The Hymns We Share: Amazing Grace (Combined Service)

Finding God in the Music

For the last three summers, we’ve had our summer sermon series on Finding God in the Music.

It must be pretty clear at this point that I’m a bit of a music nerd.

My entire doctoral thesis is centered on music and the faith we sing. There will be so much more about that later.

So you have to understand how utterly offensive the worship wars are to me.

How is it possible that two of the most beautiful expressions of the Christian faith, what some call contemporary Andy some call traditional, how is it possible that we would treat them like opposing hockey teams?

Both traditions of worship have much to teach us, much to illumine us, and so much good good music to celebrate.

It absolutely turns my stomach when we fight over that.

So, long before we decided to set the sanctuary up like this and have a combined service, I knew what the summer series would be.

Finding God in the Music: The Hymns we Share.

Both services actually steal a little bit from each other from time to time, so I thought this summer we could celebrate what we share.

So, I figured we ought to start with the most famous hymn of all time.

Except…

I am just back from two weeks in Edinburgh.

And all throughout the streets of Edinburgh, especially the deeply touristy parts, there are bagpipers.

And do you know one of the only songs that bagpipers know?

That’s right.

I am fresh off of two weeks of wandering around a city where I was flooded near constantly with the piercing sound of the bagpipes playing Amazing Grace.

Still, you have to wonder.

Why is that the most famous song to be played on bagpipes?

Or sung in churches for that matter?

What is it about this hymn that speaks to our souls?

Why is it that we share this hymn?

The Story.

Perhaps this is familiar to you.

John Newton was born in 1725 in London England.

For work, John was a slave trader.

This means that he was actively working to capture other people, take them far away from their home land, and sell them to other people.

This means that he saw folks from Africa not necessarily as people, but as products.

He saw them as profit.

Experience of Slavery

A part of the story I didn’t know though that shocked me to read:

In 1745, John Newton himself became a slave of Princess Peye in Sierra Leone.

That means that the one who thought of people as products became a product himself.

It meant all the freedom he enjoyed was taken away from him.

It meant that he got a taste of his own medicine.

And yet, at some point in that process, he was rescued.

And he immediately went back to the slave trade.

He saw the underside of what he was doing.

He knew exactly what each and every one of those men and women that he sold were experiencing.

He knew their pain.

He knew their hurt.

And knowing all of that, he went back to selling.

The Storm

In 1748, captaining the ship the Greyhound, Newton woke up one night to discover that they were caught in a horrific storm.

He ran out of other options at that point, and so he prayed for God’s mercy.

And as soon as he prayed, the storm died down.

And that’s what began his conversion to Christianity.

Conversion

Newton started reading the Bible (a rather good idea, I highly recommend it).

Even in Newton’s own words, the conversion took a while.

He stayed on the slave trade, but kept reading that Bible.

And it kept gnawing at him.

In 1764, Newtown was ordained an Anglican Priest.

In 1779, he along with William Cowper started writing some hymns, including “Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken”, and a lovely tune that Newton titled “Faith’s Review and Expectation.”

Luckily, someone had the insight to convince him to change the title of the hymn to it’s opening line: Amazing Grace.

The Hymn

Changing lyrics?

A while back, a particular evangelical denomination had a hard time with the lyrics in Amazing Grace.

They tried to change the line to “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a soul like me.”

I guess the thinking was that folks don’t want to think of themselves as a wretch?

First of all, as a wannabe songwriter, I implore you: don’t change somebody else’s lyrics unless you have a really good reason to.

But secondly…doesn’t grace sound more amazing when we realize just how far we’ve fallen?

You have to put that line in Newton’s mouth, right?

Not only is he the guy that captured, tortured, bought, and sold humans for a living,

He’s the guy who got a front row seat to what that can feel like, found his way back to freedom, and went RIGHT BACK to selling, torturing, and abusing humans for a living.

Do you have a better word for wretch?

Let’s get honest.

But let’s be honest for a second:

I’m guessing none of us have ever bought or sold humans in this room, right?

I’m guessing that we were never ourselves enslaved.

I’m guessing that we’ve never gone right back to enslaving people when we got out.

So maybe we like to think that the word “wretch” perfectly applies to Newton, but not so much to us.

But come on…

Who among us here hasn’t treated someone else in our lives like they were a little less than us?

Who among us hasn’t viewed people with a judgmental eye?

Who among us hasn’t reduced a person to what they could do for us, over and against their humanity?

Who among us hasn’t abused someone with our speech toward them, or with the way we talk about them behind their back, or the way we think about them?

Who among us hasn’t failed to learn a lesson from our failures?

Who among us can’t at least a little consider ourselves hypocrite?

Who among us hasn’t said one thing and then done something completely other?

Who among us are slow to learn the lessons of life, no matter how many times God has to keep reminding us of them?

Nah, friends, we ought to be honest here.

There’s no better word than wretch in this hymn, is there?

We are all broken.

We are all fallen.

We have all done wrong.

We’ll all do wrong again.

We are the wretch, however much we try to pretend otherwise.

Can’t stop God.

And you know what?

We can lie to ourselves all we want about that.

But we can’t hide any of our failures and flaws from God.

He knows what you did.

He knows what he said.

He knows the thoughts that run through your head at your very lowest of lows.

He knows every single thing…and yet…don me a favor friends, lean in close when I tell you this:

He.

Still.

Loves.

You.

Hesed

Perhaps you were wondering why I picked this psalm, of all the scriptures we could have read today.

It’s because in the midst of all this fear and trembling David is clearly going through, no matter how much he is surrounded on all sides by enemies, he keeps repeating this phrase over and over again:

“Your steadfast love.”

God’s steadfast love.

It’s actually not a phrase in the original Hebrew language.

It’s this Hebrew word hesed.

Steadfast love is overwhelmingly the way it gets translated, but the truth is there’s not really a direct English translation for this word.

Love

Kindness

Loyalty

Faithful.

And in some cases…you guessed it… grace.

Hesed is something that in scripture seems exclusively reserved for God.

It’s the kind of love that God does.

It’s the kind of love that doesn’t care how many enemies you’re surrounded by, it’ll get you through.

It’s the kind of love that doesn’t care if you’re actually the one who invited the enemies to your door, it’s still going to look after you.

It’s the kind of love that doesn’t care what brought you to pray in the first place, even if it’s just a desperate cry in the middle of a storm.

Brennan Manning

One of my favorite authors is Brennan Manning, and he wrote about grace this way:

Several years ago in a large city in the far West, rumors spread that a certain Catholic woman was having visions of Jesus. The reports reached the archbishop. He decided to check her out. There is always a fine line between an authentic mystic and the lunatic fringe.

“Is it true, ma’am, that you have visions of Jesus?” asked the cleric.

“Yes.” the woman replied simply.

“Well, the next time you have a vision, I want you to ask Jesus to tell you the sins that I confessed in my last confession.”

The woman was stunned. “Did I hear your right, bishop? You actually want me to ask Jesus to tell me the sins of your past?”

“Exactly. Please call me if anything happens.”

Ten days later the woman notified her spiritual leader of a recent apparition. “Please come,” she said.

Within the hour the archbishop arrived. He trusted eye-to-eye contact. “You just told me on the telephone that you actually had a vision of Jesus. Did you do what I asked?”

“Yes bishop, I asked Jesus to tell me the sins you confessed in your last confession.”

The bishop leaned forward with anticipation. His eyes narrowed.

“What did Jesus say?”

She took his hand and gazed deep into his eyes. “Bishop,” she said, “these are His exact words: I CAN’T REMEMBER.”

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.

We’ve been there ten thousand years.

When you catch this, it pierces the heart like a thousand bagpipes in the Scottish hills.

Thomas Merton says that a saint isn’t someone who does good for God. A saint is someone who experiences the goodness of God.

A saint is someone who has understood God’s amazing grace in the face of our unrelenting wretchedness.

A saint is someone who knows that hesed is waiting at the end of every single prayer of confession.

A saint is someone who sighs a deep breath when at the end of that confession, someone up here reminds us of the truth: we are forgiven.

A saint is someone who’s been through all the dangers, toils, and snares of this life and has a full knowledge that grace will lead them home.

A saint is someone who knows that this isn’t about what we do to earn God’s love.

It never has been.

It never will be.

A saint knows that God loves us in spite of what we do.

God acts first, and we respond in gratitude.

And so a saint knows how this hymn ends too.

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.

We’ve no less days to say thank you to God for the grace to greet the morning.

We’ve no less days to find gratitude for the forgiveness that Christ’s work on the cross affords us.

We’ve no less days to sing because when we confess our sins to Jesus, he legitimately forgets what we’ve said.

He’s too busy falling in love with us.

We’ve no less days to gather together in church, to lift up our praise, no matter what music serves as its soundtrack.

We’ve no less days to learn the unforced rhytms of grace from Christ and each other.

We’ve really just begun, haven’t we.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.

Amen.