| "The Fourth Sunday of Lent is intended to be the least solemn day of this season, the day when we catch our first whiff of Easter. Liturgically, today is known as Laetare or "Rejoice" Sunday. So we have sung praise- and hope-filled hymns, and we have decorated the church with pink flowers rather than purple. Yet outside the church, this is a day when it is far easier to feel depressed than to feel joyful. For this is Day 11 of the sound of war-of the boom-boom of bomb after bomb, convulsing sky and earth, shattering buildings and bedrock and bone after bone; of the pow-pow-powpowpow of weapons-fire as soldiers, many for their very first times, are maiming and killing fellow children of God; of the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of missiles arched majestically into the heavens on missions of death and destruction, which we euphemistically call "shock and awe"; of the rat-a-tat-tat of all those false words fired off at press conferences from the mouths of the propagandists on all sides. One quite adult New Yorker was telling me this past week that he's so fed up with the sound of war on the Today Show that he's traded it in for Elmo and the sound of [whistle the Sesame Street theme]. Well, if the sound of Sesame Street can offer its own kind of Laetare in the midst of our depression and anxiety and guilt over war, how INFINITELY MORE SO can the sound of the words of love and grace spoken by Jesus in this morning's First Lesson from the Gospel of John. For how absolutely prompting of joy Jesus's words are! Now, many of us memorized these verses in Sunday School and have recited them so often that they're in danger of becoming a kind of background noise, the kind of sound we are always listening to without really listening. But please give now your undivided attention to these amazingly hope-filled words, which become especially poignant against the overall Lenten backdrop of betrayal and crucifixion. Listen: "For God so loved the world as to give the only begotten Son, so that everyone who has faith and trust in him may not perish but may have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." Amidst today's omnipresent sound of war's insane brutalities, the sound of Jesus's words of love and hope comes to us as quite a different kind of "bo¨m"-as a "b-a-l-m" balm of amazing grace, a balm "to make the wounded whole," "to heal the sin-sick soul." (from the spiritual "There Is a Balm in Gilead") For as our Second Lesson from the Letter to the Ephesians tells us so clearly: it is out of the great love with which God has loved us and it is through the great riches of divine grace that, even when we are spiritually "dead" through the effect of our trespasses and sins, God wills to raise us up anew and to make us alive again in Christ, saving us by grace through faith for renewed good works. Pre-emptive war, aggressive war, how savage that sound. But "amazing grace, how sweet the sound!" Now, "Amazing Grace" is without doubt America's favorite hymn, which is rather surprising to me, for it is not at all a modern one. The words were first published in the year 1779 by John Newton, an Anglican clergyman in the parish of Olney, England. And the tune, which was matched to his text here in America some 40 years later, is a folk song also dating, most probably, to the 18th century. Now, Newton was a late-in-life convert to following the way of Jesus. Prior to his conversion, he had led quite a different kind of life. He had been a sea captain who transported and sold Africans as slaves. Yes, he had been a "slaver"-the very model of one who, while alive, was yet dead through sin, the very model of one whose love for profit had led him to tune out the sound of sin, the sound of seared flesh and tortured humanity. But at Newton's conversion, he experienced for himself the good news proclaimed in both the Letter to the Ephesians and the Gospel of John: the good news that God, out of the richness of divine mercy, offers to free us all from the spiritual death of sin and to re?create us into the newness of the life found in Christ, if we but choose-if we but choose to trust in Christ, in Christ, rather than in the false gods of power and might, the false idols of greed and pride and revenge. And to give witness to his personal experience of God's healing grace, Newton arranged to have carved on his tombstone this epitaph: JOHN NEWTON [CLERGY] ONCE AN INFIDEL AND LIBERTINE A SERVANT OF SLAVES IN AFRICA WAS BY THE RICH MERCY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST PRESERVED, RESTORED, PARDONED, AND APPOINTED TO PREACH THE FAITH HE HAD LONG LABORED TO DESTROY "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound." How sweet the sound! I don't think I had ever focused on the word "sound" in that text until several years ago, when, after having just re?read this ex-slaver's words, I happened by sheer good fortune to come across a report of an amazing phenomenon found in East Africa. (Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart [New York: Bantam, 1993], p. 120) In one particular tribe there, when a woman intends to conceive a child with her husband, she "goes off to sit alone under a tree. There she . . . listens until she can hear the song [that God is creating and sending down to her for] the child she hopes to conceive. Once she has heard [this song], she returns to her village and teaches it to [her husband] so that they can sing it together as they [unite in] love . . . [And] after the child is conceived, [the woman] sings [this God-given song] to the [growing life with]in her womb. Then she teaches it to the old women and midwives of the village so that throughout [her] labor and at the miraculous moment of birth itself, the child is greeted with its [God-given] song. After the birth, all the villagers learn the song of their new member and sing it to the child whenever it falls or hurts itself. It is [also] sung in times of [joy and during the various ] rituals and initiations [that involve that child]. "This song becomes a part of the marriage ceremony when the child is grown, and at the end of life, . . . loved ones . . . gather around the [person's] deathbed and sing this song . . ." I read the account of this God-sent song of love and creation, of nurture and support, this song that precedes the conception and birth of a tribal member, that is mediated to the child through the voices of others, and that accompanies and sustains that person through the whole of their journey of life-I read that account, and, suddenly, I heard with new ears that word in John Newton's hymn: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound!" In my happenstance juxtaposition of Newton's hymn text and that report of this East African phenomenon, I had one of those "ah?hah" moments. For it suddenly seemed to me that the distinctive God-sent song that precedes the birth of each tribal member and that is mediated to the person through the voices of others and that then accompanies and sustains that person through life-it suddenly seemed to me that that distinctive God-sent song can wonderfully symbolize what Newton must have meant by the sweet "sound" of God's grace. This African phenomenon suggested to me that we may speak of grace as a God-sent "song" that precedes and initiates our life, that surrounds and sustains our life, a "song" created by God to accompany our life in Christ from beginning, to end, and beyond, a "song" from God that is mediated to us through others, a "song" from God that we can either reject or accept for ourselves, a "song" from God that accompanies us to the Font and the Table, a "song" from God that bestows upon us the immeasurable riches of the fullness of life in Christ, a "song" from God that heals and lifts us from the gloom of sin and death to the glory of love and eternal life. How sweet the sound! God's song of amazing grace, the amazing grace of God's song. The contemporary hymn writer Brian Wren recounts this true story of the amazing grace of God's song (in Praying Twice [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000], pp. 92-93, drawn from Sarah S. Miller, "Below the Frost Line: Hymns of Faith," in The Christian Century, 12 December 1990,). When Mrs. Miller was 81, "she had a stroke that made her unable to walk, [to] speak, or [to] care for herself. For five years she lived in a Minneapolis nursing home, giving [family members an] occasional alert look, but mostly [offering] no sign that she knew them." One New Year's Day, sixteen grownup members of Mrs. Miller's family and two babes in arms were gathered together for a holiday time of celebration, of playing games, watching television, and singing around the piano, and they brought their mother from the nursing home to sit among them. They settled her into her wheelchair and fastened her to her seat by a cloth strap. Then "[t]hey wheeled her to the piano, and one of her sons stood beside her, his arm around her shoulders. They sang from an old book of hymns, and when they came to 'Silent Night' they could hardly believe their ears. 'Mom[, who could not even talk,] was singing, too. Her voice was soft, but she was on key and she knew the words.' Amazed, they kept on singing. "'They smiled at her and she nodded. They sang other carols and then went on to some of Mom's favorite hymns-'Amazing Grace, [How Sweet the Sound,]' 'What a Friend We Have in Jesus,' 'Holy, Holy, Holy.' She sang them all. It was a moment of incredible warmth and joy, [of] blessing and almost magical beauty. Even when she couldn't recognize the faces of her own children, even when she seemed incapable of [speech or] laughter or tears, the songs of faith were still alive. Deep within her spirit, below the [surface of] illness and death'" Mrs. Miller was being upheld, upheld by the constant and amazing grace of God's song. Surrounded as we are these days by the sound of war, by the dread, percussive boom and pow and whoosh of human folly and sin, it is ever so sustaining and uplifting to realize that deep, deep within the human spirit God's song of love sings on, ready to be rediscovered. It is ever so sustaining and uplifting to know that beneath the surface of death and destruction there is still alive and sounding within us the song of God's amazing and abiding grace. And even today that song of grace has the power to "bend our pride" and "cure our warring madness" (from the hymn "God of Grace and God of Glory") if only-if only our nation would stop, and listen, and choose to join in that sound, the sound that can heal us from sin and save us for renewed good works-the sound of God's grace. Let us pray: Amen |
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