable of continuing the family line. Or perhaps she was, like the luckless woman described by Jesus’ opponents in the dispute over the resurrection, passed through a succession of brothers, all of whom predeceased her. Mark 12:18-23. Whatever the case may have been it is obvious that this woman has known repeated rejection and her failure to remarry marks her as “damaged goods.” In spite of all this, which is somehow known to Jesus, Jesus is genuinely interested in her. The woman, for her part, is beginning to take an interest in this strange Jewish rabbi.

Now the woman poses a question to Jesus: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” So, which is it? It was hardly an idle question. The subject had been a matter of fierce dispute ever since the northern Israelite tribes broke away from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin to become the Northern Kingdom of Israel a millennium ago.  Perhaps she was expecting a lengthy dissertation on why the temple in Jerusalem is the only legitimate place of worship and that the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim was an idolatrous sham. What she got was a startling admission on Jesus’ part that neither the Temple in Jerusalem nor the Jewish nation hold a monopoly on genuine worship. “The hour is coming and is now here,” says Jesus, “when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.” Did this Jew just say that Samaritans, too, can be genuine worshipers of God? The thought is almost too big to get one’s head around. “I know that Messiah is coming,” says the woman. It seems she wants to be done with this conversation. “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” To this, Jesus replies, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” 

At this point, the disciples return and wonder why Jesus is speaking with a woman of Samaria and what he could possibly want with her. The woman takes her leave at this point. Significantly, I think, she leaves her bucket behind, thereby enabling Jesus to access the water from Jacob’s well, a small act of compassion toward the one she so recently deemed a de facto enemy.  Moreover, she invites the people of her village to come and see this remarkable teacher who saw her, knew her and expressed a passionate interest in her. The Samaritans come out in force to meet Jesus, inviting him and his disciples to stay with them. Jesus “remains” with them for a full two days.

The Greek word “meno” meaning “to remain” is a significant one in John’s gospel. John the Baptizer announces that Jesus was known to him by the witness of the Holy Spirit that both descended and “remained” upon Jesus. John 1:32. In his final words to his disciples, Jesus urged his disciples to “abide in me as I abide in you.” John 15:4. Here the English word “abide” is but another translation of the Greek word, “meno.” Thus, you could translate the verse as “remain in me as I remain in you.” As God loves God’s beloved Son, so the Son loves us and invites us to “abide” or “remain” in God’s love. John 15:9. In Sunday’s gospel, the love of God that stubbornly abides in Jesus penetrates the heart of a women that ought to have been an enemy. The inroads made into her heart opened up a crack in the wall of historic enmity between Jew and Samaritan, allowing the living waters of reconciliation and healing to flow freely and bring new life.  

There is an old saying, the source of which I have not been able to ascertain, that “an enemy is a person whose story you have not heard.” Saint Paul reminds us that our “struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12. The weapons we are given to resist them are truthful speech, righteous integrity, the way of peace, prayer and the good news of God’s redemptive intent for our world. Ephesians 6:14-18. We wage peace rather than war, forgiveness rather than retribution, prayer rather than threats. We know that those who display aggressiveness, utter threats and commit violence do so from profound hurt, desperate fear and deep seated insecurity. Loving one’s neighbor (which includes the enemy) as oneself requires that one get inside the other’s skin, try to see the world through their eyes and understand the journey that led them to where they are. Such love requires one to look past whatever harm the other has done, whatever hateful views the other might express and whatever threat they may appear to present in order to touch with a healing hand the places where they are hurting. As Jesus demonstrates, such love requires one to become vulnerable, helpless and open to the other.

As again Saint Paul reminds us, this way of Jesus appears as folly to those who believe that strength consists in raw coercive power. I Corinthians 1:18-25. But we are witnessing today the tragic consequences of employing raw coercive power to achieve justice and peace throughout the middle east. Violence does not end violence. It only begets more violence spiraling out of control and drawing ever more victims into its vortex of death and destruction. Today, as has always been the case, Jesus’ way is the way, the truth and the life. Jesus and his way of the cross are the only way out of our self destructive path. It is not for nothing the Samaritan villagers recognized in Jesus “the savior of the world.”

Here is a brief poetic fragment by Edwin Markham that illustrates in one broad stroke the way of Jesus as it appears in our gospel lesson for this coming Sunday.

He drew a circle that shut me out –

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in.

Source: This poem is in the public domain. Edwin Markham (1852—1940) was born in Oregon City, Oregon and was the youngest of 10 children. At the age of four and following his parent’s divorce, he moved with his mother to Lagoon Valley in Solano County, California. Markham attended San Jose Normal School (now San Jose State University) graduating in 1872. Markham’s most famous poem, “The Man with the Hoe,” which accented laborers’ hardships, was first presented at a public poetry reading in 1898. His main inspiration was a French painting of the same name (in French, L’homme à la houe) by Jean-François Millet. Markham’s poem was published and achieved instant popularity. Throughout Markham’s life, many readers viewed him as an important voice in American poetry, a position signified by honors such as his election in 1908 to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. You can read more about Edwin Markham and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.