Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

Abraham Lincoln was a people person. God is a people person.

The relationship between those two sentences is this: being a people person was Lincoln’s way of coming to know God.

In the end both God and Lincoln share this common focus on people. The people-focus of God and the focus on people of Lincoln is what, in the end, drew them together.

In the Bible God creates humanity because God is lonely and wants company. There is a profound aloneness that surrounds the life of Abraham Lincoln, and it is also his need for company that drives him first to people and then to God.

So we open the sermon with a theological statement: there is a humanitarian aspect to the Nature of God.

We move to a psychological statement: the humanitarian nature of God is what draws the humanitarian Lincoln into a spiritual relationship with God.

God as the humane spirit shows up in the last great words of Lincoln. Lincoln quotes the Bible saying, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” After naming the nature of God he goes on to define the nature of human relationships, “with malice towards none, and with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which many achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

When he says all those things, he is simply repeating what he knows about God: that God is our judge; and from God: our teacher of mercy, our commandment-giver for love, our source of mercy, and our vision of justice and peace.

And the work we are to finish, the work we are in, is God’s work. That is Lincoln’s conclusion.

How he got there is the story of his spiritual journey and it is a journey of relationships, relationships with children, with women, and with men, and then with God.

The spiritual journey of Lincoln is largely a journey into the Biblical and historical nature of God. Lincoln’s spirit was shaped by our two great sources of language. One is Shakespeare and the other the Bible. He finds God, as does the Bible itself, in the life of nations, the struggles in history for justice and freedom, and he defines human relationships through his Shakespearean education as well as in the mercy and forgiving spirit of the Biblical Jesus.

There are other ways to know God and God has attributes other than being a people person. God is also the creator and many of us come to know God through nature and the creation, largely in the silences of nature. The poet of India, Tagore, writes of the founding ancient sages of Indian who lived in the primeval forest learning to focus inwardly and to dwell in passive consciousness not on active progress. There are deep wellsprings in Lincoln’s spiritual life of such inner passive silence. His pioneer prairie youth defined his meditative spirit much like that of the old sages of India.

There are also ways to know God in words and the life of the mind. There too Lincoln dwelt, first as a doubting Enlightenment deist, then as a poet, then as a reason-driven lawyer, and then, of course, as a wise man.

One way of knowing God that Lincoln did not follow was the Christian path of accepting Jesus Christ as his lord and savior and of being baptized into the Christian Church. There is some reason to believe that Lincoln felt a longing and a fated exclusion from such faith, but he was never drawn to the frontier evangelical versions of Christianity.

It is in relationships that Lincoln most realized his spiritual life. In his relationships we see both the Biblical historical quality of his eventual faith and the secular human side of his enduring spirit.

Relationships, for us, are our deepest way of knowing each other and for knowing anything spiritual or divine. The great Jewish theologian Martin Buber gave us the iconic categories “I and Thou” to image and reveal the dialogical nature of life. Sacred life is elevated into I-Thou relationships. Profane life never gets out of I-It relationships.

We now know that all knowledge is relational, from sub-atomic physics and Relativity Theory—and what is relativity but a measure of relationship?—to the psychological creation of life and consciousness in maternal bonding.

Relationships are the basis not just of physics and psychology but also culture. The inspirations of language, music and art are nothing more than our aspirations returned to us in some form. Culture, and religion as well, are the embodiments of relational hopes. That is what prayer is, hope’s boomerang. The great American Theologian Jonathan Edwards defined the Trinity as God in communal relationship, a three-sided Thou.

Let us look then at some of the I’s and the Thou’s in Lincoln’s life. Let us start with a quote from Lincoln, one that we know well:

“….and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Those closing words of Lincoln’s famous short Gettysburg Address are words all about people. Lincoln’s spiritual life was mainly all about people. He loved people. He had an almost mystical sense of America. To him America was a place for people to be together in a new way, in the spirit of freedom and equality.

When we see how Lincoln related to children, to women, to his fellow men, we see the focus of Lincoln’s spiritual life plain as day: people. Often we define people’s spiritual or religious life by what ideas they believe. Lincoln believed in people a long time before he ever believed in God.

Sometimes we define someone’s spiritual life by what they love. The great commandments are: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God…and thy neighbor as thyself. Lincoln loved a lot. He loved the land, nature, the spacious skies, animals. He loved words, Biblical and Shakespearean, poetical. But what he loved the most was people. He loved individuals and he loved The People.

When Lincoln closed the Gettysburg Address with his call to dedication and sacrifice so that “this nation, under God, (would have) to a new birth of freedom,” he was chanting, it was his spiritual mantra: “Of the people, by the people, for the people.”

His love of people was as clear with children as well as with women and men.

Lincoln embodied the words of Jesus, “Suffer the little children to come onto me for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Little children came to Lincoln streaming their clouds of glory behind them as they flowed to his side.

There is the wonderful story, probably true, of young boy Lincoln holding his younger friend upside down so that he could pat his muddy foot prints across the whitewashed cabin ceiling. More, when this practical joke was over, he himself re-whitewashed the ceiling. His step mother said of him that he was the best boy any mother could ever hope for.

As a lawyer in Springfield when Lincoln would walk home from his office the neighborhood children would flock after him as if he were Hans Christian Andersen. He would take one of them and hoist him high on his shoulder near his tall, tall hat.

Note that it was not just to his side. In these memorable stories Lincoln uses his own muscle and height to elevate a child to the higher and equal status of himself, even more.

We see in Lincoln’s heart breaking love for his two sons, who die in childhood, his wonderful capacity for compassion and for relationship. We know that his own relationship with his father was estranged and hard if not also empty of much of what Lincoln would have longed for. He redeems his own inner boy in his loving relationships with his sons and other children. His rapport with little girls is also legendary.

The Bible often tells us that the love of God is like a father’s love for his children. Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son, the wayward youth who is welcomed back with love and honor. That was how Lincoln saw the South—as wayward sons to, of course, welcome back with justice and honor. Lincoln’s spiritual life with children defines his presidential policy of national reunion, where all the children really are equal.

Now here’s another quote, but this is about Lincoln by his admiring and devoted step mother, Sarah Bush Johnston.

“Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused in fact, or even in appearance, to do anything I requested him….I never gave him a cross word in all my life….his mind and mine….seemed to move together, move in the same channel.”

Sarah was gifted, like her step-son, as a people person, creating a blended family under very harsh pioneer conditions. We can hear in her words, the mystic chords of her memory, the kind of person Lincoln was. After his death and her own son’s, she said that Abe “was the best boy I ever saw or ever expect to see.” He returned her deep affection. A mutual relative said, “…no man could love a mother more than he loved her.” Not only did she make a potentially divided house stand, she moved in her mind in one channel with the mind of her extraordinary step-son.

There is a spirit of harmony, an almost mystical unity, that characterizes their relationship. Such a spirit of union also characterizes his relationship with the people and the nation of America. America ends up rocking its soul in the bosom of Abraham. That is one of the more feminine aspects of the relationships that Lincoln creates. What then about his relationships with women themselves, other than his step mother and his beloved dead mother Nancy Hanks, whom he always called his “sweet angel mother.” What can we say about Lincoln’s spiritual life and his relationships with women?

Lincoln was awkward as hell with women who were possible mates. In young male years he most likely a typical pioneer male, crude and more like a growing up Huckleberry Finn, except that he did not hunt, fish, drink, or swear. He did wrestle a lot and he told bawdy jokes of the kind that the Scottish poet Robert Burns would tell. He was snowed under by the fierce and voluble Mary Todd, and he loved her as a mother figure, calling her “Mother” as she called him “Mr. Lincoln.” His relationships with women worked best inside the Mother-Son matrix and he was a 19th century patriarch when it came to responding to his wife’s emotions, the more emotional she got the more rational he got. (Inside all that they were dear friends, compatriots, partners in ambition, and most likely pretty astonished with each other and the fact that they were together, for better and for worse. In grief they had a deep bond.) But his limitations with women were his limitations with the South: He misjudged the depth of their emotions and he responded to their raw passions with reason and authority, and that just made them madder.

There would not have been the feminine face of God for him, God was the distant Calvinistic patriarch, The Almighty, but who yet also had a Christ-like merciful side that would have been every bit like what his stepmother brought to his life when he was the suffering servant to his father.

His strange passivity at times has been defined as his inner feminine nature–a kind of spiritual repose, an acceptance, a calm and non-reactive spirit that we would see as almost Zen Buddhist-like.

He was kindly like a mother when almost no one else was. He forgave the vast majority of the Native Americans accused of murder in a Minnesota rebellion. He would not have Union deserters shot for cowardice because, he said, “it would scare the poor devils too much” and those who ran from battle he said could not be held responsible for what their legs might do!

But as President his mind flowed in the channel of another woman, the Quaker minister and leader Eliza P. Gurney. In his relationship with her, largely through letters after their first meeting, he found a spiritual companion for his most important thoughts. She had come to the White House in 1862 with three other women for the sole purpose of comforting and encouraging him. Most ministers who came to visit Lincoln came to tell him what God told them he should do. She, rather, preached to him, and she did do that, of his need to seek divine guidance. She even got down on her knees and prayed for him and for “light and wisdom.”

He must have been amazed to see this skirted woman on her knees, amazed and moved. He later wrote her a letter about his “deepest feelings, especially religious ones.” So says Lincoln historian Ron White. Two years later, after the “fiery trail” of the Civil War had seemed to lead to no good end, Lincoln wrote her another letter. His views on slavery and on God were coming clearer to him. In fact they were not only clearer to him they were flowing in the same channel as were her’s. He penned his deepest hopes ad resignations to her, saying, “Surely (He, God) intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion which no mortal could make and no mortal could stay.”

In this personal and spiritual relationship with Eliza P. Gurney Lincoln first stated what he would later tell his cabinet and then the whole country and the world in his Second Inaugural Address, “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect,” and, in his words, the purposes of the Almighty are to punish all the people, North and South, for the great wrong of slavery until some justice has been achieved.

In the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln, as with his step mother, his mind flows in a channel with this Quaker woman minister, seeing God’s will in history. In the divine light and wisdom of what the wrong of slavery has meant he promises God that he will do something about it, first the Emancipation Proclamation and then the 13th Amendment. This spiritual relationship makes history.

When it comes to his relationships with men Abraham Lincoln is a case study in the masculine spiritual journey. Ambition and leaving his mark is Lincoln’s early path. But even in his secular youth spiritual values are at stake. In his initiation to the maturity Lincoln engages in dark and then light versions of will and fame.

Emerging from the legal servitude to his father, up to the age of 21, Lincoln runs for public office in his new home town of New Salem, Illinois. This is what he write in the local Sangamon Journal as his political advertisement,

“Everyman is said to have his peculiar ambition…I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worth of their esteem.” March 15, 1832

He is becoming his own man. He is at that crucial turning point of initiation. Every society has its way of defining how a boy becomes a man. In traditional societies the boy is ususally13. In Lincoln’s society the legal age is 21 and he is 23 in this his first campaign. The turning point of initiation is where religion and psychology have traditionally merged in a ritual passage. Lincoln’s does not involve rejecting his maternal bond, however. Joining the Black Hawk War he assumes his grandfather’s title and name becoming, like him, Captain Abraham Lincoln. But his identity is solved not with a title but with the values of personal relationships. He wants most to have “esteem.” It is a beautiful word that speaks of admiration and worth and it requires a community to bestow it. Esteem is a gift of accumulated relationships. He is not saying he wants to great or superior to others. Interestingly these values also translate into his presidency. He does not try to make America great or superior, just true to its union promise. His hopes for himself become his hopes for America.

To be granted esteem and to be seen as worthy, which are not so much prizes or achievements as a gift. Lincoln thinks he needs to be an ethical and useful person. That is the opportunity he asks for in running for the lower house of the state General Assembly. To be worthy he must, he says using another beautiful word, “render” himself worthy of their vote, and he promises to do that by fulfilling his duty. It is not victories he is asking for but virtues he is promising.

Lincoln lost his first election. He came in eighth out of 13 and only the top four got to go to the State House. But he did gain esteem. He won 92% of the vote in his hometown, 277 of 300 votes. Prior to his defeat he had also written that if his friends and neighbors want to keep him in “the background” that is OK with him, he said, using yet another beautiful word, “chagrined.” He will not be chagrined as he is too familiar with disappointments for that.

Lincoln is neither chagrined nor, at that time, glorified. It is the spirit of his relationships that illuminate his early definition of manhood, rendering him worthy of esteem forever.

Finally, or should it be ultimately, it is Lincoln spiritual relationship with God that defines him. Again, as with children, women, and men, his relationship here defines his relationship to America and how he viewed America’s relationship with God.

His ultimate theological statement begins to emerge for us in a penciled personal document he wrote for himself sometime a year or so after his meeting with Mrs. Gurney. This is what he wrote to himself—later to be found, after his death, in his papers by his secretary John Hay, “I am almost ready to say that this is probably true—that God wills this contest.…”

Lincoln may eventually echo themes from Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Jesus, but he begins with cries like Job. The horror and the terror of the Civil War was not like anything anybody had ever seen before, nor expected to see. And so Lincoln, always most angry when he couldn’t understand something, asks, “Why?” Why does this go on and on? And because he was both a fatalist and one who increasingly acknowledges the providence of “The Almighty” asks, “Why does God not stop this?”

He has comforted a little girl in a letter to her about her grief, saying he that knows personally that time will help. He has comforted mothers who lost sons. He has consoled men who have lost brothers. Why can he not comfort himself and the nation? As a logical lawyer he explores his theology, coming to the tentative conclusion that he is “almost” ready to say that this is “probably” true that God wills this contest. He is similarly nearly agnostic when, in his Second Inaugural, he defines how it is that God’s purposes are at stake. He has subjective and backwards ways of asserting this, saying only, if we shall suppose that slavery is under God’s providence then “shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?” This may be the first time he has used the term “Living God,” but he certainly couldn’t think of a more indirect way to assert what he later tells people was his bold claim: that people don’t like to hear that their purposes and God’s are not the same. But he has not counted himself in the troop of believers, but just notes what it is that they believe.

He is more direct when it comes to actuality of suffering. There is a “woe” due to those who offend God. And he says quite boldly and simply, “The Almighty has his own purposes.” This we can pair with his private sentence that he has “almost probably” concluded, “That God wills this contest.”

There are three reasons to trust Lincoln’s theological conclusion here. One, he states it first privately and only to himself. This is not campaign rhetoric. Two, when he makes these thoughts public he makes both the North and the South guilty in his theological assertion, and therefor pleasing neither side and risking disapproval from both. Three, he is overly and logically guarded in a statement that if he were seeking political gold he could have found a plethora of fustian phrases to spin.

In Lincoln’s personal relationship we see his spiritual qualities and the spiritual nature of all his relationships. With children he was “at play in the fields of the Lord.” With some women he flowed in deep channels. With Mary it was of thinking and grief, with his step mother and Mrs. Gurney it was of divine love and wisdom. With men he valued esteem and equality over successful ambition. With God he was willing and able to not only meet his maker but to meet his match.

In the famous carriage ride with Mary on the afternoon of Good Friday before his assassination that evening, Lincoln and Mary talk of dreams about their future and travel. Lincoln’s mind goes, strangely, we could think, toward the Holy Lands and Jerusalem. Why?

There he would be in the land of other Biblical Kings like himself, David and Solomon, men who also alone had faced God as he had. These would be like the Kings he met in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Solomon and David would have been the kinds of men with whom Lincoln could have had full and spiritual relationships of shared anguish, guilt and glory. They too were men who met God as the maker of history, who acts in history, who judges and redeems, and shows both power and mercy.

Lincoln, as President, has had a growing relationship with this Biblical God who, as we have heard, he says, is almost probably acting in judgment and mercy even in our own history.

Lincoln breaks new ground with America theologically. Only one President, out of the 18 Inaugural Addresses given before his Second, quote God, and that was John Quincy Adams. Lincoln in his701word Address names God 14 times, quotes the Bible four times and prayer three. But more, he asserts that this whole history, his and ours, has been a spiritual relationship with the Living God whose will he can almost understand.