Prairie Musings

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” Some of you may have seen the 2006 movie Amazing Grace , which tells the story of William Wilberforce’s twenty-year effort to abolish the slave trade in England and all British colonies. This song, and its author, John Newton, play a key role in the movie, and in Wilberforce’s life. At the end of his life, John Newton was a blind Anglican priest—at the beginning of his life, he was captain of a slave ship. He wrote this hymn, perhaps the most well-known hymn across all of Christianity, as part of his confession. In a pamphlet he sent to every member of Parliament, he apologized that it was “a confession, which ... comes too late ... It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders." I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see. Today’s Gosp...

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? It was the day before Easter last year. A car of grad students was pulled over in New Jersey for a routine traffic stop, and the police found that the registration had expired and the driver did not have insurance. So, they impounded the car, and one of the kids called her mother to come get them. “Do you know who I am?” the mother shouted at the officers multiple times when she arrived. As her arrogant, expletive-laden, 15-minute, abusive rant went viral on the internet, it cost the mother her job as a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—a seven billion dollar agency. She had to resign in shame a few days later. “Do you know who I am?” We hear Jesus warning us about this attitude of self-centered privilege and self-righteousness in today’s reading from Luke. Jesus is at a banquet, and he has a message for both the guests and the host. “Guests,” he says, “don’t come in and take the seats of honor—you might find yourself saying “...