WHAT ARE YOU READY FOR?
A Sermon Delivered at Memorial United Methodist Church, Taunton, Massachusetts on March 8, 2009

Usually, a good sermon teaches the congregation a lesson and often provides comfort and reassurance to those listening to it. Today's message is either not a good sermon or is at least an unconventional one. Today I plan to raise questions for which I have no answer and I am asking the congregation to leave here thinking and questioning for ourselves. I am not having a crisis of faith, nor am I suggesting that anyone else have one. I do think that we need to begin to ask just what does the Lord have in store for us.
In her role as co-Lay Leader and as a fellow certified lay speaker, Susan Ulicnick asked the congregation to consider throughout the month of February leading into Lent the question “Are You Ready?” When Susan asked the question, she asked it in the context of whether or not we as Christians and as members of Memorial United Methodist Church were prepared to spread the word of the Gospel and to do what was necessary to grow and expand our church. As a people of faith, we always count on the Lord to deliver us through all times of trial. We know that everything that happens is part of God's plan and we believe in it. Today we are confronted with the greatest economic crisis in three generations, wars and global terrorism, and a seeming triumph of secular humanism or an "If it feels good, do it" attitude in Western society, but as Christians, we know that God is going to get us through it somehow. Even as our church hurts for money and attendance and has lost membership, have we not also been blessed with timely inheritances from old friends, our blessed partnership with the Church at Antioch and an influx of new families and the return of families whose children have reached an age where they and their parents are looking for a faith experience? I am here before you this morning because our pastor is on a retreat with our confirmation class. Six weeks ago, the pastor did not expect to have enough children for a class this year or even next.
But do we have the faith to accept and worship in God's plan if this plan is the Ultimate? The basic call to every Christian is whether or not he or she is ready to stand before God when the time of judgment arrives. In this season of Lent and in this time of religious war or jihad and of global economic crisis, we reflect more and more upon meeting our Maker and many serious people are now asking us to consider whether we are approaching the Apocalypse and End Time or the Second Coming or the Rapture.
Even before the current crisis with war and the economy, there had been much discussion in recent years about the Apocalypse or the Rapture. About five or six years ago, as secular and worldly a program as “60 Minutes” did a feature on the Rapture and the believers in it and their primary theological analyst happened to be my friend, Rev. Professor Peter Gomes of Harvard Divinity School, who comes from nearby Plymouth, served on the board of the Pilgrim Society with my dad, and is an alumnus and trustee of Bates College, where I went to school. Many of the quasi-educational cable channels such as History, Discovery, and National Geographic have done documentaries on prophecies of the Apocalypse. Just within the last few weeks, an episode of "Law and Order" depicted characters preparing for the Rapture. Interestingly, such diverse sources as calculations based upon Scripture, psychic prophecies by the likes of Nostradamus and the twentieth century American psychic, Edgar Cayce, and teachings extracted from the ancient Mayan religions in Latin America all seem to converge on selecting a date for the Apocalypse in the year 2012. Many pessimists have questioned whether the world can survive the current economic conditions, global warming, and political strife. The current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the home of the Garden of Eden, and the disputes between the Israelis and Palestinians seem to fulfill Biblical prophecies, not surprising considering that Jesus Christ and the mortal human beings who crafted the Bible from the Word of God all lived in that vicinity. The Book of Revelation speaks of a new Jerusalem and the crisis stage at which the geopolitics of the physical city of Jerusalem presently stands could very well be setting the stage for the fulfillment of that prophecy.
Then there is the new President of the United States. Barack Obama is far and away the most charismatic figure ever to head our nation and one of the most in the history of the world. This is amplified even more by the fact that he succeeded one of the most despised leaders in our history, George W. Bush. His seminal position as the first President of black African descent has made him an icon in the African American community such as has never been seen, surpassing Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the legend of Abraham Lincoln. On this past Martin Luther King Day, which was the day before President Obama's inauguration, I attended the Martin Luther King Breakfast at Bridgewater State College and the Martin Luther King service cosponsored by the City of Taunton and the Greater Taunton Clergy Association. At least three times at the breakfast and at least once at the service, speakers felt compelled to say that Obama was not a messiah. Back in 1980 after I heard Ronald Reagan feel compelled for the second or third time to defend himself by saying that he did not “eat his young,” I began to think that “the man doth protest too much” and that perhaps there was something to allegations of cannibalism by "the Gipper." I also have to wonder if people who feel compelled to disavow the President as the Messiah harbor secret thoughts that perhaps he is the Messiah. There is also little doubt that many who are critics or enemies of the President view him as an Antichrist, which would also be a fulfillment of prophecy. Either way, perhaps the Obama Presidency should be factored into the equation.
At this point, many of you probably think that I have gone off into the realm of the ridiculous and that perhaps I have lost my mind to delusion or paranoia. However, there is a very real down to earth point to this speculation. Nearly two thousand years after the fact, the majority of the world's population does not recognize Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Most of us have been taught about Jesus from the cradle or have had a salvation experience that brought us to Him. However, if you had lived in Judea two thousand years ago, would you have known or believed? While there is much discussion that witnesses observed an aura about Jesus, remember that a mob of thousands was willing to turn against Him before Pontius Pilate because Caiaphas had convinced them that He was not the Son of God but a heretic and traitor to the existing order. Some moderns are even claiming Jesus to have been a myth rather than a real person, because the only physical evidence of His existence today outside the Bible is the writing of the Roman historian Josephus, who recounts stories that he had heard about Jesus. Remember also that while Jesus preached that He was sent by His Father, when the authorities asked Him “Are you the King of the Jews?” His response was “It is you that say that.”
We must ask ourselves are we prepared to recognize a Messiah or an Antichrist if He or She came? Many in our history, such as Marcus Garvey and Sun Myung Moon have come to us claiming to be the Second Coming and have been found wanting, although Rev. Moon did found a well respected newspaper in the Washington Times. But what if Jesus comes to us again in a humble and modest form as He did two thousand years ago? Would we miss the signs? It is a challenge. How do you tell someone who has lost job or a home or a retirement fund that “Jesus Saves”? Are we ready to accept that God is going to deliver us through all our present adversities and that we will be invited into the Kingdom of Heaven, if only we will believe?
We have come to say mechanically “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sin, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” What does that mean to you? Does the Holy Spirit work within and through you? What does God's church mean to you? Who is in the communion of saints and are you prepared to join them? Do you believe that your sins are forgiven just by confessing them and asking forgiveness? Do you believe that Jesus' body was resurrected? Do you believe that yours will be, too on the last day? What is life everlasting? How do you intend to achieve it and what do you expect it to be?
Looking toward the End Time would certainly be the ultimate test of our faith. Instead of being concerned about what we would leave our children, our concern would go more toward "Will our children be saved and resurrected with us?" No parent wants to conceive of burying a child, but can our faith handle the notion that we are going and that we are taking our children with us?
I am not preaching Hellfire and brimstone or that we are approaching the Apocalypse. There is much reason to hope that our planet and our existence will continue for years and generations to come if we are responsible stewards of what God has given us.. The same faith that God can get us through an Apocalypse, or a Judgment, or a Rapture can also get us through the little things. Even if you are experiencing a devastation in your life, it is still a miracle that you are alive and experiencing. Ultimately, if you really believe, does it matter whether God delivers you through adversity to a new and happier mortal life or to a new and happier eternal life? We are all going to have to deal with the eternal life question at some point. In my youth, I was terrified by the notion of death and dying. I was blessed to have three of my four grandparents sitting front and center at my high school graduation, although I lost all of them in my college years. However, at the age of twenty-eight, I had the devastating experience of watching my lively, life loving, and faithful twenty-four-year-old sister waste away and die of cancer. Seeing her strength and courage and enduring that loss, I came to know that there has to be more to life than our mortal existence and I know that the end will come in God's own time and that all I can do is be a steward of the body and soul He has given me and to accept His will for me. Our economic crisis has come about because God is calling the world to task for greed and irresponsibility. I told my colleagues in the Taunton Rotary Club a couple of years ago that the world was moving away from the responsible free enterprise capitalism practiced by business members of service clubs such as Rotary and Kiwanis and to the extremes of corporate greed in the capitalist world and to socialism or Communism as its alternative. No regulation or bailout or nationalizing of industries or socialism or Communism will ever restore the world's economy. If our world is to be saved, it is going to be through the Bible's lessons of prosperity combined with charity. Remember that that dreamy and romantic sounding Revised Standard Version of I Corinthians 13 about "love" was originally translated in the King James Version as "charity,": which all former Rainbow Girls know from advancing through the chairs of "Faith," "Hope," and "Charity." In the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," Julia Ward Howe speaks of the example of Christ and says "As He died to make men holy, Let us die (or in some versions "live") to make men free." Whatever the future has in store for us and for our civilization, let God show us that in a life of true faith, deliverance from adversity into a new and better mortal life or a new and better eternal life should make no difference, so long as we know that it is God's deliverance.

THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BICENTENNIAL IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

Delivered at the Taunton Rotary Club, February 12, 2009 by Jordan H. F. Fiore

Two hundred years ago today Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the wife of Thomas Lincoln, gave birth to a baby boy in a dirt floored rickety log cabin outside Hodgenville, Kentucky. They named the boy Abraham, after Thomas’ father, and he grew to be one of the most famous people in the history of the world. For the past one hundred fifty years he has served as a source of inspiration, pride, controversy and conscience to billions of people. Being the son of a professional historian and being trained as one myself, and having experienced my elementary school years during the centennial of the Civil War, I have certainly had a lifelong fascination and relationship with Lincoln and that has brought me to the chairmanship of our city’s special commission to celebrate this bicentennial. To help invoke Taunton community pride and to provide a local angle to the celebration, in September we dedicated the square next to Reed and Barton, adjacent to a site where Lincoln spoke in 1848 as “Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Square” with an audience of about ninety people and three color guards. In October a number of us, including several Rotarians and Rotary family members, read portions of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates on the steps of First Parish Church. In November, on the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, we dedicated a plaque on Wayne Berube’s law office, which was the home of General Darius Nash Couch, who commanded the honor guard at the Gettysburg dedication ceremony in 1863. In January and February, the African-American Club at Taunton High School has been at work on a project covering the Emancipation Proclamation and tonight at 7 o’clock at the Old Colony Historical Society, we are having a birthday party for Abe. The program will feature a performance by the African-American Club and a presentation by Dr. Charles Thayer on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. We will also have a display of probably about a thousand dollars worth of Lincoln pennies, which have been raised by school children and others to provide gifts cards to grocery and department stores for families of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the cards to be distributed by the city’s office of veterans’ services. We will also be handing out vouchers for the new Lincoln Bicentennial pennies which the mint will release later this month. You are all invited to come and swap pennies with us this evening.
With the coming of the Lincoln Bicentennial year, our new President geared a Lincoln-based theme to his Inauguration. Of course, both Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln were products of the Illinois legislature and it was the actions of Lincoln that made possible the candidacy and service of the African-American Obama. While Lincoln was antislavery from the time that he visited the New Orleans slave markets in his early twenties, he was slow to suggest any political rights for Negroes, particularly campaigning in Illinois, which bordered on the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and which had areas of a Southern orientation. However, Lincoln’s observation of the exploits of black soldiers in the Civil War, such as the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, brought him to the conclusion that the Negro was as much a stakeholder in America as the white man and, when the federal government was trying to formulate a state constitution for Louisiana in 1864 after it was brought under Union occupation, Lincoln insisted that the constitution contain a provision allowing African-Americans to vote. He also advocated for the Fifteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which was ratified after his death.
This congruence between the two men has opened an invitation to compare and contrast. I will admit to the prejudice of being a lifelong Republican and also, as one who has held elective office himself for nineteen years, I have had grave concerns over Mr. Obama’s level of relevant experience, just about the least of any incoming President in history. Because Mr. Obama is so bright, articulate, and hopeful, people have tended to overlook this fact, but we really have nothing in this man’s history on which to base an expectation of his leadership. That being said, I find amazing similarities and some unexpected contrasts between the two men.
Both men came from unconventional family backgrounds with problematical relationships with their fathers and with step- or half siblings. Lincoln’s father, Thomas, was a poor, illiterate dirt farmer, who had no sympathy or understanding for Abraham’s desire for “book learning” or for his ambitions beyond the family farm. Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, died when he was nine years old and his only sister died as a teenager. It is known that Nancy was nurturing of Abraham and of his reading and learning of stories. Thomas Lincoln remarried the widow Sarah Bush Johnston, who brought with her several children from her first marriage. Abraham and his stepmother adored each other and Sarah was always encouraging of Abraham’s aspirations. However, some of her children were ne’er do well. From Lincoln’s later correspondence, it is known that he regularly sent money to help his stepmother and he corresponded regularly with his step siblings. However, after being hit up for money on several occasions after becoming successful in the law and in business, Lincoln began replacing financial aid to his step siblings with advice. Lincoln and his father apparently resented each other and Abraham never visited his father, nor did he attend his funeral. However, on his way to Washington to assume the Presidency in 1861, Lincoln did go to visit his stepmother. Mrs. Lincoln survived her stepson by about four years.
As we all now know, President Obama is the result of a college romance between a teenager from Kansas and a student from Kenya about a dozen years her senior. Barack Obama, Sr. returned to his native land around the time that his namesake son was born and only returned to America to visit the boy once, when young Barack was about ten. The senior Barack married several more times and fathered several more children, all of whom were raised in Africa (one of the sons now lives in China). His father, the President’s grandfather, also married several times and the African “grandmother” with whom the President is seen in some photographs is his grandfather’s fourth wife and widow. The President did not meet most of his siblings until he traveled to Kenya after his father’s death in an automobile accident in 1982. He is, however, close to his half sister, who is his mother’s daughter by her second husband, an Indonesian. He apparently maintains contact with his African family, but it must be remembered that their relationship began as adults and that there are no childhood bonds among them.
Although Lincoln’s image is of being a much older man than Obama, in fact he was only four and a half years older when assuming the White House. Furthermore, although Lincoln’s son Robert was already a student at Harvard when his father became President, Lincoln’s younger sons, Willie and Tad, were about the same ages as the Obama daughters are now. Lincoln and Obama were both taller than average and of lanky build. They both rose to the fore based upon their ability as speechmakers, though in a much different way. Mr. Obama is very handsome and has the voice of a radio announcer. His inflections, his movement, his eye contact, and his fairly upbeat subject matter and approach to it have created the public presence that sends a tingle up Chris Matthews’ leg. However, there are few great quotations from Obama’s speeches; they have to be heard. Lincoln, on the other hand, make an awkward and sometimes slovenly appearance and is said to have had an irritating high-pitched voice. However, his self-deprecating humor allowed regular people to identify with him and his language was poetic and passionate. “Our free country was founded eighty-seven years ago” became “Fourscore and seven years ago our Fathers brought forth on this Continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” “No hard feelings” became “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us bind up our nation‘s wounds.” In addition, Lincoln‘s secretary John Hay, was a poet and journalist and contributed much to Lincoln literature.
Both men came to greatness from humble origins by different paths. Lincoln was born to a poor dirt farmer in a socioeconomic class not much above that of the African-American slaves and became a wealthy lawyer and a respected statesman. Barack Obama‘s family often faced economic difficulty and he traveled an interesting and noble route. He was raised in a lower middle class white family and lived most of his childhood in multiracial environments in Hawaii and Indonesia. However, as an adult, he made a decision to go to work as a community organizer in the African-American ghettos of Chicago, exposing himself to more prejudice and social hardship than he had ever known in his life. Then he moved on to an elite law school and moved in and out of elite law firms to enjoy the more modest life of a law professor and a state legislator.
Both men experienced critical development in unsuccessful races for lower office. Lincoln’s 1855 Senate loss to Lyman Trumbull resulted in Trumbull’s commitment to support Lincoln in 1858 for Illinois’ other Senate seat, setting up the Lincoln-Douglas Debates that made Lincoln a national figure. Lincoln’s unsuccessful bid for the Vice Presidential nomination at the first Republican National Convention in 1856 helped him establish contacts that aided him in winning the Presidential nomination four years later, a development similar to what John F. Kennedy would experience with the Democrats a hundred years later. Obama broke out of the pack in the Illinois Senate with an unsuccessful primary challenge to Congressman Bobby Rush. Obama bucked the Daley machine in Chicago in that election and lost, but won their respect and future support as a result.
Both Lincoln and Obama had beautiful and fashion conscious wives. Mary Todd Lincoln came from Kentucky society and helped to fire Lincoln’s social and political ambitions. Mrs. Lincoln also suffered from mental instability which often manifested itself with lavish New York shopping sprees in which she would buy dozens of pairs of gloves and expensive hats, dresses, and home furnishings, the bills for which the President quietly paid. Much of the 2009 press is agog at Michele Obama’s J. Crew fashion accessorizing and her choice of modern emerging designers for her custom formal wear.
The comparison of experience I believe is a little misleading. The Obama campaign and its allies pointed out that Lincoln and Obama spent about the same amount of time in equivalent public offices and that Obama was older than John F. Kennedy. This overlooks two crucial factors. By the time he was forty-three years old, Jack Kennedy had had fourteen years in both houses of Congress. It is true that Lincoln had the same level of experience as Obama in public office. However, Lincoln had been a major political player for about twenty-five years by the time he reached the White House. He was elected to the legislature at twenty-five and even during his years out of office, particularly in the period 1854-1860, Lincoln was a major spokesman for the Republican Party and played a key role in formulating its policies and strategies. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas quoted from a number of Lincoln speeches given over the course of at least a dozen years.. Furthermore, Lincoln had a very sophisticated law practice and a diverse investment portfolio and had a much more highly developed business and managerial philosophy than Obama. In fact, Obama’s professional and political background does not even stack up against our so-called “moron” Presidents. Millard Fillmore had critical administrative and economic experience as the state comptroller of New York. Warren Harding had been a newspaper publisher and the lieutenant governor of Ohio before spending twice as long as Obama in the U. S. Senate. Chester Arthur had fifteen years as the Collector of the Port of New York.
Both Lincoln and Obama arrived in office with great intensity of feeling, but the feelings were very different. President Obama has come into office with a large residue of good will from breaking the racial barrier and being so personable and mediagenic. Since he comes into office in such hard times and succeeds the much despised George W. Bush, many of his supporters see him as a savior and messiah. His much smaller font of critics jealously view him as the Antichrist. There is very little casual feeling or indifference. On the other hand, Lincoln’s support was not all that enthusiastic. He was relatively unknown nationally, his nomination was “inside baseball” rather than a popular movement, and he won with only 39% as a result of a split between Northern and Southern factions in the Democratic Party and a strong bid by John Bell of the Constitution Party. However, the election of a President from the antislavery Republican Party, which Stephen A. Douglas had rightly scored as being only a regional party because its platform could not be carried in the South, was anathema to the South and resulted in secession of states from the Union. Much of the North and even more established Republicans were skeptical, as well. Lincoln’s political life, even within his own party, was turbulent to say the least for most of his time in office. His 1864 reelection only came about as a result of some last minute victories by Generals Grant and Sherman. Obama will encounter no such strife during his term. The Congressional Republican Party has been totally inept and unprincipled since its replacement of professional leaders such as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and Trent Lott with rank amateurs and the party’s recent Presidential candidates have espoused controversial foreign policies and domestic policies that rank somewhere between nonexistent and ridiculous. While Obama spent hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertising, it was completely unnecessary: All of the broadcast news outlets except for Fox, whose conservative owner Rupert Murdoch essentially endorsed Obama himself, have become essentially commercials or cheerleaders for Obama. The Democrats are poised to gain at least four or five and probably more seats in the Senate in 2010 and the Republican Presidential candidates in 2012 will be ridiculed during the primary season and ignored or written off during the general election campaign. The election of the Obama-like Michael Steele as Republican National Chairman is a closing of the barn door after the horses have left the stable. Only a wide open Presidential election in 2016 may restore some semblance of two-party democracy to America. However, if the 22nd Amendment is repealed to allow Obama a third term or a 74-year old Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, the Republican Party will remain in the wilderness for a generation, if it survives at all. It will be 2020 at least before the Senate is no longer filibusterproof.
When Jacob Riis did his groundbreaking study of urban America over a hundred years ago, he commented that virtually all Negro households had a “Massa Linkum” hanging on their walls. In that regard, Lincoln was largely replaced by Malcolm X or Martin Luther King years ago, but now the permanent icon will be Barack Obama. The disdain of the African-American community for the Republican party has become so deep that Lincoln’s efforts toward freedom are now being written off as acts of war or political expediency. However, Obama himself has expressed appreciation that the efforts of Abraham Lincoln in the nineteenth century and our own Edward Brooke in the twentieth century made him and his ascendancy possible. Let us hope that the world never forgets the lessons and achievements of both Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.