Where the Grapes of Wrath Are Stored: A sermon for the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.

150 years ago this week the American Civil War began and our Nation entered the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  By the end of the war over 6200,000 had died – a staggering 2% of the U.S. population. – and another 400,000 had been wounded.  At the start of the war 4 million Africans were enslaved in our country – 8% of the total population – and by the end of the war they still had more than a  hundred year struggle for freedom ahead of them.  

The prophet Ezekial took me to a valley of dry bones this week and we walked around.

I could hear the snap, crack and knock of brittle bones under my feet.   I could feel the tension in my body as I took immense care with each step.  I could feel the horror rise in my heart – the desolation and emptiness, the overwhelming loss of precious, distinct human lives.  This valley of bones had many names – Chancellorsville, Antietam, Wilderness, Bull Run, Gettysburg, Vicksburg …

As I walked and walked with the Prophet Ezekiel there was no end to the bones, the bones remained underfoot, a part of our landscape, even up to today.

William Faulkner once said, “The past is not dead, it is not even past.”  I believe that as a nation we are still tripping over the bones of the fratricidal blood-bath that formed us as a people.  The bones that are still underfoot  are called white supremacy and racism, faction and rivalrous self interest, unequal distribution of sacrifice, suffering and opportunity, the equation of human value with class status,  a reflexive violence in act and in rhetoric.  We have still not decided what it means to be a diverse people and it seems to me that we are rapidly losing any sense of obligation to one-another at all, that the spirit of the age is “Every Man for Himself,”  and “Get mine while I can.”

In a season devoted to reflection on forgiveness we need to look hard at the bones that litter our past and our present.  We cannot really enter the process of reconciliation without a reckoning, a sober appraisal.  We avoid it, deny it, skim over it, put a happy face on it all the time.  We can tell it is highly charged and contested territory because blame, guilt, self-pity and fierce defensive anger erupt when we go there.  We like to prematurely and unilaterally declare past wounds healed without any significant effort or sacrifice on our part.  I agree with Dr. James Cone when he says that progress will be made toward racial reconciliation when white Americans take racism and white supremacy seriously as a subject for self-examination.    

I believe we need to put this work at the center of our reflection on reconciliation and forgiveness not to wallow in guilt but because that is where the path of new life in Christ leads.

We need a new spirit in our dry bones.  We need God’s spirit to return us to life.  I hear that spirit speaking in one of our greatest national prophets who literally spoke a word over the dry bones.  I would like to read from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural, where I hear the spirit of God speaking….

"Neither party – North or South- expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes God’s aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through God’s appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that God gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." 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."

What does it take to move on?  It requires a clear reckoning, a spirit of sacrifice and a spirit of compassion – hearts expanded to meet and include our suffering neighbor as an indispensable part of ourselves.   It takes a spirit I have only ever experienced fully embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.  Collectively and individually we put on the person-hood of Christ in our  Baptism.  This is good news for us and for the world that need us so badly.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.