Sermon for Pentecost 7C

Peace In The Making

This past week as a nation, we marked the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The first event defined a new nation and called the war for independence a struggle for liberty and equality. The second event, marked a turning point in a bloody civil war to keep that same nation united. In honoring the place where so many Americans had been broken or killed, president Abraham Lincoln linked those two struggles along an arc of a common cause. Our nation, Lincoln said, is one “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all … are created equal.” The bloodbath of the Civil War was a test of whether a nation “so conceived can long endure.” Yet on that battlefield, Lincoln called on the people who were still living to resolve to bring about what was yet unfinished. I suppose he meant to win the war. Yet, what the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address imagined, dreamed and hoped, however, was a peaceable kingdom beyond the end of the conflict, a way for people to live together in liberty, equality and peace.

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