Category Archives: Religion

My daughters loved to do it as family entertainment.

They’d bring a friend into the living room where I was, whisper to her, “watch this” and then announce:

“OK Dad, number 19.”

Like clicking on a computer, I’d begin a detailed description of our country’s 19th president, Rutherford B. (for Birchard, a family name) Hayes. I’d spout off dates, events, VP, home state, physical appearance, personality and various other facts, some important, most trivial.

Figuring it was a set-up, the friend would insist on picking her own number. I’d do the same thing.

After three or four numbers, my daughter would boast, “I told you, my dad knows a lot about the presidents”.

For the past several years I’ve held 50 third-graders at Liberty Christian School spell bound each spring as I spend nearly an hour lecturing on the American presidents, armed with nothing more than colorful portraits and a bust of Lincoln.

I don’t need notes.

I’m a presidential savant.

Lincoln died at ten seconds past the 22nd minute of 7:00AM on Saturday, April 15, 1865. He had been laid diagonally on a short bed at the Henry Peterson boarding house across the street from Ford’s theater. He was 56 years old. Edwin M. (for McMasters) Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, was said to have famously remarked, “Now he belongs to the ages”.

Nothing in the preceding paragraph was googled – except in my head.

I’ve watched the movie Lincoln 22 times – but most of those details aren’t in the film.

When Beth and I were served at a local restaurant by a young aspiring actor named Chester, I proceeded to share salient facts about his presidential namesake.

Yes, that’s right, I’m a weirdo.

Blame my mother, who, while a sales lady, brought home a free set of World Book encyclopedias when I was ten. Included was a volume on the presidents.

I devoured it.

I was hooked – on our country and the fascinating and often heroic and tragic men who have led it.

Over the past half century, I’ve moved beyond the statistics of the presidents, which I mastered as a child. I’ve gained a deeper and more nuanced appreciation for the temperaments, gifts, strengths, weaknesses – the successes and failures – and the diverse personalities of the 43 men who have held the nation’s – and now the world’s – most powerful office.

One thing I’ve learned is that character counts. Our nation has survived and prospered because of it. Without wise and self-disciplined leaders of integrity in times of crisis we would have been doomed.

Another thing I’ve learned is that even the most powerful and greatest of men are mere mortals.

When little Toto pulled back the curtain on the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions discovered the diminutive, white-haired and cherubic-faced senior citizen who had been performing an elaborate and impressive disguise.

When Dorothy upbraided him as “a very bad man”, the old gent replied, “No my dear, I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad Wizard”.

The Republicans presented Donald Trump last week and attempted, with the valuable help of his impressive children, to unveil the decent, humble and caring man behind the public curtain of his uniquely authoritative candidacy and personality. We were invited to behold the real Donald Trump – not the media’s alleged caricature.

This week it will be the Democrats’ turn to try and humanize Hillary Clinton – who has been at the controversial epicenter of the public’s eye for a quarter century.

What’s behind the curtail matters – a lot.

No president has ever fully idealized this country’s vision of what a president should be – certainly not while in office. Only history can correct our frequent myopia.

Trump and Clinton enter the fall campaign as the least popular and trusted candidates in American history. There is little comfort for them – or the rest of us – in thinking it’s going to get easier next year. The history of the “glorious burden” of the presidency clearly argues against it.

It would be a grave mistake for any president to go into this storm without a firm moral compass. Those who attempted it ended shipwrecked.

When he was secretly diagnosed with cancer of the jaw, President Grover Cleveland, once the burly sheriff of Buffalo, said that he was reminded of “how weak the strongest man is”.

What is true physically is equally true politically and morally.

“Nearly all men can stand adversity,” observed Lincoln, “but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power”.

Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will place his or her hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States. When they utter the words, “So help me God” on that cold January noon they will assume more power than any other person on earth.

May we pray that the scriptures will be opened to King David’s pledge:

“I will lead a life of integrity … I will reject perverse ideas … I will not endure conceit and pride …My daily task will be to ferret out the wicked and free the city of the Lord from their grip” (Psalm 101, NLT).

The curtain will be pulled back.

Character will be revealed.

It’s the nature of the office.

We’ve been here too often.

The violence is numbing us.

The rituals and rhetoric of public grieving seem predictable and somehow insufficient.

The anticipation of tragedy is disturbing.

Amidst the cacophony of angry voices and opposing opinions – editorials and talking heads – our flag remained the most poignant silent reminder of our shared grief and the uncertainty of life.

At the beginning of the week the Stars and Stripes waved proudly as we celebrated the 240th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. Before the week was over it flew sadly at half mast, testing once more whether this nation – conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal – can endure.

President Obama has ordered the American flag lowered more than any president in history.

It is a sign of our troubled times.

This time it was for five police officers slain in Dallas while protecting the lives of others.

We’ve been an increasingly divided country. We are North and South, red states and blue states, rich and poor and black and white.

Sometimes we’re simply Americans – but not often enough.

Values once held dear are today suspect. Beliefs that united and sustained us in tough times are questioned or scorned as idealistic and naïve.

Throughout history there have been nations that have been great without being good. The United States is not one of them. Our founders never intended it to be. They created a government that must rely on widespread virtue – and faith – to survive.

“We have no government armed with power,” observed John Adams, “capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion … Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Three years before the bloody civil war that would sunder the nation Abraham Lincoln argued that dependence upon economic and military strength alone would not be enough to preserve the Union:

“Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.
Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them.”

Abandon ordered liberty rooted in virtue, Lincoln said, and “you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.”

Our founders understood that in a free republic personal virtue and national greatness are inseparable. Forsake individual morality and this nation would descend into the bondage of anarchy.

Their warnings have proven prophetic.

After the last funeral is conducted in Louisiana, Minnesota and Dallas, white police officers will still be confronting young black men on the streets. And the tensions will remain. So will the judgments, suspicions and reactions.

The cause of racism will not cease even when its effects are addressed in law and practice. Bias and bigotry are stubborn and subtle enemies. They dwell deep within the human heart and the heart cannot be legislated.

For decades we have known that the deterioration of the black family – and the absence of strong male role models – has impacted the black experience much more than economic and legal factors.

Yes, racial discrimination is still a daily reality in this country and it’s immoral. Poverty is also real. But the ultimate answer is not more laws but more decency, responsibility, respect, determination, courage and self-control.

Right and wrong are not subject to race – they are colorblind. The content of a man’s character is the only judgment you and I have any right to make about him.

Through the prophet Jeremiah God warned of the desperate and unfathomable wickedness of the human heart (Jeremiah 17:9). Even as many began to trust in Jesus, he still “didn’t trust them, because he knew human nature. No one needed to tell him what mankind was really like” (John 2:24-25, NLT, emphasis added).

Jesus knew what was in the heart of man.

These tragic acts of violence remind us again that we are all fallen creatures and we live in a fallen world.

Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.”

We are fallen not because of our race but in spite of it. In the end the only race that matters is the human race and the only thing that can redeem that is the grace and love of God through Jesus Christ.

Only Christ can transform our hearts and heal our divisions. He alone is able to excavate the angry heart of stone and replace it with a tender heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26).

Only God can heal our land by changing each of us. Only changed people can change society.

This is our calling. This is our duty.

May we pray with David, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10, KJV).

Only then can we begin to face the stubborn ancient prejudices that lurk within us all.

Because the heart of this problem is a problem of the heart.

It was a dramatic moment in a dramatic story.

The tall young senator stood unshaven and disheveled on the floor of the senate. His voice hoarse from hours of a filibuster; exhausted, his energy spent in a one-man defense of his ideals, he looked once more at his passive colleagues.

“You think I’m licked,” he told them. “You all think I’m licked. Well I’m not licked. And I’m gonna stay right here and fight for this lost cause.”

He staggered over to the large bin overflowing with fabricated telegrams orchestrated to condemn him and drive him from office.

He reached in and grabbed a handful and held them up.

“Even if this room gets filled with lies like these. And the Taylors and all their armies come marching into this place. Somebody will listen to me.”

With that, Senator Jefferson Smith collapsed.

As with all Frank Capra’s movies, this one would have a happy ending. The distinguished but corrupted senator whom Jeff Smith had once idolized openly confessed his complicity on the senate floor.

Jim Taylor’s graft machine was defeated.

Truth triumphed over greed.

Jeff Smith would live to fight another day.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – starring the inimitable James Stewart in his first Oscar-nominated role – stands alone as the iconic Hollywood depiction of American values and old-fashioned patriotism.

That nearly eighty years later its pure idealism would seem so quaintly irrelevant is an American tragedy.

Young Jefferson Smith, unlikely choice to replace a deceased senator, is suddenly thrust into the cynical sneering world of Washington politics. A good and decent man, the naïve Smith is mocked by the press and ridiculed and dismissed by his worldly colleagues.

When his legislative plans to acquire land to build a camp for boys in his home state interfere with the nefarious schemes of a powerful political machine, Smith is suddenly no laughing matter. Run by a ruthless boss named James Taylor, the machine goes all out to railroad unsuspecting Jeff Smith out of the senate.

It is a classic morality play.

Selfless idealism confronts self-centered greed.

Throughout the film, the virtues and values of America – especially our ideas about individual freedom and decency – are unapologetically espoused.

There is no cynicism in this film except on the part of the villains who care nothing of American virtues and have no virtue of their own. They care only for themselves – for power and for money. They would use the government to concentrate and expand both.

Speaking to his jaded legislative assistant who would later root for him and fall in love with him, Jeff Smith explained why he wanted the boys’ camp:

“You see, boys forget what their country means by just reading The Land of the Free in history books. Then they get to be men they forget even more.

Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books, Miss Saunders. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: I’m free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn’t, I can, and my children will. Boys ought to grow up remembering that.”

When Jeff Smith finally had the chance to speak to his hardened senate colleagues on the floor, he painted a noble red, white and blue portrait of America.

He read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He invoked Lady Liberty at the top of the capitol dome and defended “the whole parade of what man’s carved out for himself, after centuries of fighting …so he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent, like he was created to, no matter what his race, color or creed.”

Smith insisted “there’s no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties.” Freedom, he declared, was “the blood and bone and sinew of this democracy that some great men handed down to the human race.”

It was quite a speech.

Jeff Smith believed every word of it.

Today, many Americans, like the boys Smith spoke of, have forgotten what it truly means to be an American. Amidst our cynicism, anger, fear and bitterness we’ve lost sight of the great privilege and duty of living in the greatest, freest and most wonderful nation on earth.

It’s easy to give in to despair and cynicism. The media, popular culture and too many of our politicians lead us to think that American liberty and all it represents is just another “lost cause.”

But as Jefferson Smith reminded us, we must hold to our ideals and “you fight for the lost causes harder than for any others. Yes, you even die for them.”

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was banned in Hitler’s Germany. In German-occupied France in 1942 it was the last film shown before the ban went into effect – one theater showed it 30 times – and the first shown after France was liberated.

It should be required viewing in every high school.

Jeff Smith reminds us of what America means – what it stands for and why it’s worth fighting to preserve.

“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” (Philippians 4:8,KJV).

It was a beautiful spring day in New England.

It was perfect weather for an outdoor ceremony.

Most boys would be excited about going fishing, running through the woods, playing ball or just goofing off.

Not me. Not today.

I was on a mission – a serious mission. And I dare not fail.

It all started a few weeks before when I was cast for the part in a school presentation. I was one of the tallest, skinniest, most serious – and shyest – kids in the class. So of course when the roles for this patriotic ensemble were assigned, I was given Abraham Lincoln. My job was to recite -from memory – the Gettysburg address.

My mom – with a pride only mothers possess – helped me locate a black top hat and matching long-tailed coat.

And then she rigged up a brown paper beard.

I got through the school recitation without skipping a beat – though one side of the beard began to sag a bit by the time I got to “we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground”.

The oration was met with robust applause by teachers and students.

Some of the kids started calling me Abe. I rather liked it but remained in my shell.

And then Mrs. Tobiasson, an older lady who took a liking to me in her English class, asked me if I’d like to reprise my role as the Great Emancipator – at the upcoming community Memorial Day ceremony.

I was scared but said yes.

Mom was now an expert make-up artist and made sure my paper beard was securely attached (we decided against glue).

Then she captured the moment for my descendants by taking my picture. I stood up straight, put one hand inside my coat and stared into the camera with the same serene confidence that Abe had for Alexander Gardner at his D.C. studio on Sunday, November 9, 1863 – 11 days before his speech – and a little over a century before my portrait.

Tolland, Connecticut was a small but proud picturesque town with well-kept shingled homes, stately public buildings and a town green. The Memorial Day ceremony was held on the steps of the new brick library.

It was a large crowd. All the local luminaries were there. So was the school band.

The cloudless sky was a vibrant blue.

When my turn came, I stood and calmly and clearly spoke the words I now knew well.

It was my first public oration. I was 12.

The speech is short – especially when compared to the two hour eloquent pontification delivered by the noted Edward Everett just before the President spoke. Fortunately for me, that’s not the speech we remember and school children recite. It passed immediately into deserved anonymity.

“…our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation …”

Lincoln began his “few appropriate remarks” by placing the Civil War in a historical context – not the Constitution but the earlier Declaration of Independence, which he revered and based his principles on.

The stakes were high.

“…whether that nation … can long endure …”

The war was a test he said – we’ve had many since – of the strength and resilience of the American experiment in self-government. Would we – could we – survive?

“… those who here gave their lives that that nation might live …”

Freedom is never free. Every soldier’s gravesite is an eternal testament to the high cost of our liberty. Those graves were there on that raw November Thursday. Today they surround the globe. Lincoln honored their sacrifice -and explained it – by recognizing it as freedom’s price and well worth paying.

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

Lincoln was wrong about his two-minute speech but right about Everett’s long oration. He was also surely right that deeds matter more than words and no deed mattered more than to lay down one’s life for one’s country and for the noble cause of freedom.

That sacrifice must never be forgotten.

“It is for us the living …”

The dead can do no more. They’ve given their “last full measure of devotion”. Those of us who remain and follow must honor the dead by bravely pursuing the “unfinished work” and “the great task remaining before us.”

Being an American isn’t just a lucky break – it’s an unresolved responsibility.

In a free republic there must be no place for cynicism or apathy. Only when we determine to do our duty as a united and free people can we insure “that these dead shall not have died in vain”.

After Joshua had commanded one man from each of the twelve tribes of Israel to take a stone from the Jordan River and build a memorial, he told them to “let this sign be among you, so that when your children ask later saying ‘What do these stones mean to you?’ you can tell them, ‘they remind us’ …” (Joshua 4:6-7).

As I removed my paper beard that afternoon, I knew I’d fallen in love with Lincoln, with his speech and what it meant, and with my country.

I knew I’d never forget.