Shall We Long Endure? #4 | “The Unfinished Work of the Living” | A Sermon

0:00 My friends, we have been winding our way through a sermon series, Shall We Long Endure? Asking how our faith speaks to and maybe even through some of the great, great documents in this nation's history. The task before us has been a big one, distilling all of American history down into five small snapshots. So far we've wrestled with the Declaration of Independence, our nation's constitution, the Bill of Rights. You might think of these documents as the pencil etchings that a loving parent has scratched on the long doorframe of this nation's history. Perhaps each one of these markings tells a story of our childishness, our growth, our failure, maybe even our beauty.

1:02 we are looking backwards as a congregation so that we can look forward together and we do this not just as people bound together by a set of laws not just as those people who have made a home here in this nation and at this time but we do this as followers of Jesus as God's people committed to a fragile and an aspirational American experiment for the sake of our neighbors.

1:38 And so today, today we turn our attention to a new kind of document, a document that is not a social contract ratified by a congress or a convention, but we turn to a speech, a speech written to a particular people at a particular riven moment returned to lincoln's gettysburg address you see war had erupted and that dream that dream ratified by those framers so long ago well it had been for too long trampled over by the heinous institution of chattel slavery. That dream for too long had been denied to women, to enslaved peoples, to the non-land-owning poor. And this speech, in many ways, was Lincoln's response to all of the doomsayers who divined that that civic dream had been finished.

2:41 our dreams they said could never be wide enough for the moment and so as it happened in in Pennsylvania in eastern Pennsylvania in a small town called Gettysburg 150,000 troops descended and over the course of three days 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives and now only five months later a large cemetery would be dedicated to those who had been lost and now you might be surprised to know that Abraham Lincoln did not make the list of preferred candidates who would dedicate that cemetery that day there were three other diviners and prophets and poets who were asked before the chief executive, though eventually after they said no, the planning committee sent Lincoln a brief note only a month before the dedication was to happen saying, and I quote, that it might be appropriate for the chief executive to share just a few remarks. Imagine that as your invitation. The date had been pushed back to the heavy cold of a November morning because the main speaker, a celebrity senator, had said that he did not have enough time to prepare for what the moment required. And still, on a frigid November morning in eastern Pennsylvania, 15,000 people gathered. The bid to rebury the bodies of those lost had been delayed. And so as Lincoln's executive coach arrived the night, the morning before, he would have seen the coffins lining the field where he would give the address.

4:49 and on that morning after that silver-tongued senator sat down after giving and I kid you not an almost two and a half hour speech Lincoln took a breath and to a riven nation and maybe to onlookers who were caught in the haze of boredom in the cold. They'd be tapping their feet, looking at their watches. Lincoln rose and he shared these words. four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war, and we have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that that nation might live.

6:19 And it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, but in a larger sense, In a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate. We cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it. Far above our power to add or detract, the world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work for which they fought here and have thus nobly advanced this work. For it is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion.

7:29 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, and for the people shall not perish from this earth. President Abraham Lincoln, November 19th, 1863. holding Lincoln's words, let us turn to God in prayer as we approach scripture this morning. God, may the words of our mouths, the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, our rock and redeemer. Amen.

8:27 words from the letter of St. Paul to the church in Ephesus, chapter 2. so then you are no longer strangers and aliens but you are citizens with the saints you are also members of the household of god built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with jesus christ himself the cornerstone and in him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. My friends, this is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

9:19 you know when I first told one of my spiritual mentors back home in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that I was feeling called to seminary, that I might feel that divine nudge to be a pastor, that spiritual mentor of mine responded by saying this, Chris, anyone who wants to be a good Christian should definitely not be a pastor. Now, this person, this person who still is a very meaningful figure in my life, this person who has decades of ministry experience, well, he was probably being a little too pessimistic that day. But what I took him to mean was something like this. That there are some times when institutional leadership makes it really hard to be a Christian.

10:22 You see, he warned me, that small modicum of honor, of reputation, afforded to someone, maybe to you, the need to keep up appearances, to make hard decisions, to do the right thing. that there is sometimes a space, dear friends, that opens up between our personal convictions and the expectations of leadership. And that is a space that I have discovered that I am most desperately in need of forgiveness. I think Lincoln lived in that space for a lot of his presidency, that space between personal conviction and the demands of leadership in a tumultuous moment. I think Lincoln often knew the liberation that war would eventually bring, and yet he also lived with the reality, the bewildering tragedy that it also incurred.

11:31 and if you ask historians many have rattled off their theories about the motivations and the consequences of Lincoln's great speech on that chilly November morning and many would tell you that Lincoln Lincoln's aim was political that he had to get the union to continue to support the war effort, especially after the battle at Gettysburg had tipped the scales in the Union's favor. This speech, historians argue, is a great act of rhetorical persuasion, of rhetorical leverage, meant to convince a skeptical audience to keep close and to keep believing in Lincoln's cause. They're probably right about that. They're probably right.

12:30 But the Civil War had also left Lincoln as a spiritually broken person. You see, Lincoln's young son, Willie, only a year before this speech was given, had passed away from typhoid fever. And the Presbyterian preacher from North Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., who preached Willie's eulogy. That day he spoke of the deep mystery of God's presence with us, even in the midst of tragedy, even in the midst of our grief. Perhaps it is grief's prerogative to dismiss us of any certain words about what God is up to in a moment. But after the funeral was done and the eulogy was given, Lincoln then returned across the street to the executive mansion where he heard politicians from both the north and the south speak with such ease, with such confidence about how God had in fact ordained the war that was before them.

13:43 but I wonder if in the back of Lincoln's mind, I wonder if what he thought in hearing those words was not the God who sits enthroned above all, not the God who is sovereign above all things, who is provident above all things, but I wonder if when Lincoln heard those words from those politicians north and south who were so easy to jettison human life. I wonder if he thought that God man Jesus. I wonder if he thought about his son Willie. I wonder if he thought about the cross. You see that thorn in our side Jesus who came not to conquer but to be conquered for the sake of his enemy. That thorn in the side Jesus who never lets us get away with our worst instincts, maybe in the back of his mind, Lincoln heard those words rattled off by that old dusty apostle Paul, a Roman citizen imprisoned and chained, pointing to that Jesus.

15:02 he's already torn it all down for you are no longer strangers you are no longer foreigners you are no longer enemies but you are citizens with the saints my dear friends, how often we settle for so much less than St. Paul's words.

15:29 If I had to wager, I'd say that much of the problem with a lot of the Christianity that we see in our politics today isn't that it is too Christian, but that it isn't Christian enough. You see, it's a Christianity that doesn't seek to reconcile enemies but to create them. A Christianity that has decided that only the strong will survive. A Christianity that rips families from homes, from schools, calls them foreign enemies. A Christianity that jeers at racist tropes used for political gain. It's a Christianity that has forgotten Christ himself.

16:16 Blasphemy. And still, St. Paul looks down, surveying the scene, looking what we have become of ourselves, and he whispers to us, there is still another way forward. fifth avenue presbyterian church when we are born into this world we are handed the part that we are to play we are told that might is right that our freedom has been given to us that we might be the conquerors that we might be the heroes of the story but maybe this is the oldest trick in the book. It's been around at least since our ancestor Cain decided that he couldn't abide any longer with his brother Abel.

17:11 It's what turns siblings into enemies. And Christian theologians down through the years have named this impulse. They have called it the libido dominandi, the lust, the thirst, the hunger to dominate that runs through the human heart. but there is another kind of power. There is a kind of power that Christ alone makes possible. It is a power that doesn't make an enemy of all that stands in its way, but it is a Christian power that recognizes that we were once the enemy. An enemy that has been reconciled to God in the person of Jesus Christ. you see the young adults of this church I think they push me to be a better Christian a better person of faith and when I think about the state of American Christianity in this nation it is often not the people in power that I look to for inspiration but it's you it's those young adults and so a week ago I was I was catching up with one of our young adult leaders from this congregation, she had recently been on a trip to the West Bank, and she told me about a farm that they had visited while they were there, owned by a family named Nassar, a Palestinian Lutheran family just outside of Bethlehem.

18:57 She recalled a conversation with a young boy, a member of that family named Daoud, who recalled threats and intimidation and even attacks that his family had endured. The destruction and ripping up of crops, of trees, their livelihoods. And this young adult told me about how bewildering it was that what caught her attention the most was not even his words, but it were these large words written on a boulder right at the driveway at the front of that hundred-acre farm. That printed on that rock were the words, we refuse to become enemies. This is the message that I think Lincoln knew.

19:53 That we are bound together by a common thread of our own humanity. And when our bodies pour over with the desire for retribution, for vengeance, that Christ shows us another way. But I think Lincoln had that vision. that there is a time, a day that is coming when the lion shall lie down with the lamb, when those who for too long have sat alone in the darkness that diminishes their humanity, that we will take off our masks, that we will remove our jackets, that we will lay down our badges and our weapons, and we will stop our warring ways.

20:47 And Christ will draw us to a table where we will sat down with those people who we feared, who maybe even we ridiculed as enemy. And we will feast. And we will see them for the beloved child that they are. And together, after we have been fed, God will wash us of all of our sins.