How does this blog writer take a historical event anniversary and turn it into a spiritual blog? Here goes nothing…

The Missouri Compromise. Senator Henry Clay introduced a bill that would admit Missouri into the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. Two hundred years ago this month, this proposed legislation was amended so that slavery would be banned in the former Louisiana Purchase Territory from the southern Missouri border southward. This compromise, or consensus, would have a “shelf-life” of thirty-four years until it was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. (You Mid-Westerners are such troublemakers)! Then in three years came the Dred Scott decision; followed three years later by the firing on Ft. Sumter. America basically just postponed the Civil War for forty years.

You would have thought our nation would have early on reached a consensus that slavery was wrong. The Presbyterians were a strong voice for abolition, especially Rev. Elijah Lovejoy. His printing presses were destroyed and dumped into the Mississippi River. He was assassinated in 1837 at the age of 35. Frederick Douglass, speaking in London in 1846, attacked Christianity for being silent and complicit in the practice of slavery. Daniel Payne (1811-1893) was the first African-American Lutheran pastor. In 1839 he condemned slavery “not because it enslaves the black man, but because it enslaves man.” There, as they say, is the crux of the biscuit. The bicentennial of the Missouri Compromise gives us a chance to reflect on what our history teaches us spiritually. The topics of slavery and immigration often carry some extra, unclaimed freight. Both have been fueled, trigger words that lead to terrible division and rancor. They are spiritual, moral issues. Sadly, as we mark a bicentennial of a different sort, it is still part of America’s sad legacy, its “DNA”, if you will. There are, of course, many forms of enslavement: toxic relationships, addictions, prejudices. How do we best achieve at least a proximity of welfare and justice for all? Living out what we pledge as our allegiance? Those questions certainly illicit further conversations (arguments?). The kingdom of God, come down to us now, is further advanced by our acts of compromise, consensus and reconciliation. Our Gracious God reconciled himself to us in that while we were still enslaved to sin, he died for us with a love that for us will always be unconditional.

Pastor Art