Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Amazing Grace

One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” John 9:25

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
Lent 4A – March 26, 2017

            “I once was blind,” the man said, “but now I see.” Those eight words from our gospel text are possibly the most well-known phrase in American hymnody and are associated, of course, with the great hymn, Amazing Grace, which we will soon sing to conclude our worship today. One writer estimates that Amazing Grace is performed over 10 million times each year. The Library of Congress has cataloged some 3,000 different renditions of the song. Gospel legend Mahalia Jackson recorded a signature version of the hymn in 1947 and performed it thousands of times thereafter. During the 1960s, it became one of the anthems of the civil rights and anti-war movements and was performed by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Sam Cooke, Elvis Presley, The Byrds, Willie Nelson, and Judy Collins.

            In this country, the song has become something of a spiritual anthem at times of national tragedy: it was sung in the aftermath of 9/11, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, and after the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. And more recently, as I will talk about in a few moments, it was sung by President Obama at the funeral services of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney and the Mother Emanuel 9 in Charleston, South Carolina.

            Despite all of this attention, many people do not know the hymn’s remarkable origins. It was written by the Englishman John Newton, the son of a shipping merchant. Born in 1725, Newton had a hard life as a child. His mom died when he was six. At the age of eleven, he joined his father as a sailing apprentice and spent most of his youth at sea. By all accounts, the young man Newton was an awful person. He was a mean, vulgar drunk, who treated most people with disdain. Eventually he became involved in the slave trade, sailing ships to Africa loaded with goods from England, trading them in Africa for human beings, and then transporting these human beings as slaves back to England for sale.

            His life came to a turning point, however, in 1748 during a voyage off the Irish coast, when Newton almost died during a fierce storm. According to his journal, one night as the ship was taking on a lot of water, Newton suddenly awoke, got down on his knees, and prayed for help. The ship by all accounts should have sunk. But it somehow stayed afloat, and Newton ever after remembered that day as his moment of conversion toward a life in Christ.

            Change, however, is never easy and Newton’s conversion took time to take hold. At first, he merely cleaned up his personal life, giving up his fondness for drinking, profanity, and unruly behavior; but he continued for a period of years to engage in and profit from the slave trade. Ultimately, however, he came to see that slavery was a barbaric practice incompatible with the teachings of Jesus, and he gave it up. He studied for the priesthood, and after a period of years was ordained as an Anglican priest.

            Perhaps the single most important thing Newton did as a priest was to become the spiritual mentor to William Wilberforce, the great English abolitionist. Wilberforce is probably as responsible as any single person is for the abolition of slavery in the Western world. Newton, however, was the one who persuaded Wilberforce to remain in political life and to relentlessly lead the charge against slavery decade after decade until Parliament eventually passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire.

            Newton wrote the hymn Amazing Grace on New Years Eve in 1773 and at its heart the hymn is the story of his conversion. When Newton writes about the sweet sound of God’s grace, he is writing about his own experience of being rescued not merely from drowning at sea but from a destructive life of human cruelty. When Newton writes about “how he once was blind, but now sees,” he is testifying to his own conversion from the death-dealing darkness of slavery to the life-giving light of Christ.

            Many people who sing this great hymn today wince when they get to the words “who saved a wretch like me.” To think of ourselves as “wretches” runs counter to contemporary views of human self-esteem, of our “I’m okay, you’re okay” culture. Yet Newton understood well and deeply the dark side of the human soul, what our faith calls “sin,” and he wasn’t afraid to name it and confess it. We don’t have to buy into extreme Calvinist notions of the “total depravity” of humanity to acknowledge that each one of us is capable in our weaker moments of true wretchedness, and that our social institutions can also embody such wretchedness.

            Indeed, America’s “original sin” of racism, in which we all participate to one degree or another, is a perfect example of such wretchedness. Just read the historical accounts of the obliteration of native American peoples, and the enslavement of African peoples, upon which our country was founded.  And we know, of course, that these historical patterns of racial violence have lasting legacies in our nation, and have found new expressions in, for example, our country’s current suspicion of refugees and others who claim different racial, ethnic and religious identities.

            For these reasons, when I sing the hymn, I have no problem whatsoever acknowledging my capacity for wretchedness, and hoping and praying that God will save me from the utter blindness of viewing other children of God as either objects to be used or enemies to be feared.
           
            Appreciating this history of Amazing Grace makes even more poignant President Obama’s use of that hymn at the funeral services two years ago held for Clementa Pinckney and the Mother Emmanuel Nine. Indeed, there are layers and layers of painful, yet somehow beautiful, irony here. Nine black Christians welcome a white stranger into their bible study group, only to be viciously gunned down by him in the name of white supremacy. The black families of the victims then respond to his racial hatred, not with vindictiveness, but by publicly forgiving him and asking that he be spared the death penalty. Then, as the community gathers to bury the nine innocent victims, we witness America’s first black President, surrounded by the leadership of one of America’s great black churches, joyfully sing a hymn celebrating God’s amazingly redemptive grace, a hymn that was written by a former slave trader turned priest, a man who may well have bought and sold the ancestors of many people in the church that day. The paradoxes of grace in that moment take your breath away.

            And, while many will remember President Obama for the courage he displayed in singing this famous hymn, unaccompanied, in such a tender, yet public context, what really makes his eulogy remarkable is its theological integrity. The focus of Obama’s remarks was not on our all too human notions of justice, but rather on the sheer power of God’s grace to break through the blindness of even our darkest moments and lead us toward the light of redemption.

            Obama began his eulogy by humbly stating the most basic truth of the Christian faith: “We don’t earn grace,” he said. “We're all sinners. We don't deserve it. But God gives it to us anyway.” And then he explained:

“[The killer of these nine Christians] surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress. An act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination, violence and suspicion. An act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin. Oh, but God works in mysterious ways” Obama continued. “God has different ideas. Blinded by hatred, the killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group—the light of love that shone as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle. The killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court – in the midst of unspeakable grief – with words of forgiveness. He couldn’t imagine that. Blinded by hatred, the killer failed to comprehend what Reverend Pinckney so well understood—the power of God’s grace to save, to overwhelm evil with goodness.”  

            We are invited by our gospel text today to reflect on our own blindness, the many ways in which we blind ourselves to God’s goodness and to the goodness in each other. We are indeed blinded by racism, as these words from our former President remind us. But we are blinded too by greed, by ambition, by a preoccupation with ourselves, and by so many other weaknesses. And in the midst of such blindness, we are prone to blame others rather than ourselves for our plight. Like the Pharisees, who only want to talk about how Jesus is violating the law by healing on the Sabbath, or how the blind man must have deserved his blindness due to past sin, we too would prefer to scapegoat someone else, rather than humbly acknowledge our own brokenness.  And yet, with unrelenting patience, Christ stands before us waiting; waiting for us to turn to Him for the healing grace He so longs to give.
            Let me then conclude with a simple suggestion. Among the prayers we keep close to our hearts this Lent, let us include this one:  "Eternal God, in whom we live and move and have our being, whose face is hidden from us by our sins, and whose mercy we are often too blind to see: grant that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son. Amen."

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Human Weakness and the Strength of God: Wandering in "the Place"

First Sunday in Lent – March 5, 2017
Olivia Hamilton


My best friend is a Hebrew School teacher in Brooklyn – one of the main responsibilities she has in this role is to prepare middle-schoolers for their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. As a performer and a poet, she undertakes this endeavor with endless creativity, always coming up with new ways to engage young people in the richness of the Jewish tradition, and to help them locate their own unique place within it. The young people embroider prayer shawls, they create raps and rhymes in order to learn Hebrew letters and words, and they engage their Torah portions with awe and wonder, as if the text were alive, always being encouraged to make connections between the world we live in, and the world they encounter in these ancient stories.

 

There is one activity that she does with her students that I have become really fond of –the prompt is simple and goes as follows: the young people are instructed to identify ways that God is depicted and imagined in the Hebrew Bible. For example, some familiar images include God as a teacher, a father, a king or a ruler. In Exodus, God is called a “man of war” and Moses calls God an unchanging rock. The student’s attention is also drawn to more ambiguous terms that are used in the Hebrew Bible to talk about God, such as the word makom, which literally means “the place.” Rather than signifying a precise location, makom is a way of gesturing toward God’s revelation in time and space, and how God manifests in particular communities and is revealed in particular places. For instance, when Abraham is preparing to sacrifice Isaac at Mount Moriah, makom is used to signify both the place where God has instructed Abraham to go, but also God’s closeness to Abraham there. As Jewish scholar Barbara Mann writes, makom, in this instance “indicates the biblical topography – in this case the heights – as well as the presence… of divinity.” Makom is any place where we meet God intimately in our lives, and in the Bible is variously depicted as a desert, a mountaintop, a wilderness, a winding road – not places on a map, per se, but times in our lives when we are disoriented and must pay close attention to where God is leading us.

 

Next, the students are asked to think about how each of these images of God help to shape our understanding of ourselves – and by that I mean: if God is _____ than we are ­­­­­­­­______. So, using some of the examples that I just named:

 

·                    if God is a judge, than we are people who have erred and are in need of mercy.

·                    If God is a teacher, than we ought to listen, learn and observe.

 

Those analogies come pretty easily – but what about if God is makom, the place? I encourage you to think about this for a moment. (Silence).

As I think about it, if God is the place, than perhaps we are pilgrims or travelers, seeking rootedness, disoriented, but always wandering on the terrain of God’s loving-kindness, whether we know it or not.

 

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On Wednesday when I had ashes imposed on my forehead, I was thinking of this image as I heard the words “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” If we are dust, than it seems God is the place from which we came to which we are always coming back to. I think of it as a blessing that our scriptures give us so many images for who and what God is, and how what it means to be in relationship to God. I am especially grateful that starting with the ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, Lent is a season when we are reminded that although our lives are fragile, God’s love for us is unfathomably strong, and whether we are wandering through the temptations of the wilderness or walking on the road to Jerusalem, following Jesus to the Cross, God is the solid ground under our feet – the context in which our whole lives take place.

 

Today we hear the story of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness – the wilderness, I think, is makom:  it is a place that represents Jesus’ trusting relationship with God, and it is a potent reminder of human vulnerability, on one hand, and divine strength on the other. In the wilderness, Jesus is tempted by Satan, who desires to outsmart him and cause him to disobey God. Jesus’ time in the wilderness is a test of sorts: how bad are his hunger pangs that he would be tempted to turn a stone into a loaf of bread in order to eat? How compelling is his desire for power that he would follow Satan in order to have all of the kingdoms of the world handed over to him?

 

There Jesus is, famished and weak, vulnerable to temptation – a very human moment in the narrative of his life. But he also trusts in the strength of God’s promise to him, and knows that he will not be abandoned there. This temptation seems to foreshadow what we know will happen on the Cross: the jeers and taunting and humiliation that Jesus will endure, his body hanging in a posture of ultimate weakness, nailed to a cross, tempted to believe that God has forsaken him, but trusting in God’s strength nonetheless.

 

Human weakness and the strength of God. These are the realities that we encounter and move between in these forty days: we encounter our own weakness as we reflect on the ways that we sometimes sin and miss the mark, so to speak, failing to treat our neighbors as ourselves. We hold grudges, we don’t ask for help when we need it, we judge others and the world through our limited perspectives, failing to see how each person encounters God in a unique place, in a unique way. We encounter our own vulnerability as we are reminded that life is fleeting, and that our bodies will not last forever.

 

The poet Christian Wiman grapples with this in his lyrical autobiography, My Bright Abyss, which was written shortly after he was diagnosed with a terminal cancer. He writes, about his own frailty, saying -- “Herein lies the great difference between divine weakness and human weakness, the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man. Two human weaknesses only intensify each other. But human weakness plus Christ's weakness equals… strength.”

 

What Wiman seems to be saying here is that in Christ, strength and weakness are altogether bound up in one another, and more, that our own weakness – our own tendency to give into temptations of power or ease or material stability – is reconciled through Christ’s total trust in the strength of God.

Thinking back to the concept of makom – the place or places where we encounter God – I want to leave you with a few questions to ponder today, and throughout these next forty days:

In the terrain of your life, where are you feeling closeness (or distance) from God?

Where is the place where the wounds of Christ are touching your wounds?

Where is the place where God’s strength is yearning to meet your human weakness?


I want to close in the words of our collect for the day, which I think is so powerful as to bear repeating: “Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.” Amen.