Daily Lesson for April 15, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson:

42:1 Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.

42:2 He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street;

42:3 a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. (Isaiah 42:1-3)

Today marks the 154th anniversary of the death of President Lincoln, who was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theatre the night of April 14, 1865. 

It was more than the death of a single man, or even president. Lincoln’s death was a symbolic death, a dying for both the virtues and also the sins of the nation. 

I keep in my Bible a sermon by the famous 19th century Northern divine Phillips Brooks, preached in the days after Lincoln’s death, as his body was being transported from Washington, DC back to Springfield, Illinois where it was buried. The train carrying the casket stopped at various major cities along the way and his body lay in state that public mourners might come and pay their respects. The sermon was preached at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia on April 23, as Philadelphians came in the thousands to pay respect to the fallen president. 

In the sermon Brooks laid the murder charge not only at one man, but against the whole institution of slavery.  He called it “the horrible sacrament of slavery, the outward and visible sign round which the inward and invisible spiritual temper gathered”.

Slavery would soon end, amidst those latter days of the Civil War, but Brooks said that it’s spirit would not die:

“Do not say that it is dead. It is not, while its essential spirit lives. While one man counts another man his born inferior for the color of his skin, while both in North and South prejudices and practices — which the Law cannot touch, but which God hates — keep alive in our people’s hearts the spirit of the old iniquity, it is not dead.”

Brooks went on to say that Lincoln embodies the best of the American nature, “ready to state broad principles of the brotherhood of man, [and] the universal fatherhood and justice of God”.  But there was another nature at war with the first, a nature bent on “the false pride of blood”, the scorn of the laborer, and a commitment to its “own established prides and systems” “dearer to it then the truth itself.”

It was this latter nature which killed Lincoln and still threatened the nation at large. 

A century and half later these two natures of America are still in some ways at war with one another. There are still sacraments — outward and visible signs of an invisible and vehement spirit. And there are still men and and also women who embody even today the grace and virtues of “a more Union”. 

My deepest prayer is that what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” might yet prevail in this two-natured America, that we as a nation might not yet again be torn asunder but rather rise to the standard of our pledge “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”