Amazing Grace

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now I’m found, Was blind, but now I see.

Could we just take a minute here to ask ourselves in what way, if at all, we identify with this verse of that well-known hymn?

I have been thinking, in the context of a well-heeled city centre church, about the sheepfold, about insiders and outsiders, about people who belong and people who don’t. People are not consciously included or excluded, but I think you could safely say that this congregation is made up almost entirely of “insiders”, people who “belong in the sheepfold”. Few of us have a serious struggle to make ends meet. Few of us are addicted to illegal drugs (though I’d be prepared to bet that there are a few problem drinkers around, on sheer statistical probability). Few of us have ever been homeless, and I would be very surprised if any of us were so now. Few of us have any convictions, with the possible exception of minor road traffic infringements. Few of us have been refugees. though maybe some of our parents were. I suspect that few of us have major mental health issues, few of us have been victims of domestic abuse, and few of us live in the seriously disadvantaged parts of the city. Pennywell or Bingham, anyone? Well, this sounds really great, doesn’t it? A church full of happy and successful people. Actually, it worries me quite seriously.

In the second chapter of the epistle to the Ephesians we are clearly told that Christianity started by turning everything upside down – excluding the chosen people, the insiders, unless they were willing to accept that others were equally chosen; and welcoming in “those who were outside”.

We have a tendency (and I think we hardly give it a thought) to distinguish between what we do for ourselves as a congregation, and what we do as “outreach”. Out – reach. The insiders reaching out to the outsiders. Well and good, as far as it goes. But – what are they doing outside?

We are followers of the man who said: “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself”. How have we managed to neutralise Christ’s magnetic power? What have we done to the magnet that is Christ? and what do we even mean by “outside”? It might do us no harm to listen again to those words of St Paul’s as addressed to us – as indeed they are. “Remember that…you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.” As Kierkegaard repeated in season and out of season as he read the Bible: “It is of me this is spoken, to me this is said”.

A friend told me the following story: a very scruffy looking man turned up to a service in a nice church in a nice part of the south of England. Sharp intakes of breath all round. At the end, prompted by the churchwardens, the vicar took the man aside and said "during the next week I want you to talk to God and ask Him if He really wants you to come into His house dressed like this". Next Sunday, there the man was again, still dressed just as scruffily - sharp intakes of breath again. After the service the vicar took him aside again and asked him why he hadn’t spoken to God. "I did" responded the man "and He said He didn’t know your church".

Christ’s brothers threw their hands up in despair and said of him: “He is mad”. One of the precious things that Christ did on earth was to show us a completely different reality. There is no doubt that we are called to be Christ to the disadvantaged, and to those whose reality is different from ours. But if we are willing not only to do that, but also to be open to their reality, we are receiving Christ from them. and there are times when it is more blessed to receive than to give. It does our humility no harm, and the thing we receive may turn out to be just the thing that leads us to the Lord.

I am now going to “out” myself as a member of Al-Anon, the twelve-step fellowship for families of alcoholics. I think there is an interesting comparison to be drawn with the church. People first go to Al-Anon because they think that they will be given some way to stop the alcoholic drinking. It is not long before they are told very firmly that that is not what it is about. Al-Anon takes the focus away from the alcoholic and puts it squarely on the person who has come to the meeting. The only person you can change is yourself. Most people are, at first, disappointed when they understand this. But if they keep going back, and keep an open mind, the Al-Anon programme “works”. People change. People recover. and new people come, and see the change and recovery…and keep coming back until they too are changed and recover. and exactly the same thing happens at AA – Alcoholics Anonymous.
Why is it quite normal for people to be transformed by AA and Al-Anon, and to keep going back with enthusiasm, perhaps long after the original problem has been solved? While we Christians drag ourselves unwillingly to church, and remain, many of us, unchanged?

I suggest that one reason is that no-one would go to AA or Al-Anon if they had not first recognised their brokenness, their outsiderness. We know our neediness in an immediate way, as most churchgoers do not, and we know how precious that knowledge – that grace -is to us, because without it we cannot change.

I think we need to advert more to the outsiderness in ourselves. We are all able to say “oh yes, there is broken-ness in me, and I have faults”. But as long as we regard those things as weaknesses to be hidden (“I don’t really fit in but I try to make it look as if I do”) we are not going to be healed, and we are not going to connect with those people whose brokenness is more obvious than ours. These things are facts, and they can be the most important facts about us, and the facts that build bridges.

In Al-Anon we not only acknowledge our brokenness to ourselves, we acknowledge it to others. Nothing can be healed unless it is brought into the light.

Why would a broken person come to a church full of happy and successful people? What he wants is a church where people are healed and transformed. and he wants to see it happen. He wants a church which includes the outsiders, the excluded: “separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world”. The church that Jesus Christ founded, and whose foundations were built upon by the probably illiterate Galilean fisherman and the heretical Rabbi, Saints Peter and Paul. John Newton knew who belonged in that church. and perhaps we happy and successful people, with our brokenness well papered over, might give it a thought. We need God. and unless we acknowledge that, to ourselves and to others, there will be no healing and no transformation, and the insiders and the outsiders will never meet.

and so let us pray, in the words of a Native American prayer:
Grandfather, Look at our brokenness.
We know that in all creation Only the human family has strayed from the Sacred Way.
We know that we are the ones who are divided
and we are the ones who must come back together to walk in the Sacred Way.
Grandfather, Sacred One, Teach us love, compassion, and honour
That we may heal the earth, and heal each other.