What surprised me this morning is that my thoughts kept turning to the words of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” and it took me a few minutes to figure out why. What I arrived at was this—through all the challenges and sacrifices that we have faced since 1776, there is one thing that gave us the determination, hope, and heart to hold us together and see us through: the promise of the Declaration of Independence. What Lincoln did that day, surrounded by the sorrow of row upon row of men and boys who would never come home again, was to re-dedicate us as a people for the rest of time to that promise of the Declaration of Independence: his ode to the “better angels of our nature;” his gift to us as Americans.
So as we remember today those young men and women who never came home, as we remember all the turmoil we have been through over these recent years, and as we brace ourselves for facing the tough decisions that lie ahead for our country over the next few years, let’s share a moment of re-dedication:
The Gettysburg Address
Four score 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.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us
- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion
- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain
- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom
- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
