I Once Was Lost, But Now Am Found...

“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 Gospel is about being lost, and being found. We only heard two of the three parables that make up this complete lesson by Jesus: the lost sheep and the lost coin go with the story of the lost son. (But our lectionary saves the story of the Prodigal Son for Lent.) These three stories in the middle of Luke have been called the "heart of Luke's Gospel," because they so clearly show God's love and mercy for sinful persons, and God’s desire to bring all back into communion with each other and with God. God’s initiative in seeking and saving the lost is the overarching theme from the beginning of Luke, when the angels proclaimed Jesus’ birth to the shepherds with “good news of great joy for all the people…Jesus, who saves, rescues, restores, and redeems humanity to a loving God, is born”—to the end of Luke, when before the resurrected Jesus leave his disciples he tells them, “Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in my name to all the nations.”

The context of today’s reading, the reason Jesus tell the parables, is that the Pharisees and Scribes are grumbling because Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them.” The leaders feel this association with sinners is inappropriate behavior for Jesus. Why did the religious of Jesus time, why do we, so often resist God’s relentless, searching, love? Why do those of us who have experienced grace resent it being offered to others? Is it because we are too self-righteous, or too afraid, to admit that, like John Newton, we once were lost, too? Anyone who has participated in a recovery program knows that the first key step on that road to wholeness is to acknowledge the problem. Desmond Tutu, in The Book of Forgiving, writes ““Forgiving and being reconciled… are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.”

Reconciliation is in the news, and on my mind, because this month marks the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the first slave ship to North America. More directly touching us, this month also marks the 100^th anniversary of the lynching of William Brown in Omaha. On September 28^th, 1919, William Brown, an African-American in jail at the county courthouse downtown on a false charge of molesting a white woman, was dragged from the courthouse by an angry mob of  5,000. Police chief Eberstein and city commissioner Zimmerman tried to calm the mob, which attacked them with shouts of “Lynch the damn Jew.” The mayor of Omaha, Ed Smith, came out to the mob and said he would do his duty to protect the prisoner even with his own life, and the mob beat him with a baseball bat and dragged down Harney street with a noose around his neck. (He was saved when someone cut the rope as he was being hoisted up a traffic light pole.) The courthouse was set on fire, William Brown was beaten and dragged behind a wagon for several blocks while still alive, then burned in the middle of 17^th and Dodge streets. If you search for this story on the state Nebraska.gov site, or on Wikipedia, you will find articles with horrific, unbelievable photos of the proud, smiling mob surrounding Brown’s charred remains…In 2009…ninety years later…an man in California learned of this tragedy from a Henry Fonda documentary, and paid to have William Brown’s remains moved from a pauper’s grave to a plot in Forrest Lawn Cemetery, and paid for a gravestone to be placed there with the inscription, “Lest we forget.”

Omaha for many years has ranked in the top three cities nation-wide for overall African-American poverty rates, and is number one for African-American children living in poverty. These facts are surely not unrelated to the story of William Brown, and the story of slavery, which was followed by the story of Jim Crow laws and discrimination, the story of redlining to prevent integration of neighborhoods, the story of segregated schools and white flight…But what are we to do about these stories—other than what we mostly do now, which is try to forget them? How can we really, truly, talk about reconciliation, and be reconciled?

This coming Friday, All Saints and Trinity Cathedral and Church of the Resurrection are sponsoring a free screening of the movie Traces of the Trade. This is a moving, fascinating, and poignant documentary of the DeWolf family—Episcopalians from Rhode Island. Just a few years ago, Katrina DeWolf discovered, essentially by accident, knowledge that had been lost to several generations of her family: their wealth, the wealth that had benefitted the town for hundreds of years, the wealth that had established the museum and the library, the wealth that had built and endowed the beautiful Episcopal Church, was all achieved because the DeWolfs were the largest slave-trading enterprise in the world. Katrina and her family decided to find out more about that history that had been lost.  They documented their pilgrimage of discovery through New England, Africa, Cuba, and Charleston.

I encourage you to come, Friday at 6:00 PM, for a free dinner and then to see and then discuss the movie. Historically, our response to the need for racial reconciliation seems to have taken two perhaps equally unhelpful paths: some people avoid the need by saying, “It wasn’t me. It was a long time ago. There’s nothing I should, nothing I can, do.” Others are afraid that delving into reconciliation will so rack them with guilt for their culture and privileges that they are frozen into inaction. Katrina DeWolf made this movie in hopes that it would show us all a third way—she says, “For starters, I can tell myself not to take it personally. Which is sort of obvious. All of us white Americans actually, whatever our ancestry, can say ‘it wasn't me’ because we weren't alive during slavery. But instead, what if we were to acknowledge that, though it's not our fault, we are inheritors of a country in which the cumulative effect is that African-Americans are still at a disadvantage. Let's bring all these stories out into the open. Let's figure out how to tell all of what went into the making of America. Without anxiety or dread, but with the hope and trust and faith that are born of love.”

There are other events in this eight-day vigil our three churches are calling us to keep; you’ll find them in your bulletin announcements, and on a flyer I’ll have in the narthex. My prayer is that simple, small steps, like viewing and discussing Traces of the Trade, will give us a framework for thinking about the origins of our privilege, will give us a deeper consideration for our relationship with those who have historically been marginalized, and will give us courage to find ways, like Jesus did, for the inclusion for all. Because, remember the point of today’s parables: Jesus’ responses to the Pharisees’ and Scribes’ grumbling about radical inclusion are, in the end, stories about rejoicing—rejoicing on earth and rejoicing in heaven—that what was lost is now found, that what was broken and separated is now whole and complete again. John Newton did not pretend his past was other than what it was. Though lost, he was found by God, and, with the new sight that transformation gave him, he helped change the world. May we all, like him, find the path to healing and transformation and reconciliation—for ourselves, for our city of Omaha, and for our nation. May all who were lost—lost in bondage and humiliation and discrimination, lost in sin and self-righteousness, lost in forgetfulness and ignorance and fear, be found, and may all be called together as friends and neighbors to rejoice with all the angels in heaven, and to sing: “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.”