Amazing Grace

This past week, Pastor Laura explained her own concerns about a few of the lyrics to “Amazing Grace,” but in her comments, she emphasized the beauty of grace and its transformative effects on the song’s author, John Newton. Jonathon Aitken writes beautifully about the significance of grace for Newton’s life:

Newton’s early years were indeed disgraceful. He was a wild and angry young man who rebelled against authority at every opportunity, starting with foolish acts of disobedience against his father. Press-ganged at the age of eighteen into the Royal Navy, he broke its rules so recklessly that he earned himself a public flogging for desertion. Filled with “bitter rage and black despair,” he was torn between committing suicide and murdering his captain. Only his unrequited love for a thirteen-year-old girl he had met in Chatham, Polly Catlett, restrained his destructive instincts. Exchanged from his warship to a slave ship in Madeira, Newton became even wilder in his behavior. “I was exceedingly vile,” he said. “I not only sinned with a high hand myself but made it my study to tempt and seduce others upon every occasion.” Revealing the first glimpse of his later talent as a hymn-writer, he composed a derogatory song about his new captain and taught it to the entire crew. He had to leave the ship in a hurry after that bout of troublemaking; so Newton’s next move was to work for a shore-based slave trader in Sierra Leone. He indulged in every available vice including witchcraft. Accused (unfairly) of stealing, he fell foul of his employer’s black mistress, a tribal princess who imprisoned him in chains, starved him, and treated him brutally. He was rescued from a remote part of the West African coastline by a ship’s captain from Liverpool. Because Newton’s lifestyle had improved by this time, he initially refused the offer of a passage home, but the thought of seeing Polly again won him over. During the long voyage to England Newton again behaved appallingly as a troublemaker. Although he had been brought up in the Christian faith by his devout mother, who died when he was six, Newton had become such an aggressive atheist and blasphemer that even his shipmates were shocked by his oaths. Halfway across the Atlantic, out of boredom, he picked up the only available book on board the ship, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. As he read it he began to worry that its words might be true. So he slammed the book shut and went to sleep until awakened in the middle of a terrifying storm by the cry, “The ship is sinking!” The ship was badly holed and waterlogged. As it seemed to be going down, Newton, to his own great astonishment, began to pray, “Lord, have mercy on us!” After many hours of extreme peril, the storm subsided, and Newton felt at peace. “About this time,” he said, “I began to know that there is a God who answers prayer.” Almost immediately Newton stopped swearing, changed his licentious lifestyle, and started to pray and read the Bible. From that day, March 21, 1748, until his death in 1807 he never let a year go by without recognizing in prayerful thanksgiving what he called his “great turning day” of conversion.

Aitken, Jonathan; Philip Yancey (2008-03-31). John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace (p. 19). Crossway Books. Kindle Edition.

From there, Newton went on to become a passionate advocate for abolition and, of course, to write one of the most widely known hymns in Western Christianity. His own struggles to come to terms with grace had political and spiritual impacts that still resonate with most of us today.

But as the PL pointed out, maybe we don’t understand grace in the same way that Newton did. Perhaps it isn’t best for us to dwell on our wretchedness but instead to remember the grace and beauty offered each one of us in this life. Certainly wretchedness and evil exist in our world, but our hope lies in the possibility of life precisely in the presence of those realities. As a community of faith, may we always be open to give and receive amazing grace to one another as we work towards a better reality.

It’s not as clear as we’d like it to be

Even the messiest among us likes some small amount of order.  We are creatures who like categories and labels … a short hand that helps us process through an issue or a person without much thought.  In our busy lives, it’s just easier to use this short hand to deal with the world.  We only have to engage in that which we feel is truly important.

But what are we missing?

So much of life falls outside the neat little boxes and rules we try to cram our existence into.  We uphold the Ten Commandments as a core of our values.  But do we really look beyond just the surface of the Decalogue?  In a very real sense, many of us break the Commandments daily.  But is that truly the intent of these laws, that we should strictly adhere to them?

“You shall not kill,” seems like a straightforward rule to follow.  But how does it apply to the soldier fighting in Afghanistan?  How does that command apply to the woman and her daughter being brutally abused by the woman’s spouse?  She comes home to find her husband strangling the child and ends his life to save her daughter.  How does she fit into the neat box?

“You shall not commit adultery,” is thorny as well.  A man divorces his wife because she refuses to stop abusing drugs.  He fears the impact her addiction will have on their son.  He divorces her and remarries. He provides a stable, loving home for both his son and the son of his new wife.  Technically, he’s committed adultery.  But was staying with a wife who chose drugs over her husband and child some how less ethical than committing an act of adultery?

A young man tells his parents he is gay and they subsequently throw him out of their house.  He is rejected by both immediate and extended family.  The young man is now forced to provide for himself to survive.  How is this young man to honor his father and mother when has been utterly abandoned by them?

We desire our questions of morality to be more black and white than these.  We want to be able to have a clear choice:  right or wrong.  But life is far more complicated and disorganized than that.  Most of the issues we are faced with have multiple answers in varying degrees of right and wrong. None of us can have all the right answers. We can only make the choices that speak to our hearts as being the best and most just.  Beyond that, we can only pray about those things that fall into that murky, gray area.