Lenten Pulpit Series: Lessons from Old Chestnuts
Amazing Grace
A Sermon by Rev. Michael Scott
The Dublin Community Church
March 6, 2016
Genesis 1:26-31
John 1:1-2, 14
Today, I continue the pulpit series for the Lenten/Easter season in which I’m turning to
some of our favorite old hymns, the “old chestnuts”, as well as scripture readings to examine
some of the themes of Jesus’s ministry. This week our hymn is “Amazing Grace.”
This hymn was born out of one of the most remarkable stories of all. It was written to be
used in a prayer meeting in 1772 by the Reverend John Newton. But how Reverend Newton
arrived at the point where he could pen these words is an amazing tale. Born in the London of
1725, Newton was abused as a child and suffered the death of his mother. He quickly became a
rapscallion. When he was eleven he went off on his father’s sailing ship and so began a career
as a sailor. But he was not your ordinary sailor. You’ve heard the expression, “language that
would make a sailor blush”? Well, with John Newton that was no joke. He literally got into
trouble aboard ship for his unbelievably foul mouth. Working on slave ships, he was pretty
much a renegade and a bit of a reprobate. In time he was imprisoned with the slaves for his
behavior, and even ultimately enslaved himself in Sierra Leone. He was without question, in the
words of the hymn, a “wretch”. After being rescued with his father’s help, in time, Newton
managed to become a ship’s captain – a captain , that is, of ships running slaves from Africa to
North America. Over the course of several years he had gradually begun to feel that God was at
work in his life, and that a transformation was taking place. When he gave up his life on the sea
he began attending church along with the woman he married. The influence of that congregation
– not, I daresay, unlike the influence of this one – changed him completely. He began studying
and in time was accepted into the priesthood in the Church of England, and then was assigned to
a church in the small town of Olney. While there, he and a friend, William Cowper, started a
weekly Bible study class and collaborated on writing hymns to be sung there. The Olney Hymns
were written down as poems (there was no music with the lyrics) and one of the poems titled,
“Faith’s Review and Expectation”, contained these words:
Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
It wasn’t put to the tune we are familiar with (a tune called “New Britain”) until 1829. That
tune is an American folk melody that’s thought to be Scottish or Irish. By the way, I discovered
that the five note scale of the tune is suggestive of bagpipes, so it’s not coincidental that Amazing
Grace is played on bagpipes so much these days. It’s also worth noting that Newton wrote two
final verses that we never sing anymore, and the last verse that we usually sing (“When we’ve
been there ten thousand years . . .”) wasn’t written by John Newton. It first appeared in Harriot
Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, being sung by Tom. That verse had been sung by
African-Americans for a half century before Stowe’s book, having been taken from another song
titled, “Jerusalem, My Happy Home.”1 [All just part of the service here at Mike’s House of
Trivia].
Back to the story: It’s often thought that Newton wrote the hymn to celebrate his
awakening to the abolitionist cause after his years as a slave ship captain. In truth, though, he
didn’t raise his voice about the slave trade until about ten years after he wrote this hymn. But
when he did he didn’t do it half-way. He joined forces with William Wilberforce, the MP who
eventually pushed through the act of Parliament in 1807 that abolished the slave trade. But the
hymn is all about Newton’s experience of conversion, and that conversion did ultimately lead to
his denunciation of slavery. So it’s all of a piece.
The foul-mouthed, trouble-making sailor who became a slave ship captain and then
eventually became an abolitionist clergyman is a story for the ages. His story, by the way, is
something like mine – though mine is bit less dramatic: a foul-mouthed, racist, homophobic jerk
who became a foul-mouthed, racist, homophobic police officer, and now look at me. I’m a
foul-mouthed preacher of liberation theology. At any rate, this hymn is sort of Newton’s
simplified autobiography. And he included next to the title of his poem a reference to 1
Chronicles 17:16-17. I looked it up. It reads: “Then King David went in and sat before the
Lord, and said, ‘Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus
far? And even this was a small thing in your sight, O God; you have also spoken of your
servant’s house for a great while to come. You regard me as someone of high rank, O Lord
God!” It’s clear to me that Newton saw himself, as he perceived King David saw himself, as
undeserving of God’s favor. When he read in 1 Chronicles David’s question “Who am I, O
Lord God, . . . that you have brought me thus far” Newton knew: “’Tis grace hath brought me
safe thus far . . .”. And the humility in David’s question reflects the awe in Newton’s sense of
his own undeserving rescue from a life of wretchedness. Somehow it seemed to him that grace
– saving grace – is simply built-in to the way things work.
Well, that’s a fact. In the opening chapter of Genesis we read that God created human
beings in the very image of divinity. And at the end of creating us and the world around us, God
proclaimed that it was all “very good.” This is not a record of prehistoric events, it is a
theological affirmation that the universe itself is infused with God’s own goodness, a goodness
that resides in the divine nature of our very core. Many centuries after this theology was
articulated, John, in his Gospel, takes it a step further. He says that there was a Word that
existed from the beginning of the world, and that Word came to dwell among us “full of grace
and truth.” I don’t regard these theological assertions as just some folks’ quaint notions. I hold
them to be foundational truths.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis’ atrocities, Islamic State terrorists’ beheadings, and John
Newton’s assertion that he had been a “wretch” notwithstanding, human beings are, at their very
1
See: Jonathan Aitken, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace, Crossway, 2013, p. 235.
core, not evil, contemptible creatures; we are created in the divine image, and declared from the
outset to be “very good.” Somehow, along the way we get off track, and some among us get
very, very lost, but that divine spark from creation lives somewhere deep within nonetheless.
And the world we are part of is also “very good”. There is something built-in to the
fabric of existence that keeps tipping the scales toward wholeness, and worth, and even justice.
It doesn’t seem like it a lot of the time. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if the world is just going
all to hell. But look at the larger picture and you will remind yourself that human beings keep
finding ways to emerge from the quagmires they get themselves into, and keep learning hard
lessons (albeit ones that have to be learned over again in many times and places). But for all of
the awful things that happen, and all the horrors and hang-ups that people exhibit, there is
something that keeps tugging us toward growth and healing. That something is, for want of a
better word, grace. And in the person of Jesus we find that grace epitomized. Indeed, he dwelt
among us “full of grace and truth.”
Because of this no person is ever so lost that he cannot be found; no person is ever so
blind that she cannot find a way to see; no situation is ever so fraught with misery that it cannot
be redeemed; no life is ever so shipwrecked that it cannot be saved.
As Easter approaches we acknowledge that this amazing grace, the grace that holds us all
our lives, bears a yet more unfathomable mystery: even death is not a victor. That is the
substance of John Newton’s final verse (the one we never sing). He wrote:
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call’d me here below,
Will be forever mine.
Let’s sing together:
Pastoral Prayer
Merciful God, we stand in this Lenten season awed by the unbounded love and
unparalleled self-sacrifice of Christ. To this time of reflection we bring the wants and desires of
our hearts, the hurts and disappointments of the past week, the unfulfilled promises of our lives.
We hope to find here clarity of purpose, a broader view, a wiser spirit. We come as we are,
knowing that you ask nothing else of us.
From your Spirit, O God, flows freedom, forgiveness, and love that we can scarcely
comprehend. We pray that you would pour that forgiveness and love out upon us, so that we
will have more than enough to offer to our brothers and sisters. Empower us by your mercy to
be healers, reconcilers, ministers of justice. We know that the cross that represents your
matchless love also beckons us to follow in the footsteps of the Christ who gave himself for us.
May others also be drawn to you. And may they find the gift of hope. May the broken
and fearful find courage. May the ungrateful find thankful hearts. May the thoughtless and
foolish find your own wisdom. May the places in your world that are torn by violence and
disaster be mended, may healing and hope come, and may all your children come to know the
oneness that is found in you.
We pray these things in the name of Christ, who taught disciples this prayer:
“Our father, who art in heaven . . .”