Sermon; Jim 02/15/98,

I have been enjoying a new book by Alfred Kazin entitled "God and the American Writer," which traces the role of religion in the works of some of our greatest authors. Interestingly, he devotes a chapter to Abraham Lincoln. By doing so he reminds us that Lincoln, in addition to being a great president, was an eloquent writer. He sees Lincoln's Second Inaugural address, delivered April 4, 1865, as both a crowning literary achievement as well as a profound expression of Lincoln's religious convictions, Abraham Lincoln is among our foremost presidents, those remembered on the President's Day holiday. So it seems to me fitting that we speak of his own spiritual journey.

The general facts of Lincoln's life are well known to us all. But like any real person who has become a national icon, it is important to recover the issues and the context in which he made history, as well as his own unique character. It is especially important to understand the changes Lincoln underwent during the war years, especially changes in his faith.

To begin with it is important to note that Abraham Lincoln never joined a church and rarely attended worship. Lincoln's faith was inward and personal. Lincoln placed tremendous emphasis on reason. As early as 1838 he delivered an address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, in which he said:

. . . the pillars of the temple of liberty . . . must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy, Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.

Lincoln was brilliant and cautious, He said and did little without first carefully calculating the impact. This served him well as first a lawyer and then as a politician. And he was an extraordinarily ambitious politician. He greatly admired Thomas Jefferson and attached his philosophical passions, such as they were, to him.

As a politician, leading into his presidency and the Civil War, he was clear that he believed the major issue facing the land was the preservation of the Union, not the abolition of slavery, and he was widely quoted as saying that If the Union could be preserved with or without freeing the slaves, he would do so. In fact, however, as the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates show, he was on the record as a politician and person as being unalterably opposed to slavery. In this context, it is important to remember that the Civil War took place not because the North wanted to eliminate slavery in the South. Most Northerners were either indifferent toward slavery in the South or opposed to its expansion. Not all, of course, for our abolitionist forbears in the Congregational Churches of New England were very outspoken in their total opposition to slavery anywhere, But the Civil War came about due to the South's insistence that the Union recognize slavery as a right of property throughout the nation. And if this was not possible, the Southern states should be allowed to leave. This Lincoln would not permit. Issues of religion and slavery were secondary in his mind.

I began by saying that Lincoln was not a churchgoer. More about this. Though he did not attend church, he knew the King James Bible very well (along, incidentally, with the works of William Shakespeare.) The Bible was the source of what belief he held. But this was a time in which most everyone was drenched with one kind of religion or other. Most northern churches of differing denominations did not bother with anything that could be termed politics. They preached a faith of personal and private salvation, Some Congregationalists, along with groups like the Quakers, were vehemently opposed to slavery and sought to have it eliminated, but they were a minority. And in the south, religion was used as a defense of slavery. Kazin writes this:

Harriet Beecher Stowe had represented the "pure" conscience of abolitionism when she had written in "Uncle Tom's Cabin, " "What is peculiar to slavery, and distinguishes it from free servitude, is evil, and only evil, and that continually." On the next page she added, "The great object of the author in writing has been to bring this subject of slavery, as a moral and religious question, before the minds of all those who profess to be followers of Christ, in this country," But Southern preachers, poets, politicians, and editors had no trouble defending slavery by the New as well as the Old Testament, and in this they were not simply rationalizing their economic interests and social structure. They, too, were loyal to a religious tradition. They, too, were believers. "Sin" was a critical issue of the time, on both sides of the slavery question. The appeal to righteousness and the sense of moral guilt were . . . vehement and impassioned . . .

As the war progressed it more and more became a truly religious war for both sides, a crusade. It should be noted that Lincoln became very impatient with what he saw as the self-righteousness and unbridled criticism of many abolitionists. In a famous meeting with some New England clergy who came to bring him a message from God, Lincoln retorted that if that were so why hadn't God contacted him directly?

Religious life polarized further as religious leaders of the North and South alike became more and more convinced absolutely that God was on their side. What did Lincoln believe? What seems clear is that over these troubled war years, Lincoln's own personal faith underwent a profound deepening, even transformation. The expression of what Lincoln as president came to believe is expressed majestically in the Second Inaugural. And it represents a religious expression in ways very different from that of the preachers thundering from the pulpits of organized religion, both North and South.

Like many of you I have stood awed in the Lincoln Memorial and read the words of this speech engraved there. Lincoln says of religion North and South:

Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully, The Almighty has his own purposes.

The ordeal of the war had been a crucible that, through fire, had brought Lincoln through to a different place than the religionists' North and South. Kazin writes:

In his torturing responsibility to the nation, to the future of democratic government in the world, Lincoln had come through a terrible experience to submit to a power higher and greater than anything political ambition had prepared him for, Now he felt responsibility before God for whatever he did and said to guide the nation.

The Second Inaugural shows Lincoln as president come to a conclusion about slavery that was different from the earlier Lincoln as politician. He says: ''One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it, These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war," And as he came to this conclusion, he concluded that God was somehow involved in the war. Not that the armies of the North and South alike were crusaders with God on their side, but that somehow, the Almighty's purposes were being worked out in ways ultimately mysterious to us, He wrote:

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope - fervently do we pray - that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God will that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."

Lincoln seems to be saying that at the heart of the necessity of this terrible war is the will of a God whose ways will always be, in the end, a mystery to us. "It is clear that the terrible war has overwhelmed the Lincoln who identified himself as the man of reason. It has brought him to his knees, so to speak, in heart-breaking awareness of the restrictions imposed by a mystery so encompassing it can only be called 'God.' "

Earlier Lincoln had written a letter to an angry Kentuckian in defense of his decision to allow former slaves to enlist in the Union army. He writes with remarkable humility, but also with a growing spiritual vision:

I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle, the nation's condition is not what either party, or what any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, will pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial1 history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

Here there is no blaming, no self-righteousness, All, North and South, may indeed be paying fairly for their joint complicity in the sin of slavery. How God does it is God's business: The Almighty Has His Own Purposes. Kazin:

Lincoln's God was born of war. It would not have survived without him, since only Lincoln understood Him, Lincoln had nothing to say about Jesus as redeemer and intervene in this life, what was personal to Lincoln was a sense of divinity wrested from the many contradictions in human effort. God came to him through a certain exhaustion. Faith was still deep and intense enough to allow doubt and survive it. The sense of Providence during the Civil war - there was still no alternative - was of a kind we cannot fully take in.

Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, 1865. His mad assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was driven over the edge when he heard a speech in which Lincoln supported the idea of extending the vote to freed slaves.

What does Lincoln's faith say to us in a far different time? Much I think. At the very least, his faith stands in contrast, then and now, with those self-righteous believers who claim to know, without doubt, the will of God, and act in confidence that God is on their side. Lincoln came to trust a divine Providence that, for him, was at once overarching, and yet ultimately mysterious. Lincoln's faith was as one who realized that we can never fully "know" God and God's will. And yet we must live and work in trust - trusting that the purposes of God are truly being worked out, AMEN.