A REBIRTH OF FREEDOM

by Forrest Church

Feb. 17, 2002

Holidays exist for two reasons. The first reason might be called the "gathering" or "significant cause." We take time off to ponder something essential or meaningful in the lives we share. For most Americans, much of our nation’s remembered history is associated with one holiday or another. In pageants and ceremonial addresses our past is brought alive again. The teaching of our history begins here, in school auditoriums and houses of worship, at great outdoor festivals and colorful parades, and around the family table. In this respect, holidays serve as compass points.

But they exist for another reason as well–vacation. The long weekend, the gift of a little discretionary time, closed schools, the luxury of an extra day off. We need that too. We need occasions that break the tyranny of a daily grind. We need to vacate, to relax. In and of itself, that is a good thing. But because it is a good thing, we can easily overlook the reason we have been alloted this "free" time. We can forget what it was that caused our forebears to establish a holiday in the first place. Labor Day, Veteran's Day, Columbus Day, Memorial Day, President's Day, all have become basically interchangeable national holidays almost completely stripped of their essential or original meaning. They are plain vanilla, white bread, all-American three-day weekends. We look forward to them not in anticipation of honoring those who have served our country in war, founded our nation or died for it, participated in the union movement, or whatever. We look forward to them because we get a Monday off.

When Washington’s Birthday and Jefferson’s birthday were homogenized a quarter century ago, we gained something–a three day weekend. But we lost something as well. Looking at ads in the papers you might conclude that Washington and Lincoln were co-owners of an auto dealership. This morning, I therefore shall take one of these leaders, Abraham Lincoln, and revisit why we honor him today. Let’s travel back a century and a half to our nation’s greatest trial, the Civil War.

When Julia Ward Howe wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," she called Union soldiers to battle with a Christian trumpet. Between midnight and dawn on November 18, 1861, she set new words to the martial hymn tune, "John Brown’s Body," creating a fighting song for the Union army to march to throughout the remaining years of the Civil War. With apocalypic imagery, Howe invisioned a second coming of the Lord, "trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." God’s sword, "terrible and swift," would be loosed of its "fateful lightning;" God’s "righteous sentence" would be read by campfires’ "dim and flaring lamps." Even as the Puritans followed the steps of Moses to a new promised land, Howe read her own generation’s chapter of American History in light of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me;
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

There is nothing Unitarian about these words, though Howe herself was a Unitarian. They invoke passion, not reason. They capture something far more primal than the measured cadences of rational religion. Howe’s passion was unleashed by a holy cause: the cause of freedom. For Howe, emancipation and union were inseparable. Freedom transfigured her once dispassionate faith into a battle cry.

President Lincoln was initially more concerned about union than he was about slavery. Yet, whenever he thought back on the Declaration of Independence, slavery was foremost in his mind. Speaking at Independence Hall in Philadelphia shortly before his inauguration, Lincoln lifted up "that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence, which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men." Honoring our creed by ending slavery could alone save our country. "If it can’t be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful," Lincoln said, adding in an aside, "I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it."

Lincoln revered the Declaration of Independence as "a standard maxim for free society," something "constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere." Lincoln’s commitment to this guiding principle deepened during the course of the war. By the time of his martyrdom, he, like Julia Ward Howe, had been transfigured by a zeal for justice. For this reason, the death of our sixteenth president proved as richly symbolic as were the deaths of our second and third.

At the November 19, 1863, dedication of the National Soldiers' Cemetery at Gettysburg, with thousands of soldiers from both sides who gave their lives in early July of that same year being ceremoniously laid to rest, Lincoln's role was a minor one. The sponsors invited him to make "a few appropriate remarks" following the major address to be delivered by Edward Everett of Massachusetts. Everett, a former U. S. senator, president of Harvard, and a Unitarian minister, was the most highly regarded orator of his day. He spoke for two full hours to a crowd of 15,000 on Cemetery Ridge. The Baltimore Glee Club followed by singing a solemn dirge written expressly for the occasion. Only then did Lincoln, his voice reedy but piercing, deliver his two-minute address.

At first, the speech had a mixed reception. Secretary of State Seward turned to Everett Everett on the platform and said, "He has made a failure and I am sorry for it; his speech is not equal to him." Edward Everett apparently disagreed. "Ah, Mr. President," he said, "how gladly would I give my hundred pages to be the author of your twenty lines." The next day he wrote, "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes," to which Lincoln replied, "I am pleased to know that, in your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a failure." In fact, the American Creed has rarely found more eloquent expression.

As you heard from Galen’s reading, Lincoln's language is Biblical in cadence and theme. It is also thoroughly American. Through the sacrifices of its citizens and at the time of its greatest trial, our nation, founded on the proposition that all are born equal and invested with certain inalienable rights, could finally attain its moral promise. The poet Robert Lowell considered the Gettysburg Address sacramental. "In his words, Lincoln symbolically died, just as the Union soldiers really died–and as he himself was soon really to die. By his words, he gave the field of battle a symbolic significance that it had lacked. For us and our country, he left Jefferson's ideals of freedom and equality joined to the Christian sacrificial act of death and rebirth."

In the years leading up to the Civil War, both parties–abolitionist and slave-holder alike–defended their antithetical positions by marshaling evidence from the Constitution and the scriptures. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Stephen A. Douglas, who defeated Lincoln for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, went straight for the emotional jugular at the heart of many people's support of slavery: "I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the Negroes that ever existed. I do not regard the Negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever."

Lincoln could have responded by quoting Isaiah 4 ("God will make justice shine on every race"). But, perceiving the intimate relationship between American democracy and the ideals of equality and Justice, he instead chose to cite chapter and verse of the American Creed. "According to our ancient faith, the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed," Lincoln said. "Allow all the governed an equal voice in the government, . . . that, and that only, is self-government."

Charging Douglas with "blowing out the moral lights around us," and with "penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people," in a voice thinner but morally far more resonant than that of his eloquent opponent, Lincoln reclaimed the Declaration of Independence from its late captivity. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," he said, quoting from the Bible. "I believe, this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free."

Lincoln's religious beliefs were far from conventional. Raised by Free-will Baptists in Kentucky, the young Lincoln found Thomas Paine's Deism more attractive than his parents' Christianity. But as he grew older, suffering through the death of brother, sister, and two sons, and contemplating the carnage of war, Lincoln gradually adopted a more Christian outlook. Even then he held no truck with theologians. "The more a man knew of theology," he once said, "the further he got away from the spirit of Christ." When asked why he refused to join a church, Lincoln replied, "Because I find difficulty without mental reservation in giving my assent to their long and complicated creeds," adding that, "When any church inscribes on its altar, as a qualification for membership, the Savior's statement of the substance of the law and the Gospel–'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind ... and thy neighbor as thyself'–that church will I join with all my heart and soul."

There are as many legendary stories about Lincoln as there are about George Washington. According to one early biographer, Lincoln once perused the voting lists in his hometown of Springfield. He took particular interest in how the local clergy were registered to vote. Of twenty-six clergymen from various denominations, only three had registered as Republicans. According to legend, Lincoln turned to a friend and said, "I am not a Christian–God knows I would be one–but I have carefully read the Bible." He drew a Bible from his pocket, where he always carried it. "These men well know that I am for freedom in the territories, freedom everywhere as far as the Constitution and laws will permit, and that my opponents are for slavery. They know this, and yet, with this book in their hands, in the light of which human bondage cannot live a moment, they are going to vote against me. I do not understand it at all." Whether true or apocryphal, this story accurately reflects Lincoln's religious views.

Abraham Linclon was not a believer in humankind’s intrinsic goodness. Though non-doctrinal in theology, he stood squarely in the Puritan tradition of self-judgment, believing that we are united not by righteousness but by sin. Nowhere is this more evident than in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, delivered only months before he died. Looking back over fields of heartbreak and devestation–600,000 American dead, some ten billion dollars of property damage–Lincoln fulfills the prophet's ancient role: to speak the word of God without hubris. Considering it "perhaps better than anything I have produced, " he did acknowledge that it would not be immediately popular. "Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them."

In an eight-minute speech, the shortest inaugural address on record, Lincoln begins by acknowledging that during the late conflict between North and South both sides read the same Bible and petitioned the same God for assistance against the other. "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces," Lincoln said, "but let us judge not that we be not judged." In God's good time, justice would ultimately be done and the ungodly institution of slavery abolished. Even then, however, given our sinful nature, the prayers of neither side would be answered fully. Our judgments are themselves under a higher judgement, one we cannot presume perfectly to discern, whereas "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

In closing, Lincoln expresses the essence of Jesus’s gospel. The key to the scriptures is to practice neighborly love:

Abraham Lincoln devoted, even gave his life, to preserve "one nation under God." Enjoining neighborliness and justice–or liberty with equity–"even to the least of these," Lincoln held Christ in his heart, and followed in the spirit of the prophets. In the words of Isaiah, "Ours were the suffering he bore, ours the sorrows he carried. . . . He was pierced through for our faults, crushed for our sins. On him lies a punishment that brings us peace, and through his wounds we are healed."

Amen. I love you. Happy Presidents’ Day. And May God Bless us All.

 

 

Closing words:

Looking back on our nation’s history and heroes, our challenge as Americans is to rededicate ourselves to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

 

 

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