Saturday (February 12) is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. Lincoln was a man of contrasts. He did not go to school as child on the frontier but gave the most eloquent speech ever given on American soil, the Gettysburg Address. He was born in a log cabin but today a larger than life statue sits in the Lincoln Memorial like a Greek god. He opposed the Mexican-American War and then presided over the most brutal war in American history. He was elected by only a plurality of the voters but became the most popular president in history. And he was a deeply Biblical man who did not belong to any church.
Lincoln once told his secretary “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for that day.” President Obama quoted this statement at the National Prayer Breakfast last week in Washington, D.C. Like many another president, he knew of what Lincoln was speaking. We may not bear the heavy burden of the president, but we, too, find times when we are driven to prayer because we need a wisdom greater than our own.
In his Second Inaugural Address in 1964 Lincoln spoke of a God of justice righting the scales of injustice. As he prayed for an end to the Civil War he said “Yet, if God will that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
And yet as a man who understood the grand sweep of the whole Bible, he knew that the mercy and grace of God are always greater than the call for vengeance and punishment. It is the blood drawn by the lash upon the back of Another that grants to us the mercy and love of God despite all our sins and failings. God has said, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” (Matthew 9:13) And so in that spirit, in his final days, Lincoln called for reconciliation in the nation and a gentle reconstruction of the south. In that Second Inaugural Address he also said, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on 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 for his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
There is no greater call for us than to live today with malice toward none and charity toward all, to bind up the wounds, and do what is right as God gives the wisdom to see the right. Or, as Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12)
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