“Four score and seven years ago…”
“Five score years ago…”
Two speeches delivered 100 years apart (minus 83 days) have defined our nation’s most pregnant hope while naming its most damning shame. Each was delivered by a man whose sojourn among us was cut short by an assassin’s bullet. Each speech shaped the nation for generations, for it painted a vision that scripted people’s dreams.
If any two figures in America’s history have lived the promise of the ancient prophet Joel, surely they were Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, who dreamed dreams.
In many ways, for both of them the context was the same: a war costing thousands of lives, a nation blighted by unrestrained race hatred. In both eras, injustice wore the mask of majoritarianism.
Also in common: Each speech followed, and built upon, the preacher’s publication of a defining document. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect Jan. 1, 1863. King penned his Letter from Birmingham Jail on April 16, 1963.
Eleven months after signing that proclamation, Lincoln said the war that had engulfed the nation was testing whether any nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.”
Four months after writing the letter, King told his countrymen that “America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”
King tied these story lines together, by issuing the verdict that, a hundred years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, “the Negro is still not free.”
Yet neither preacher left his listeners to hang their heads in hopelessness. Lincoln called upon them
to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
King prodded Americans of his day to attend to “the fierce urgency of Now.”
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.
Now it the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.
Now it the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
Now is the time to make justice a reality to all of God’s children.
Accordingly, King told his hearers, “I still have a dream” … of the nation living up to its creed that all humans are created equal … of the children of slaves and slaveowners sitting as sisters and brothers at the table … “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
We who gather week in, week out to proclaim and hear the Good News acknowledge our antiquarian ways. In our pulpits and pews we engage a one-directional medium that educators deem the least effective for instruction.
Tell that to those present that day at Gettysburg, or to those who, a century later, gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. The “foolishness of preaching” electrified our nation’s citizens 150 and 50 years ago. And preaching remains the mode of choice for those of us who recognize, with our faith’s most prolific writing apostle, that by it God intends “to save them that believe” (I Cor. 1:21, KJV).
Future generations must assess whether we preachers of today bore ably the mantle of prophetic leadership bequeathed to us by these two forebears – whether we inspired the young and the old, the poor and the wealthy, the powerless and the powerful to dream dreams and thereby change the course of our lives together.
