Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

Abraham Lincoln was a religious man, and he was a spiritual man, and he was a secular man. He was essentially a very paradoxical man. How can you be religious, spiritual and secular all in one person, no matter how huge you are?

For every aspect of Lincoln’s mental, emotional, even physical life, the opposite is true.

Physically he was often really quite ungainly and unattractive, and yet at times he was absolutely beautiful and with an inner light like a candled Jack O’lantern.

Mentally he was as coldly rational and logical as a brilliant mind can be. He studied the six books of Euclid as an adult just to sharpen up his thinking. And yet he had a yonder look in his eyes, a dreamy way of listening to people, and a mystical vision of America that defies definition.

Psychologically he was among the most melancholy of men. He would be at home, miserably at home, with Edgar Allen Poe. And yet he was often the most delightfully jocular of men and would have been able to hold forth, joke for joke, with Mark Twain. He was able to go from one extreme to the other and back fast, like the weather.

And he grew up making fun of ministers and then during the Civil War he said, “Thank God for the churches.” Because he was forever the soul of honesty this must be some sort of paradox.

It is that statement I want to start with this morning, because with Lincoln being both, paradoxically, a spiritual and a secular man I want to know what he might have meant by thanking God for the churches.

And there is a reason why I would want to share with you all this intriguing composite of the sacred and the secular, the paradox of the religious churches and the secular world. You see I’m here on a mission. I want to help you all survive and thrive as a vital religious institution, a church.

Now I know folks can be uncomfortable with the word “religion” and more perhaps with the word “church.” Couldn’t we just be seekers in a faith tradition gathering in a community of the beloved? Well, yes. And among ourselves maybe we can intimately talk so. But to the world this is a religious congregation and this is a church. And it matters how the world sees us, because we are in the world. And we are in history, and history has defined us here as a religion and this, a church.

So what I preach is that it is better to say yes this is a church and we are a religious body and here are some ways that our being church and our being religious are distinctive and to us very special. For example, we are a church, but we have no cross or symbols on the walls and we have no creed you have to swear to in order to belong.

This individual self-definition problem points to a core paradox within the Unitarian Universalist church, as I understand it. Rebecca and I have been attending the UU church in Belfast now for three years. The paradox is this: A core belief in the UU tradition is that we have no core beliefs that others have to swear to and we do all agree that the best thing is to be a seeker of our own religious and spiritual truth and path in life.

The problem of course is how do you bind together a bunch of people dedicated primarily to being individualists? It is of course a paradox, a group of individualists, and it is a constant tension, a push and a pull within the body, with, I would add no right answer and really no way out. Just a continuing paradoxical tension.

Which brings us back to Lincoln, the Godfather of paradoxical tensions of seemingly self-contradictory beliefs and ideas. It is that paradoxical nature that makes him so important to us in this tradition, this religion, and in this country at this time.

Now Lincoln starts out in life a Free Baptist church goer. His mother and father are serious Christian believers in the style of the non-denominational nearly free-standing faiths. They were Bible believers and were socially greatly opposed to slavery. Lincoln was the candle-countering sexton in the Free Baptist church in Pigeon Creek, Indiana where he lived from age 7 to age 20. A note he wrote with the tally of candles remaining has been found in the crevice of the logs in the church, a church where his father as a carpenter made the pulpit. But Lincoln was not baptized and he did not join. And after church as a boy he boldly stood on a tree stump and regaled his friends with a comic exact mimicry of the preacher’s sermons. He was a daring stand out who assumed he could poke fun at a major social figure.

The preacher in these frontier churches were themselves free spirits. They were among the more educated people in any community, and they valued their spiritual freedom from creedal institutions back east as well as their solitude and meditative relationship with nature. They were emotional as well. Lincoln once said if he saw a preacher he wanted that preacher to at least look like he was fighting bees! In other words, exercised and animated. But Lincoln also did not follow his heart and emotions into religious pieties.

He followed his head. He read Thomas Paine and deeply absorbed the kind of Deism that Thomas Jefferson believed in. Jefferson who predicted the ultimate majority of Unitarianism in America. That because Jefferson did not understand the pull of emotional and psychological redemption as preached and taught in the New England evangelical churches such as those inspired by the Great Awakening and the great Jonathan Edward. Jefferson was an elite, and he miss-judged the pull for common people of faith in God and Jesus.

But Lincoln followed first in Jefferson’s footsteps. As a young man in his new home town of New Salem, Illinois, on the banks of the Sangamon River Lincoln wrote a treatise on divinity. It was so rational and radical, so much like the European secular Enlightenment thinkers that he read that his friends in his little debating society grabbed the paper from him and burned it in the wood stove. They knew Lincoln had political and social ambitions, and knew he had just sealed his fate if folks ever got wind of his nearly atheistic believes.

But word of Lincoln’s anti-religious, anti-Christian, maybe even anti-God feelings were in the wind when he ran for Congress in his young adult years. He ran against Rev. Peter Cartwright who was a famous and powerful Methodist circuit riding evangelist in the Illinois lands. So in a political debate Cartwright, claiming his own salvation through Jesus asked publically Lincoln where, in terms of ultimate fate, did he think we has going, heaven or hell. Lincoln answered quickly that he was going to Congress. And that he did. And he did so without the endorsement of a church, but with the confidence of a majority of the people.

So I think Lincoln would be very happy—at that time—to be here among us in this free-thinking tradition. He was certainly individualistic in his approach to meaning truth and religion. He was not much of a joiner, except for his political party, and he was tolerate and rational in the solidly Enlightenment ways that also inform the UU traditions.

He seems to have been in many ways a doubter, and he sadly revealed once that he felt God had elected him not to be a believer, ‘tho you feel that he wished he could have been. Lincoln most likely had not read Charles Darwin but he was born on the same day and the same year and he seems influenced, as were most major 19th century thinkers, like Mark Twain and Herman Melville, by doubt as much as by faith.

The words of Matthew Arnold in his poem “Dover Beach,” written in the 1850’s, would have resonated with Lincoln in many ways.

Poems

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; – on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the {AE}gean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Could not Lincoln murmur that poem in his heart as he watched—even out his White House Study window—ignorant armies clashing?

The Sea of Faith was withdrawing at mid-century, 19th century. Biblical certainties and natural realities were all being redefined. Biblical scholars on the Continent no longer allowed people to believe that the Bible was written by God, but rather by various human hands from various tribal points of view and even over thousands of years. Scientists no longer assured us of our central position in the animal kingdom and in the cosmos. And in the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong—as Lincoln put it—it seemed in real danger of being lost to wrong, to slavery and greed.

So what changed for Lincoln? How is it he makes such ringing pronouncements about the Justice of God in his Second Inaugural Address, and such a prophetic pronouncement that the true cause for our embattled sufferings, was our injustice done against God’s will to black people for hundreds of years?

Two things changed for Lincoln. His personal suffering increased to a Job-like fiery furnace of white hot pain. Nothing was more precious in Lincoln’s heart and mind and spirit than the freedom of his own blood sons. They meant joy and truth for him because he could allow them to be free in the very way his father did not allow him. Of his father he once said the short sentence, “I feel like a slave.” His third son, Willie, seemed to everyone to be a miniature version of the spiritual side of Lincoln. Abraham and Mary had already lost one son back in Springfield. So when his dear boy Willie died, probably of typhoid, Lincoln was inconsolable. At various times he actually had Willie’s grave exhumed and coffin opened, as gothic as that seems to us.

Lincoln also did what he had done after his first son died. He turned TO religion. He turned to the Presbyterian Church and to the minister. In Springfield it was the Rev. James Smith, a Scotsmen of rational abilities who had written a 600 page book on the role of reason and the role of faith in religious life. Lincoln read that book and he talked often with Rev. Smith. He eventually named him to be US Ambassador to Scotland. When Willie died Lincoln turned with equal fervor to the Princeton-educated Rev. Phineas Gurley, the Presbyterian minister of the New York Avenue Presbyterian church, a church where Lincoln, while not joining, had paid for a pew, which he often sat in. He sometime went down to the church for the Wednesday night Bible study and sat, half-concealed in the minister’s study with the door half-open, so he could hear the conversation without disturbing the people with the presence of the President.

Lincoln came to believe and to hope to believe in two things: the presence of God, personally, in history, and the faith that his sons were living eternally with God. He found passages in Scripture, as well as passages from Shakespeare, to define that faith and hope for him. The melancholy long withdrawing tide of the Sea of Faith was always there for Lincoln. But now so too was the in-coming tide of hope, of belief, of faith.

What is so important for us today, I believe, is that Lincoln was just as rational and enlightened and philosophically sophisticated as we are and as he was in his youthful reading of secular philosophers. But his heart and soul ALSO informed his mind and words.

And so they can for us. We need not be embarrassed by religious language, nor need we be mislabeled as fundamentalist kooks—like those who occupy the airwaves—when we ourselves feel, hope, murmur and speak religious words in a hope and faith.

One of the most significant relationships Lincoln had as President was with a Quaker woman, also named Gurley, who had come to see Lincoln about slavery. She came not to lobby him but to pray for him. And that she did. In his office, down on her knees, with her big billowing skirts around her. He never forgot that and began to write her deep theological letters and personal letters saying to her many of the same God-centered things he would later say to the nation and to the world.

And what about the churches? Lincoln had said, “Thank God for the churches.” This is the second thing that changed for Lincoln.

He did that because he was always trying to find an expression of the will of the people. Recall he believed in government of the people, by the people and for the people. It was hard to find the center that would hold. A good percent of the states had left the Union. The remaining people and states were seriously divided between the Democratic Party that wanted peace at almost any cost and the Republican Party that wanted rational re-union and the end of slavery. The town of Belfast where we live was seriously divided between newspapers that took these opposite sides, and at one point the editor of the anti-war paper was arrested by the Lincoln government for sedition, later to be freed. Between the divided political parties and the divided newspapers one of the few stable pillars of support for the freedom and union principles that Lincoln stood for were the churches. Newspapers were more highly politicized than even now. Lincoln didn’t say “Thank God for the newspapers.”

What we need to know is that churches as religious institutions play a significant role in American life, more than in almost any other nation. And it is by in large a positive, even a liberalizing, role, a humane role. If we turn our backs on the religious institutional aspect of our reality here we lose that. If we take so seriously our own individual spiritual quests that we ignore the ties that bind us to the common good and the human community we lose a lot, maybe everything.

State and church are forever constitutionally separate in our country. But religion and politics are never separate-able

In America religion and the churches have been “de-regulated,” there is no monopoly. It amazed Alec de Toqueville who had always seen religion—in Europe—as the suppressor of personal freedom. In this new country, with its freed churches, he found that religion was the proponent and the advocate for personal freedoms. And frankly they still are, across the board from evangelical mega-churches to Episcopalian Cathedrals, nobody is going to tell us what to believe or how to act our conscience. This is a common core belief.

Lincoln learned on the frontier that there were many churches, and many denominations. The social and political lesson is that truth is subdivided and no one is king of the mountain. That is a democratic principle and he saw it first not in commerce, not in media, not in schools, but in churches. He saw American freedom institutionally alive in the many voices of American religious institutions. We are a part of that chorus and we need to sing along.

Let it be so.