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Father Abe

A President’s Legacy

July 6, 2008

Text: Psalm 31:14-24

Ps 31:14-24

14 But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, "You are my God." 15 My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors. 16 Let your face shine upon your servant;save me in your steadfast love. 17 Do not let me be put to shame, O LORD,for I call on you;let the wicked be put to shame;let them go dumbfounded to Sheol. 18 Let the lying lips be stilled that speak insolently against the righteous with pride and contempt.

19 O how abundant is your goodness that you have laid up for those who fear you,and accomplished for those who take refuge in you,in the sight of everyone! 20 In the shelter of your presence you hide them from human plots;you hold them safe under your shelter from contentious tongues.

21 Blessed be the LORD,for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me when I was beset as a city under siege. 22 I had said in my alarm,"I am driven far from your sight."But you heard my supplications when I cried out to you for help.

23 Love the LORD, all you his saints.The LORD preserves the faithful,but abundantly repays the one who acts haughtily. 24 Be strong, and let your heart take courage ,all you who wait for the LORD.

NRSV

July 4^th gives us an opportunity to remember our heritage.

We’d better remember it, given stories like this.

Working his way through college, a young man served as a guide at the Gettysburg National Military Park—a huge memorial to the famous Civil War battle fought there. He documented some of the more “interesting” questions tourists asked him:

Did the soldiers hide behind the monuments when they fought?

Where did the redcoats come from?

What was Lincoln’s Gettysburg address? You mean he had a house here?

Why were so many of these Civil War battles fought on National Park Service land?

Maybe we need to brush up on our heritage a bit. Today, we’ll do just that. I want to take a look at the president who made the stove-pipe hat a fashion statement—Abraham Lincoln.

Let me preface my remarks by giving a public service announcement. If you don’t want to venture too far from home this summer because of gas prices, go to Springfield, Illinois—it’s only about 2 ½ hours away. Go to the Lincoln museum there. It is worth the trip. It is a high tech, state-of-the-art place that makes Lincoln and his times come alive.

It doesn’t sugar-coat our 16^th President. It documents some of his flaws. But it also makes you appreciate this man who guided our nation during its darkest years.

As I toured the museum, two things struck me about Lincoln.

HE HELD FAST TO WHAT HE BELIEVED WAS RIGHT.

He came to believe that the freeing of the slaves was the moral, right thing to do—even at the expense of a “house divided against itself.” He took that stand, made decisions accordingly, and in the process was fiercely criticized—by both Republicans and Democrats. The radical abolitionists of his day said he was too slow and didn’t go far enough in freeing the slaves; the conservatives of his day said he went too fast and too far in abolishing slavery.

The criticism grew personal. He was cruelly caricatured and insulted in political cartoons: he was called “half-witted,” “ignorant,” “a political coward,” “shattered, dazed, and utterly confused.” Even his Gettysburg address—the speech, not his residency!—was criticized, then largely ignored.

--Katelyn Sills, http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/21716.html

To make things worse, in the midst of all this, in 1862 he lost his eleven year old son Willie to a malaria-like disease.

Is it any wonder that his years in the White House took their toll on him?

Here’s how he looked as he began his presidency:

Now look at him at the end of the war, shortly before his assassination.

How did he find the strength to endure? To develop a belief in what he knew to be right, and stand for it in the midst of such brutality?

When your decisions affect the lives of millions of people and shape the history of your nation, I can only guess that you are driven to your knees before a higher power.

I can only guess that it was his faith, forged under pressure, that enabled him to see the rightness of the cause of ending slavery—a rightness that called him to cease political compromising and take an unwavering stand.

I can only guess that he spent time alone, by candlelight, pouring over Scriptures—and those passages he read spoke to him as never before. Maybe the Psalms gave words to his feelings:

I trust in you, O LORD; I say, "You are my God." 15 My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors. 16 Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your steadfast love. 17 Do not let me be put to shame, O LORD, for I call on you… Psalm 31:14-17a

I can only guess that with each passing day in the White House, whenever he’d invoke the name of God in a speech, that God had grown more personal and intimate to him. We have a prayer that he wrote—listen, and see if you don’t agree:

O God, we have been recipients of the choicest blessings of heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten [you]. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

—Abraham Lincoln, cited in Between Heaven and Earth, ed. Ken Gire (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 74.

When you stand up for what is right, and keep to your conviction, you know God more clearly, and feel God more deeply, than ever before.

The second thing that struck me about Lincoln as I toured his museum was this:

HE KEPT HIS COMPASSION.

You would think, under the crushing load of stress and barrage of criticism, he wouldn’t have had time for the little things in life. After all, war is fought looking at the big picture—Will the battle be won with a few thousand casualties, or many thousand?

And yet throughout his presidency he did things that revealed a large heart. Stories abounded of his taking time to do those “random acts of kindness.”

One of the most famous is when he visited a battlefield hospital. A young soldier lay dying. Lincoln asked if there was anything he could do, and the boy replied, “I wish you would write to my mother.” Instead of saying, “I’ll have my press secretary Bob do that,” the President himself sat by the bedside, got paper and pen, and wrote as the boy dictated. He read the letter back to him, including the final sentence, “This letter was written by Abraham Lincoln.” The boy looked up, recognized the President, and held out his hand. It is said that they held hands as he passed away.

--New York Times, June 1, 1902; Chicken Soup Three, “An Act of Kindness”

I would guess stories like these were embellished through the years. Yet they still point to a man who had a reputation of having a heart that reflected “the

gentleness of a woman,” as one contemporary described. Indeed, one of the things that prompted Confederate Commander Robert E. Lee to surrender was hearing about this side of Lincoln. For all Lee knew, once he surrendered he could have been imprisoned and executed. Some of his advisors suggested scattering and continuing the war in guerilla fashion. But Lee took a chance, and the terms of surrender turned out to be very generous. He said later, “I surrendered as much to Lincoln's goodness as to Grant's army.”

--Jay Winik, "They gave America a second chance," Parade, April 8, 2001, 10-12; Homiletics, 9/2/01

Such is our heritage, on this freedom Sunday.

HOLD ON TO WHAT IS RIGHT, BUT NEVER LOSE COMPASSION.

Seeing the flesh and blood portrait of someone who embodied this—it makes it that much more powerful, doesn’t it?

Remember this about Lincoln, take out the flaws, multiply it a 1000 times, and you’ll have a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth.

On the night in which he was betrayed, he looked ahead to what awaited him—the cross. All the harshness and cruelty of humanity will hammer him with spikes into the wood. He would go to that cross, knowing it was the right thing to do—it was following a higher power, a higher cause.

On that night in which he was betrayed, he could have looked only at the bigger picture, of what his death would accomplish for millennia to come. But the record we have is different. He looked…into the faces of the men he’d been with for three years. They were now confused. They’d soon be hurting, grieving, guilt-ladened.

On that night in which he was betrayed, moved by the faces of these men, he took bread…

As you take communion today, know that it is given you by someone who held on to what is right, but did it with YOU in mind.

Where’s your civil war? Where’s your cross?

Go, do the right thing—and do it with the love that changed the world.