First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

2Samuel 23 and John 18

“Our Better Angels”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

November 26, 2006

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

And then these most glorious words:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passions may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. (First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln)

The better angels of our nature. When Lincoln was elected president whole states seceded; Fort Sumter was blockaded, other military positions in the south were secured by state militias and the press was brutal. The nomination and election of Lincoln was assailed as our doom, he himself was seen as our shame. It is a daunting moment to be seen as a national shame. And yet what Lincoln saw as he looked out at the throng gathered to hear the rather obscure new president speak for the first time on a cold March morning, what Lincoln saw as he gazed upon the fracturing union which America was quickly becoming, what Lincoln saw was our “better angels.”

There were three separate drafts to his first inaugural address. Although Lincoln must have seen them as wasted paper, we now see as a national treasure. The first draft was harsh. Lincoln was tempted to be strong. He needed to be presidential; he needed to be a clear and uncompromising voice. So the first draft was a kind of ultimatum, almost taunting. It was very much not the man so many had come to admire with complete devotion. That man, the Springfield lawyer whose unwavering devotion and sincerity of thought was ever ready to yield to mercy. The first draft had little mercy.

The second draft of the address was written by Francis Seward, the New York senator become Secretary of State. Seward had been the lightning rod of abolition in the Senate until he saw the limited power such words possessed in a nation in need of reconciliation not inflammation. So Seward tempered the remarks and spoke of mystic bonds uniting us with generations past. Yet, as seemed to be the case with Seward, he understood the principles without fully seeing the people.

This was Lincoln’s great gift. He could see people, often at his own expense, as better than even they could see themselves. He could see their “better angels” as it were. In March of 1861 this was not a time where the better angels of our nation were in evidence. Abolitionists in the north were calling their southern brothers and sisters evil; the south vilified all who breathed in the North as a greater evil. And those in between, who called for calm and compromise, were castigated as a kind of greedy Judas who has no morality.

So when Lincoln said, “We are friends, we are not enemies,” all evidence was in place to assert to the contrary. He was a very small minority who believed this. On the surface, and for all intents and purposes, our nation was ready to tear itself apart with the fury of the most brutal demons. The only angels most people could see were fallen ones. Although Seward’s draft helped him remember his own voice, the final draft of his first inaugural with its concluding vision of our better angels was his own. It was Lincoln.

I am not sure what it is exactly, but Thanksgiving always makes me think of Lincoln. The natural connection is that he made the holiday famous during the civil war, calling for a national day of thanksgiving just a few weeks after Gettysburg. For those of you who have found better use of your time than reflecting on civil war battles, it was a shocking move. Gettysburg was a disaster of the greatest proportion. The losses were shocking to all concerned. The aftermath of the battle was a time for all to mourn. Yet, Lincoln, ever prone it seems to find the better angels, called for a day of thanksgiving.

And it wasn’t a ploy to whitewash or create a sense of false victory. The day was not so much one of celebration, but sober reflection upon the bounty of God’s mercy, it was a call to remember we live in the midst of an experiment in justice and truth that has yet to prove itself.

In a recent book, The Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin makes this case again and again. Lincoln had a gift of seeing the better angels in friends and especially in those who made it a point to be an enemy. She recounts powerfully the way Lincoln redeemed one man in particular, Edwin Stanton, whose words would have made a life long enemy of just about anyone but Lincoln. The two met in a court case. Stanton was hired for his brilliance; Lincoln was retained because he knew the judge. On numerous occasions Stanton insulted and injured Lincoln. Yet at the end of the day, when the trial was won, Lincoln told his adversary he had shown him how much he needed to study law with greater discipline.

Stanton, at this time, was a man lost in grief, having lost his family to untimely deaths. He was a brilliant lawyer, but he was one of the walking wounded. At one point in his life he was a friend to all, but grief had driven him nearly insane. The good in him had become buried and lost to all except someone like Lincoln. A decade later as president, Abraham Lincoln would call upon Stanton to be his secretary of War. Stanton would become deeply devoted friend.

I believe this is why Lincoln always fills my thoughts at Thanksgiving. I know that Thanksgiving is cast as a time to give thanks for what we have, but that now rings so untrue to me. We have too much; simply giving thanks for what we have without being mindful of those who have not is no longer possible for me. And it is not that I am ungrateful. It is that I am more thankful for what we are as a people than what we have.

This will sound strange, as it still seems strange to me, but I am thankful for what we are as a people. I know we are awful to one another. The words, the divisions, the fights and acrimony are bitter. Never does a day pass without scandal or civil unrest. We maneuver and offend and insult. Surely we are wicked with our devotion to pornography and violence. There are grave moments of injustice that occur each day. And yet there are still better angels.

We are better than all of these. After all the misdeeds and corruption is calculated, we are still better than that. As a people, there is something sacred, something of a mystical cord, binding us to a hoped for kingdom of God. We search for this kingdom. This is what the exchange between Pilate and Jesus is all about- this search. Pilate is trying to place Jesus within the proper kingdom on earth, but he says, “My kingdom is not from here.”

Although Pilate will be castigated forever for his response, is it not the passion of our union, the very nature of the experiment that binds us, to ask, “What is truth?” And when Lincoln called for a day of thanksgiving, he was calling upon the nation to pray, to reflect upon the kingdom of heaven and listen for the voice that belongs to the truth.

Now some would suggest that gathering your extended family around a huge meal with all the challenges such moments present is not the best way to see our better angels, or be truly thankful for what we are as a people. Thanksgiving is often caricatured as a moment where the people we see are less than shall we say inspirational. Better angels are not the vision I often hear described when I ask, how was your thanksgiving?

A number of years ago I wrote a newsletter article describing this challenge. I described the thanksgiving of my youth. It was a two part day. The first part was spent with my mother’s family for whom thanksgiving was all the women playing poker and the men betting on whether the Lions would finally win a football game. The food at this gathering was spread on the counter of my Aunt Sharon’s kitchen. You ate when you were hungry. As a child this was a lovely moment to run free with cousins.

Later in the day we would eat dinner at my father’s folks. Here was a traditional meal with all the lace and silver and crystal. The table my grandmother prepared still fills my imagination with splendor. Here the same football game was watched, yet instead of swearing and calls for more beer, a single highball stood in relative silence upon the knee of every man old enough to partake. The conversation here was not loud; it was cryptic and short. “How are the kids? Good . . . good. How’s work? Good . . . good.”

The point of the article was that I learned to love both. I enjoyed ducking into my Aunt Sharon’s house and being shooed from the poker table and I loved the crystal dish of black olives my grandmother placed just for me. As a child it was easy to see the better angels of both. Yes, it does create some rather diverse tendencies in my own heart, yet thanksgiving will always be about seeing the best in all.

When Lincoln looked out over the people in 1861 seeing better angels was not an easy task. And if history is accurate, it never was before and it never was since. And my childhood memories of thanksgiving all golden are now peppered with moments of less than unbridled joy.

Yet, rather than a kind of resignation, I find myself with a deepening sense of thanks. For what I am truly thankful for, what fills me with gratitude is that I am part of a people, part of a nation. We are broken, divided, ideologically opposed, and yet still straining for the kingdom of which Jesus spoke. In some it is nothing more than a sensibility of truth and justice for all; for others it is a dream of a nation listening to the voice of Jesus. Some see this in constitutional amendments restraining freedom; others see them in the freedoms we collect and abuse. In both, though, are the mystic chords calling us and binding us to the generations before ours who struggled and stumbled as we do.

I just find it a moment of glory to be called at this time and place to see the better angels we possess. In 1861 looking out at the throng Lincoln could see them. And today, in one another at tables and podiums, in papers and even in silence we too can see them. We look for the better angels. We may not want to admit it. We may even want to suggest the opposite.

And while this is not unique to us as a people, this hope for all, it is the unique nature of our nation. This union, with all its flaws, with all its failures, is an experiment to see if we can be a people who look for the better angels. This is who we are. And for this I give thanks. It is the glory we possess. The glory may be but a shadow of the kingdom Jesus claimed when confronted with Pilate, but even a glimpse of heaven is still a glimpse of heaven. Amen.