I went to DC last week with some of my kids. At the end of a day visiting some of our wonderful free museums, we stopped and visited this man. There are no politicians in history who should have an entire speech of theirs carved into stone; this man has two of them, one on either side of him. His intellect and eloquence were so daunting that they could not be defeated. They had to be killed. His words have always moved me to envy. I wish that I had the ability to communicate in a page half as much as he was able to in a sentence.
One month before the end of the Civil War he spoke at his second inaugural. He spoke clearly to the mind and to the conscience of both sides of a still divided country. This is part of what he said. He would be assassinated in a little more than a month…
“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 men 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. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” 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 wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be repaid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
These are not the words of a political address. This was a sermon. The congregation was a nation; a nation that had battered itself to pieces in the previous four years. This country suffered more combat deaths in the Civil War than all our other wars combined. No one has ever been able to kill Americans as well as we kill each other.
His reasoning is sound; his theology is deep and profound, and his words are piercing. Much has been said about the lamentable political rhetoric of our day. But, to be fair, there has not been a political leader in any of our lifetimes who would be able, or even willing, to speak to us this way; much to our shame and loss. But this is not a political post. This is just me marveling at the astonishing power of the human tongue; particularly when it shares a skull with such a brilliant mind which sits atop a person of such dignity and faith. How rarely in our history do these things combine in one person? There is a reason he stood taller than everyone else.
Our task today remains the same as it was in 1865. It is what we all must do every day we are here, until Kingdom comes. It is a calling and a charge from the mouth of Father Abraham when he went on that day to say…
‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds…”
Amen.