This Unfinished Work

December 2017

As a relatively newcomer to Civil War history, November 2016 was my first visit to Gettysburg for Dedication Day, marking the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. By calendar coincidence, it was also Remembrance Day, which recalls those who fought and died in that famous battle.

At the same time, Christians around the world were preparing for the season of Advent, in which the church simultaneously remembers Jesus’ birth and prepares for his return. Writes Professor Ron Allen, “beginning the liturgical season of Advent with the second coming reminds us that the work of the first advent (coming) of Jesus is not complete.”

These events in Gettysburg and Bethlehem might at first glance appear worlds apart, but perhaps they have something important in common.

Both the Gettysburg commemorations and Advent look forward and back. Lincoln’s famous opening words, “Four score and seven years ago” led listeners to recall the founding of this country 87 years before. He spoke of how the budding nation which once tested its high ideals against the British was now testing those ideals against itself. The President’s sweeping words were not about the country that was, but whether “that nation might live.”

In the same way, while the most popular vision of Christmas is of a baby born in a manger, this child is also the God Who Is, Who Was, and Who Is to Come. Christians not only look back, as if we are simply celebrating the (approximately) 2020^th birthday of Jesus. We also look forward to when he will come to judge the earth. We are to live now, in light of that judgment to come.

Similarly, both the Church’s proclamation and Lincoln’s words lift up a particular occasion to speak to universal truth. Yes, Advent looks back on the birth of a human baby, but as Juan Antonio Espinoza writes in his poem of the same name, “The Lord is Born Every Day.” Yes, a baby was born in the Middle East, to live and die two millennia ago, but the Christian faith asserts that that one birth touches every person, regardless of gender, national origin, time period, and everything else.

In the same way, Lincoln lifts up the nation born 87 years prior, and asks whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” He is asking if the ideals of 1776 are still the ideals in 1863, and will they be the ideals of 2018 and beyond?

That is a crucial question for us today, one that will be answered in the lives and values we live from this day onward. “It is for us the living… to be dedicated here to the unfinished work” of a “nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men  ̶  and women  ̶  are created equal.”

Neither Americans nor Christians should need any reminder that all people are created equally. The foundational documents of each point to that eternal truth again and again. Our comfort with those different from us, our agreement with them, does not change that. To deny that truth is to stand against God and country.

That we currently struggle so much to stand unified on that issue lifts up one final truth that both Advent and Gettysburg share. To look backward and forward is to wear the Advent colors: the purple of repentance, and simultaneously, the blue of hope. To become the people we were meant to be, as church or nation, we must first admit our wrongs. Our sins. And then we must ask for forgiveness and make amends. Only then can we lay down our guilt, and made free to pick up the mantle of this unfinished work, so full of promise.