Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
John Newton was born in London, in 1725. His father was a shipping merchant. At the age of eleven, he joined his father on a ship as an apprentice; his seagoing career would be marked by headstrong disobedience.
As a sailor, he denounced his faith after being influenced by a fellow shipmate. His disobedience caused him to be press-ganged into the Royal Navy. He deserted the navy to follow the woman he had fallen in love with. After enduring humiliation for desertion from the navy he was traded as crew to a slave ship, and he began a career in cruel slave trading. While aboard the ship Greyhound, Newton gained notoriety as being one of the most profane men the captain had ever met.
In March 1748, while the Greyhound was in the North Atlantic, a violent storm came upon the ship that was so rough it swept overboard a crew member who was standing where Newton had been only moments before. In the midst of the terrifying ordeal he cried our ‘Lord have mercy’ thus beginning the questioning of himself that led him into faith.
Working as a customs officer from 1756 he began to teach himself Latin, Greek and Theology. He and his new wife engaged with their local parish church and with his new found passion for faith his friends suggested that he should be ordained. In 1746 he was ordained by the then Bishop of Lincoln and he became curate of Olney in 1764.
The reason I am telling you so much about John Newton is that he is the author of the hymn that we have just sung – Amazing grace.
This is perhaps one of the most famous of the Olney Hymns composed by John Newton while he was Curate in that village in Buckinghamshire.
It is personal, and profound; penitential and salvific. He speaks of the sheer grace of God in Jesus Christ redeeming him from a life of profanity and of gross degradation of human beings – yet despite all this he is found by God’s grace and transformed by it.
So often we think of people ‘finding religion’ or ‘finding God’. More often perhaps we have to turn this around and think of ourselves as being found BY God, by his grace and by his love. Salvation is an act of God through the cross, not a human action, though our co-operation is entirely necessary.
So often I tell of a story from my university days at St. Andrews. There was a very sincere Christian woman who would hand out little leaflets with passages of the bible. One day she accosted the Very Revd. Matthew Black, Master of St. Mary’s College where Divinity was taught. As she jumped out in front of him, she asked the question such earnest Christians often ask – ‘Are you saved?’. The Professor’s response was, ‘Aye madam, in the year 33AD’.
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