Sermons: Amazing Grace
Rev. Kathleen Ellis
28 Sept 03
“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see!”
These lyrics by John Newton, slave trader, echo in the memories of most of us. He grew up in a rough, sea-faring family. His mother taught him Bible stories and how to pray, but she died when he was just seven years old. He slid into a world of debauchery, gambling, drinking, cursing, and fighting. He wasn’t any good in school. His dad got him a job on a ship but he ran away. He was captured by a gang and pressed into service on another ship, mutinied, and was finally traded into the slave business.
The job fit his personality—he was good at it! Eventually he became captain and even the sailors were intimidated by his fearsome cursing. His ship would load up with goods from Great Britain which were used to trade for slaves to come to this country. He wanted to make a profit, because he needed the money in order to marry the woman he loved. Perhaps there was a soft spot hidden deep within his heart.
From Newton’s extensive journals and letters, we have the earliest account of what it was really like to engage in the slave trade. Various stories are told about his conversion to the Christian ministry. The most dramatic story takes place on his slave ship, which was loaded with human cargo for sale. A terrible storm blew up and threatened to break the ship apart and send it plunging to the depths of the ocean. All Newton could do was to lash himself to the ship’s wheel and wrestle with it all night long while the words to the hymn “Amazing Grace” wrote themselves in his mind. When it looked as if all would be lost, he shouted out, “If this is it, Lord have mercy on us all.”
By morning the storm passed. Newton was just as startled as anyone about his calling upon God for mercy. Where did that come from? The legend goes that he turned the ship around right then and took the slaves back to Africa. The real story is that his conversion was much more gradual. He crisscrossed the ocean several more times, but eventually he did get out of the business and became a preacher. He and another fellow wrote a new hymn every other week for services, and Amazing Grace is one of those hymns.
The documentary on Amazing Grace that was produced for public television by Bill Moyers, tells us that no one knows the origin of the melody. It may actually have been a folk tune or a ballad sung by slaves (or maybe that's a legend, too). What an odd coincidence that a slave tune and words of a slave trader have been handed down over generations of African descendants and European descendants into something so familiar and so beloved by so many, on both sides of the racial divide. At any rate, the song has been liberated from the religious community into the secular world. Perhaps this is one example of Amazing Grace. It crosses racial lines and religious/secular lines.
Some of us like the song okay but we balk at the words “saved a wretch like me.” In his later years, John Newton, who had become a passionate abolitionist, wrote, “I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.” Though we might agree with John Newton’s self-assessment that he was a wretch and an instrument of evil for many years, we don’t ordinarily call ourselves wretches. We’d rather substitute the words “saved a soul like me.”
Still, we have to admit that at the very least we have neglected responsibilities, commitments, and promises. We have “known better” than to do something and have done it, anyway. We have done things or lived through periods in our lives that fill us with shame.
The good news is that we are saved by grace. Whether or not it is God’s grace is up to you to decide. We are saved because there is forgiveness for the past even if we do not forget. Think back to the gruesome dragging death of James Byrd behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. Think about the family members who managed to let go of hatred and resentment even as they held out for justice in Byrd’s terrible killing. There is grace when divisions of race, magnified in an ultimate act of violence, can result in a Center for Racial Healing in Jasper, Texas. We are reminded that we can promote healing in the world. It is another example of Amazing Grace.
Most of us are old enough to have experienced the death of a family member. It might have been a sister or brother, mom or dad—a person whose death takes with it a piece of your own history—someone who knew what it was like to grow up in your family and helped you grow up.
Here’s another story from Texas. Ron Carlson lost his sister to the most violent of crimes, beyond imagination into nightmare. He wanted her killers to die—and they did: Dan Garrett died in prison of natural causes six years ago; Karla Faye Tucker was executed by the State of Texas in 1997.
But before that happened, both Ron Carlson and Karla Faye Tucker experienced a change of heart, toward the repentance and forgiveness of their new Christian faith. Ron came a long way from wanting the killers to die to working hard to have their sentences commuted. Ron was a witness to Karla Faye’s execution. He is now an active member of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation.
The term grace is commonly used for an especially nice quality, as in “grace under fire” or “grace under pressure”; “grace notes,” which add embellishments to music; a “grace cup,” used at the end of a meal, for the final toast. There are three Graces in Greek mythology--the sister goddesses Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who dispense charm and beauty
What is grace? You might call it the good part of luck, the part we don’t deserve and seldom expect. Some say it comes from God alone, perhaps because it is freely available to all of us. It’s grace that comes when we’re at the bottom of a nearly bottomless well and something hold us up and pulls us up by inches toward the distant light;
--it’s grace that surrounds us on a daily basis even when we’re too busy and self-absorbed to notice;
--grace that gives us breath and life;
--grace that someone knows us as we are and likes us anyway;
--grace that says thank you for this bread, for these friends; gracias, gratia;
--grace that provides temporary immunity from a natural disaster,
--or from our own foolishness. That’s when we say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
You can also call it love, mercy, science, coincidence, pure luck. Sometimes grace looks like a gift tied with wrapping paper, ribbons, and bows. More often than not, however, it cannot be wrapped at all. Like the sudden, unexpected beauty of nature, grace takes us by surprise and expects nothing in return.
We ourselves can bring grace to this wretched world. A Joan Baez song says “You are amazing grace -- you are a precious jewel. / You -- special miraculous unrepeatable / fragile fearful tender / lost sparkling ruby emerald jewel / rainbow splendor person”
There is so much we are expected to do because of our jobs or our roles as parents and partners. But it is when we move beyond the routine requirements of these roles that we become providers of grace. To do so is to be twice blessed, because your smile, your touch, your gift of time transforms not just the world, but yourself. Our connection in an interdependent web means that even the least of us can affect everyone else by the slightest tug on a fine strand.
“Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come; ‘tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.” I look back on my life and reflect on what I know of other people’s lives and I know that we have all faced toil, danger, and snares of various kinds. On the surface everything looks pretty smooth. We can always point to someone whose troubles look more real and more terrible, but the trials of life can bring us as low as we can go.
What keeps you going? What pulls you through? The grace that has brought us safe up ‘til now is the grace that will be with us to the end.
Rosh Ha'Shanah teaches us that our actions determine the course of our lives; that not even G'd can make us live lives filled with tzedakkah (justice combined with charity), tfilah (prayer and self-judgement) and ma'asim tovim (concrete actions that make the world a better place).
Amen
[story from the Austin American-Statesman, XLent section, p. 44-45, Sept. 23, 1999]
Copyright
©2006, Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church.