AMAZING GRACE

A while back Arlena and I attended the funeral of her brother’s mother-in-law. It was a combination of a Baptist-Methodist service, meaning that there was a lot of singing, preaching and praying but not much in what I would consider worship. The Baptists and Methodists in attendance, meaning just about everyone else, loved the service. I like the post-service meal much better.

Be that as it may, the service bean with a hymn by the Baptist choir, one that I had never heard before. It was a take-off, if you will, on that old standard that is almost always sung – or played on a bagpipe if a piper is available – at most Protestant funerals, namely, “Amazing Grace”. I like the hymn even though I am not fond of singing about “a wretch like me”. I may be a sinner, no, I am a sinner, but I don’t think I am a wretch, nor do I believe God considers any one of us to be such. But I digress.

The hymn that was sung I think in titled “No Other Word for Grace But Amazing”. When the choir sang the hymn and I was, to say the least, at least at the moment, startled; brought up short. Yes, I had sung “amazing grace”, those words, many, many times. The words flowed out of my mouth without, to be honest, much thought. And that is true about so many of the hymns that we sing. The words roll off our lips and we sing them with gusto; but we hardly ever pause to reflect on what we are actually saying when we sing those words.

When I heard the choir sing that “there is no other word for grace but amazing”, it was as if I had heard those words for the first time and actually got the message and the meaning of that hymn. Perhaps the reason is that over the years I had allowed myself to be so distracted by being called a wretch that I had missed the central point of the hymn: God’s grace is truly amazing and, as the hymn continued, “no other explanation will do”. God’ grace is amazing. There is no other word or war to explain it.

If you are like me, we will have to admit that we often take God’s grace for granted. We truly believe that God is with us through thick and thin, on good days and bad, even on those days or those times when it almost seems as if God has abandoned us entirely. Throughout it all, we believe that God does leave us alone, that somehow in some way God, through God’s grace, will see us through. We believe that it is God’s grace that makes the good days better and helps us find resurrection and new life when those bad days occur and we feel nothing but death inside us.

In fact, it is only after those bad days, those bad times have passed, when we have found life again, that we can look back and discern just how amazing God’s grace was in helping is through those times when we thought that new life, resurrection, was impossible, so horrible everything was. Yes, we did what we could do, even if it was only to dump everything into God’s hands. Yes, we had the love and support of our family and friends. But even that did not seem enough. What made resurrection possible then and what will make resurrection possible in the future when those bad days do, was and will be God’s grace. Amazing! No other word, no other explanation will do. None.