Hilton Head Island, SC – February 12, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Exodus 17:1-7; Deuteronomy 3:18-29
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Go up to the top of Pisgah, and lift up your eyes westward and northward and southward and eastward, and behold it with your eyes; for you shall not go over this Jordan.” – Deut. 3:27
Without question I have preached sermons on previous February twelfths, although I don’t know in what years. Nevertheless, it never occurred to me to preach a sermon in praise of the man most school children know was born on February 12 until I was coming up to this February 12.
The man of whom I speak is, of course, Abraham Lincoln. In my opinion, our two greatest Presidents were both born in February, and both deserve to have Presidents Day named in their honor. Lincoln was born on the 12th of February and Washington on the 22nd. If I were forced to choose which of the two was the greater President, without hesitation I would say Lincoln. Washington was an amazing leader too, and as a nation we were especially blessed to have him as our first President. He led us through some very uncertain times, and he established the important precedent of no more than two four-year terms. That policy was followed until FDR came along. Historians have argued whether it was wise for Roosevelt to have run for the nation’s highest office four times. Because he did, however, the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution was passed, which now limits a President to two terms.
For the sheer volume of major obstacles, no President was ever faced with the enormous challenges of Abraham Lincoln. From the time he was elected in the fall of 1860 until he went with his wife Mary into the box at Ford’s theater on April 14 in the spring of 1865, Lincoln never had a moment’s respite from the huge issues which relentlessly dogged him. From the day he was elected, it was his intention to maintain the union at whatever cost was necessary. By dint of singular force of will and tenacity, that he managed to do. And while the union survived, tragically Mr. Lincoln did not.
Throughout this sermon, I will be comparing Abraham Lincoln to another man who saw his people though a period of severe testing. They were the Israelites, and their leader was Moses.
Both men came to their positions seemingly out of nowhere. When Lincoln was nominated as the Republican candidate for President in Chicago in 1860, he was practically unknown outside Illinois. He had served for one two-year term in the United States House of Representatives from 1849 to 1851, but he was defeated for re-election. For the next nine years he became one of the most successful lawyers in the State of Illinois, even though he was entirely self-taught. Had the 1860 Republican Convention been held anywhere else other than Chicago, he almost certainly would never have been nominated. But a loud and boisterous Chicago crowd continuously chanted Honest Abe’s name when it came time for the delegates to cast their ballots, and their raucous lobbying carried the day when the ballots were cast.
Moses was a virtual stranger to all the Hebrews living in Egypt when he came to lead them out of their slavery. As you may recall, when Moses was a baby the Egyptian Pharaoh had decided to thin the ranks of the Hebrew slaves, because they were becoming too numerous, and he feared they might revolt. Therefore the king ordered all the male babies of the Hebrews to be killed at birth. Hoping to save her son, Moses’ mother put her newborn son into a reed basket in the bulrushes beside the bank of the Nile River. Who should come along to find the floating baby but the Pharaoh’s daughter? No one could make up a story like that --- could they? Thus Moses was raised in the royal palace as though he were the grandson of the Pharaoh, and thus his own mother became the wet-nurse to raise him from infancy.
The child of palace privilege grew up to be like an Egyptian prince. But he knew he was not an Egyptian; his mother kept reminding him that he was a Hebrew. That’s the sort of thing that Jewish mothers have long been famous for doing. When Moses was forty years old, he saw an Egyptian overseer beating a Hebrew slave. Moses’ blood suddenly boiled, and he killed the taskmaster. Now he knew he was in serious trouble, so he fled east into the Land of Midian near the Sinai Desert. He married a Midianite woman, and settled down to become what he assumed would be an anonymous shepherd.
Forty years later, when Moses was then eighty years old, God spoke to Moses from the midst of a burning bush in the desert. He told Moses he was to return to Egypt and lead the children of Israel out of their bondage. Moses went, but only after trying unsuccessfully to convince God that He was making a very big mistake in choosing him. The rest of the story you know.
The events leading up to the election of 1860 and the Civil War were a maelstrom of catastrophes, any one of which could have split the nation forever. As it was, there turned out to be four different candidates of four warring political parties. Lincoln won the election, but he was a plurality victor, not a majority one. When he took the train from Springfield to Washington, the engineer had to take a circuitous route and constantly to change the schedule, so as to prevent assassins from murdering his primary passenger. When Lincoln took the oath of office, the cannons were ready to fire on Fort Sumter, and a few southern states were poised to join the Confederacy. It was an ominous beginning to an ominous --- and historic --- presidency.
After the passage through the Red Sea, Moses led the Israelites out into the Sinai Desert. Needless to say, it was no simple matter to keep a large number of children, men and women, and old people moving forward as one body. Food and water were always scarce. There were no rest stops along the way, nor were there any McDonalds or Burger Kings. The people constantly complained to Moses, and Moses constantly complained to God. At a place called Rephidim, the people insisted they were dying of thirst, and they demanded that Moses do something. “What shall I do with this people?” Moses asked God. “They are ready to kill me.” God told Moses to strike a certain rock with his staff, and when he did, water gushed forth. The Israelites were happy, but Moses wasn’t. He called the name of that place Massah and Meribah, which means “Proof and Contention.” The disgruntled people wanted Moses to prove things he could not prove, and he thought they were the epitome of contentiousness.
For almost three years, the Union Army was led by a succession of incompetent generals, the most inept of whom was George McClellan. Lincoln could not trust that any of his commanding generals would fight, or having fought, that they would win. Not until the Fourth of July in 1863 did the man triumph in a major siege who would become the Commander of the Army of the Potomac. When Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Lincoln was convinced he finally had his man. However, not until William Tecumseh Sherman won the Battle of Atlanta in early September of 1864 was the re-election of Abraham Lincoln guaranteed. Without that crucial victory, the Great Emancipator might have lost the election, and the Democratic candidate, George McClellan, would have sued for a peace without victory.
Finding water at Massah and Meribah did not solve Moses’ problems. The hunger of the sojourners persisted. God provided them quails, and that silenced them for a while, until they became fed up with their daily feed of feathered friends. Then God gave them manna, a strange substance which fell from the sky. It was sufficiently tasty, but it got old too quickly, and they tired of their manna as well. Poor old Moses was ready to call it quits. But God kept reviving him, and Moses and his plodding flock of grieved grumblers kept slowly moving toward Canaan.
The carnage of the Civil War was appalling. Over six hundred thousand soldiers died, 350,000 Yankees and 250,000 Confederates. It was by far the most catastrophic war for casualties ever fought by Americans. When it was over, both sides were exhausted, both in the shortage of troops and in the military esprit de corps. How was the Union finally preserved? – Through the will and the wisdom of “Father Abraham.” On January 1, 1863, he announced the Emancipation Proclamation. All the slaves in the Confederacy were declared free. They were not freed, of course, but they believed they would eventually be freed. In November of 1863 Mr. Lincoln stood in a hastily-constructed military cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and he proclaimed that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth.” It gave the nation hope. For too long they had languished in fear, supposing that the war would never end. By the end of 1864, it became increasingly evident that the end was near.
Numbers 20 is like Exodus 17. In Numbers, Moses and the children of Israel were in the wilderness called Zin. In Exodus 17, they were in the wilderness of Sin. (Presumably Sin and Zin are the same place, and Numbers 20 is a re-telling of Exodus 17.) But unlike Exodus 17, when Moses struck the rock and the water gushed forth, apparently he did not really believe it would happen, and that angered God. For that act of incredulity, said God, Moses would not be able to lead the Israelites into the promised land. Instead, Joshua would be the one to do that.
The Bible is filled with enigmatic incidents, and this is one of them. Why would God forbid Moses the honor of leading the people across the Jordan into the Promised Land? For forty years he had stuck with a stiff-necked people. He had wooed, cajoled, begged and threatened them time and time again, and without Moses they never would have made it through the Wilderness Wandering. But for this one seemingly small mistake, God told Moses he couldn’t lead the victory march into the Land of Canaan. It is a mystery. I think perhaps the story is not clearly told. If it is, it is truly an unfathomable and seemingly unjust mystery.
Throughout his whole life, Abraham Lincoln had a very hard time believing in God. No one was more familiar with the contents of the Bible than he, and no one took its claims more seriously than he. There are several thousands of books that have been written about Lincoln, more about him than about anyone else in human history, except Jesus. But in none of those books does any biographer state that Lincoln was a man of faith for his entire life.
By the end, however, when he had seen so much death and destruction, and the savagery of the human race had manifested itself again and again on both sides of the greatest American conflict, Lincoln seemed to come to the conviction that only God could bring meaning and salvation out of so much bloodshed and incivility. The enormity of events apparently made a believer out of him.
March 4, 1865, Inauguration Day, was raw and rainy. The gaunt man who stood on the front platform of the capitol looked twenty years older than when he had taken the first inaugural oath.
The Second Inaugural Address was barely longer than the Gettysburg Address, but it shall maintain a permanent place in the annals of the world’s greatest speeches. Of the two opposing armies Lincoln said, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other….The prayers of both could not be answered. The Almighty has His own purposes.” Then, in what is perhaps the noblest conclusion to any speech ever uttered anywhere, the soon-to-be-assassinated President 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 his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Rising above the northeast corner of the Dead Sea is Mt. Pisgah, or Mt. Nebo as it is also called. Moses was with the Israelites a hundred or so miles south of there, somewhere near what later became the Nabatean city of Petra in southern Jordan. In a very long speech to the people, which goes on for the first four chapters of the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses recounted a conversation he had earlier had with God. God told Moses, “Go up to the top of Pisgah, and lift up your eyes westward and northward and southward and eastward, and behold it with your eyes, for you shall not go over this Jordan” (Deut. 3:27).
Moses knew that the end of his life was near. He also knew that he would not be there to lead the Israelites across the Jordan River into Canaan. He had to have been melancholy about that, probably even morose. But he accepted it. He believed it was God’s will. We might question that, but Moses did not.
For several weeks before going to Ford’s Theater, Abraham Lincoln reported that he had had two recurring dreams: nightmares, really. In one, he was on a ship, and it was sailing at terrific speed toward a rocky shore, and when it hit the rocks, it would surely sink, along with all on board. In the other dream, he was walking though a darkened White House, and he came to a large room in which a body was laid out on a funeral bier. He asked someone in the silent, weeping crowd standing there, “Who is it?”, and he was told that it was the President.
Two great men, both of whom had an immense influence on their people’s history, came close to seeing their life’s goals achieved. But death intervened, and it was not to be. Both were reluctant servants of God. Moses didn’t think he had the right stuff to lead his people through their Wilderness Wandering, but he had the one quality most needed: patience. He put up with a very stiff-necked people for forty years. Abraham Lincoln likely would have questioned whether he was a servant of God at all, since he had questioned the existence of God for so much of his life. Then, when it appears he came to believe in God and in His providence because of a calamitous four-year war, he wondered whether he and his nation had done right by God.
When anyone is in the midst of a great struggle, and it cannot be known beyond doubt how it shall end, it can leave an enormous void in one’s inner being. “What should I have done differently? What could I have done differently? Did I do my best? What would ‘my best’ be?”
Neither Moses nor Lincoln could be certain that their life’s work was fulfilled. But it was. All of us are benefactors of what they accomplished. We would not be worshiping God together were it not for the foundation of faith laid for us by Moses. We would not be citizens of the Re-United States of America were it not for the undaunted Marvelous Man from Springfield.
History is the record of and the careful study of what has happened in the past, what it means for the present, and where it leads us into the future. History is not undifferentiated chaos; it has a purpose, which ultimately is determined by God. All of us are instruments in the hands of God for the nurture and the improvement of God’s world. Today we thank God for Moses, and on the 208th anniversary of his birth, we also thank God for the amazing Abraham Lincoln.