Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

So here’s a joke, since Lincoln is our subplot today and Lincoln knew there was wisdom and humanity in humor. And it’s a joke Lincoln told on himself. I used it in my radio show this past week—first joke I ever told on the radio, but then I didn’t tell my first joke till I was in my twenties and my therapist recommended it. I was a serious boy.

So there are these two old Quaker ladies and it’s the start of the Civil War and they are quietly talking, are wondering, almost arguing, over this question: Who would the Lord favor in this contest, the South’s President Jefferson Davis or President Abraham Lincoln?

The first lady says, “Well I believe that the Lord will favor President Davis, because President Davis is a praying man.”

The Second lady says, “Well, I believe that the Lord will favor President Lincoln, because President Lincoln is a praying man.”

To which the first lady responds: “Well, yes, but the Lord will think Lincoln is joking!”

So maybe we will laugh again, maybe at the end of this sermon. But the issue before us in all seriousness is that we have very little to laugh about these days. Which, of course, to keep our perspective, was Lincoln’s situation as well—little laugh but and yet always willing, even needing, to.

I want to be precise as to what particular seriousness I am calling us to cope with today. There is a crowd of, let us call them seriousnesses, newly present to us. But here’s the one, the first one for us to deal with because if we cannot deal with it we cannot hope to address the crowd. Of course I speak with the uncertainty that any of us can rise up enough to see anything clearly and say anything hopeful and helpful. I may, like many of those we hear from these days, have really nothing good to say. But with that confession of real humility and fear let me say that our number one priority problem is this:

We now see that our world is not nearly what we thought it was. The world that WE live in, our world, is not what we thought it was. And because that is our basic and fundamental, and really overwhelming, experience we are disoriented. We are unmoored. At sea in waters we did not even know existed.

We each have our own version of all of this world and national news. I think we can start together with a quote from a letter from the two heads of the California Legislature—recall that California is the world 6th greatest economy recently replacing France. So it’s report from a significant portion of the world. They wrote that, “This morning we woke up to a very strange new land.” And then they go on to list the values of life they believe dominate and encompass their world, value that have been eclipsed in a shocking way. Maybe just the picture of Alice in Wonderland and her decent into an altered reality world, and the words, “Curiouser and curiouser” name the change for you.

Once upon a time Abraham Lincoln told people that they must “disenthrall” themselves before they could save the country. He saw that all, especially congress, were in a thrall—enthralled, entranced, by ideas and orientations that no longer applied to reality. They were in the dark. We must disentrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country, he proclaimed.

Now most of us don’t exactly know how a person goes about un-entralling oneself.

Lincoln had begun this tearing things down to their raw core with his own confession in his own first great speech of his final career—the House Divided speech where he simply saw the moral case against slavery as the ultimate case and that a house could not stand when half the people thought that slavery was wrong while the other half thought that slavery was right. This would not be able to stand up, he said. We will become all one thing or the other, all slave or all free. One reason he knew this was he knew land, the land, he had been a surveyor, he looked a maps, he saw that there was one map that worked for us, and that there was, he said “no line” that could be drawn on that map that would successfully divide us and keep us peacefully divided.

In other words he was very particular in his logic here, and what it takes to hold up a house from division and fall. His basic code sentence: “A house divided against itself cannot stand” was a sentence he put in quotes. Why? Some say he got it from the New Testament—but actually it’s kind of stretch to get that parable to say what he meant—because it’s about the devil talking to himself. Lincoln had seen the actual sentence he used in his grade school Reader in a quote from the moral of an Aesop Fable. It was a simple childhood truth to him.

He was looking for clarity, from maps, from the land, from logic and his mind, from the New Testament, from Aesop’s Fables because people were confused and lost as to what America meant and what it was meant to be. They didn’t know who to become or what to do, or even clearly where they were. So he began that speech this way,

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.”   So too if we knew where we were, wither we are going, then we could better judge what to do.

So we have a problem, a big problem. There are several others of course, say climate change, or trustable institutions, or the mechanics of governance. We may never understand enough to solve those, but we surely won’t if we cannot cope with our first big problem our lostness, what I would define as this: Our world is not what we thought it was.

Did the world change or did a hidden part of the world just suddenly appear. We are tempted to find someone or other to blame. Regardless, did the world change or did we just not see the whole world, the world as it really was, really is?

Most of us remember where we were when Kennedy was shot. This is bigger than that because there are huge worldwide forces behind this change. When the stock market crashed in 1929, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on 9/11, those are days the world changed.

So we are enthralled with our old world and feel it disappearing like a clearing morning mist, too quickly, in a too hot sun, and exposing things we’ve never seen before.

Many people are having chronic sleep disorders, tumultuous bad dreams, don’t watch and listen to the news any more, are reluctant to talk to anyone, or can’t stop talking about it. The outside world has broken into the sacred hour of the therapy session for many. Hundreds and thousands of people in various associations, professional groups, are holding gatherings for help from each other as to how to live all this. We don’t even yet agree on what all this is. Just that the world is strange and very different.

Here is what Lincoln’s life can tell us about our life spiritually and as citizens, how it blazes a trail for us.

He included doom and gloom into his very soul. Solitude and silence were means of intelligence for him. From dark silence he learned wisdom to see all sides of people and a life issue. He came to feel compassion that was greater than his ambition. He let the sorrow of a broken heart connect him to himself and to others and to the greatest issue of our country’s birth—slavery, the national shame.

Lincoln was a grief stricken man, from the time his mother died horribly before his eyes when he was nine, to his sister’s death in child birth, to his father’s cruelty and abuse, the loss of his first true love which some historians credit more than others, and his self-perception as a potentially great human being versus his estimation of his rustic frontier social and cultural situation.

Lincoln came to love four things. And he love all four. He loved truth. He could not be dishonest. And yet people all around him who did not tell the truth were taking over the government. He loved knowledge. He could not tolerate not knowing something to the full extent of his mind. And people who were ignorant, including rich and deplorable slave owners, were expanding into a new dominance of America. He loved people, and he loved the idea of America. He thought America was the best thing that people had ever had. In 1850 and 1852 the America he loved was being whipped off of the face of the earth.

Events we only have time to name: The Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the coming of a renewed fugitive slave law; his election loss to Senator Stephen Douglas, and soon the coming of the Dred Scott Supreme Court case that took black people out of the Constitution; and the raid on Harpers Ferry following the outbreak of civil war in Kansas, signaling new levels of random violence. All this doomed the world he loved, an American world that he cared about more than anything else. And so he grieved for a long time. And so must we. Without feeling this we will never know what to do with it in any viable way and we will only become irritable, angry, depressed, or indifferent or violent.

Lincoln, although melancholy and grieving, although a broken-hearted lover, had a vision of life defined by the wonderful word Yonder. He not only had a mechanical inventor’s way of seeing the here and now he had the mystical vision of the sages of India—a way to see the there and then.

From within that vision he had patience to let what can unfold to unfold. He was not sanguine. He did not expect too much. He was patient. He could sit with what is. He was willing to wait before he acted, and even to be confused and uncertain, and most significantly to dwell in ambiguity. Historians increasingly see in Lincoln the stance and poise that the poet John Keats named as a Negative Capability, the ability to live and act without positive thinking, without absolute values or total assurances, and with a tolerance for the anxieties that come with all of that. In that sense he was realistic.

Lincoln found life in language as well as in silence. He needed to read poetry, to hear Shakespeare-preferably himself reading it aloud—to go to opera and to plays, and to tell jokes. He wrote only about 100 speeches in his life, but he turned to the spoken word to shape life itself, and he actually spent a lot of time as an adult going to church to hear sermons, especially by two very learned Presbyterian ministers, one in Springfield and the other in Washington, and he read their books. He just never joined a church nor got baptized nor believed in Jesus as the savior.

Language led him to the Enlightenment quest for philosophical truth and to the Biblical quest for truth and wisdom. Along with reason itself he was willing to believe that truth came from great sources of mystery and even revelation.

What I believe, then, we Americans can most learn for Lincoln here is that tragedy is as much a part of our national story as is progress, that moral ambiguity is a much a part of our actions as is virtue. Irony is a truth stance. Lincoln thought we were God’s ALMOST chosen people, not God’s chosen people.

From those darker views Lincoln draws a moral conclusion—we cannot live without facing the consequences of our failures as persons and as people. And then he acted as best he could within that compromised framework. We have been trying for along long time to live without facing the consequences of our actions, from Indian genocide, entrenched racism, economic and imperial exploitation, environmental greed, and nationalistic arrogance. We have a piper to pay. Or, if you will, a God to come to terms with, a God of Justice as well as of mercy and love. And we have half of our people not willing or able to do that—to face the consequences of the dark part of who we have been.

But this is a level of maturity that other nations have had to achieve and it is time for us to get over our Golden Boy Complex, even as we have, for a while, a golden boy president.

We then are in the midst of historical changes, a history that is changing, and we will be changed—either we will disentrall ourselves and will be lighted down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation—as Lincoln said–or we will be left, I fear, in the dark.

Here are five values Lincoln embodied that can be a code for present help out of the confusion and depression that comes with losing a world. Way to emerge into the world again, when we get to that point. These are compiled by a noted psychologist and student of human adaptation. They are listed in the book Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled his Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk. As a student of Lincoln Shenk shows that Lincoln himself embodies each of these coping strategies. He names humor as the number one coping ability. Of course Lincoln hardly ever took two steps without stopping to tell a joke. The reason that psychologist says it is the single most effective coping skill is this “…one can be lively without pushing from one’s mind what’s painful and real.” In fact Shenk, who has written for the New Yorker quotes their famous cartoon editor Robert Mankoff as saying, “The core of all humor, the reason for it all, is unhappiness.”

A second practice that he determined healthy people have, and Lincoln then is seen as a healthy melancholy person, is suppression which is “quite unlike denial, it is a selective forceful act of pushing away oppressive stimuli.” A third practice—which will surprise you who believe in the NOW moment world view—is anticipation which involves dealing with the moment of now by looking ahead at the good and the bad that lie in the future. That is what kept Lincoln from over-hoping. A fourth skill is altruism, the simple act of placing the welfare of others above oneself—which from rescuing turtles from cruel boys to ordering Grant to treat Lee and his men with respect and compassion at Appomattox–Lincoln ALWAYS had, basic altruism. And fifth, sublimation—turning passions into creation, like art, words, events. Making something of it all. For Lincoln it was words.

To do these three things—H-S-A-A-S, humor, suppression, anticipation, altruism, and sublimation—will also keep us out of doing two things we need particularly not to do. Not to argue with our opponents and not to hide with our friends.

One. We need not, in fact should not, argue with our opponents. Not so long ago we had thought the big challenge ahead of us was how to get blue people and red people to talk with each other and become civil and then learn to compromise. That will, especially in government, still need to be re-mastered as a basic skill for the survival of a democratic republic. But the color scheme has changed from blue and red to things black or white, in the moral sense and in the racial sense. While we need not assume that our opponent is evil—and they need not project evil on to us as well—something both sides, it can be proven, do—our ability to cope with black and white begins with not trying to change our opponent’s minds.

Centuries ago Saint Thomas Aquinas stated that you cannot argue anyone into anything. The only way to argue with someone is to argue with them from on their own ground, their logic, their opinion, their visions and hope. That becomes empathetic acts of listening first.

Two. Don’t put your head in your own sand box. A generation ago sociologists Robert Bellah and others asserted in the book “Habits of the Heart” that soon, and this was in the early 80’s Americans if we continued to retreat into individualism would become a collage of what they called “the small colonies of the saved.” While we will need our base, and our own supportive communities more than ever, we have—in our worldview—a natural desire to be open and inclusive, and we will need to stay in the game. In terms of our base communities, I know a group of spiritual directors locally who are meeting in small groups to help find a way forward. Local clergy are doing the same in Belfast. I know a group of editors and media writers in Michigan who are meeting regularly to form an action plan of resistance, I know a group of educators who are putting together a national network based on The Idea of America curriculum from Williamsburg, Virginia. And I am sure UU’s and UCC’ers and all are gathering in tighter consultation and action. But here is one of the values that our side has that it needs to proclaim.

We like bridges more than walls. We are the types who desire to be open to the outside world, not the gated community. But notice we are surrounded here by four walls. Walls have a moral and civil claim. It is just when and where and why. That is one reason this has been so disturbing for us—we did not see what was beyond our own walls.

Our job is to see what we see, and suddenly we see that there really are millions of people, even neighbors and closer, who really do not see the world the way we do. We did not seem to think they were really in the world—‘tho where we thought they were is an interesting signal to our own arrogance and blindness.

Finally re-consider the word “patriotism.” I did a workshop talk in Belfast last fall on Patriotism as a Spiritual Practice, it was at the UU church and some people actually came. Like the words “religion,” “patriotism” it has gotten a bad name. But the core of patriotism is love, a wider circle of love than your family or tribe or class. Lincoln saw the nation as hope for human life that would allow freedom to the common person and equal opportunity to grow, and it was the best alternative to kingdoms and to despots. We can also transfer that vision to the planet and see it as Lincoln saw the nation, as the last best hope for humankind. Earth is God’s almost chosen home. But we can start with that affection for our nation. We would not be so upset if our long-buried patriotism had not been so attacked.

And so here is a last way to return to coping. Humor. The best joke often draws upon the most dire circumstances. Thanks to Josh Shenk’s book I found that Lincoln often used to often tell this. A traveler on the frontier found himself in rough terrain one night. A terrific thunder storm broke out His horse refused to go on. And so the man had to proceed on foot. The pearls of thunder were frightful. Only the lightening afforded him ways to go forward in the dark. One bolt, which seemed to shatter the earth beneath him, brought the man to his knees. He was, however, not a praying man, but he went on to issue this short and clear petition: “O Lord, if it is all the same to you, give us a little more light and a little less noise.”

This is what we need: A little more light, and a little less noise. May it be so.