AMAZING GRACE
by Bishop David Chislett SSC

It was late in the afternoon of Tuesday 19th July. My father phoned from Sydney saying that my mother was very poorly and that I should come immediately. Desperately wanting to get there while my mother was still alive, I packed a bag and threw a few things into the car. Looking around the living room to see if I had forgotten anything, I noticed some Scott Hahn tapes that I’d recently purchased. (As some of you know, I love the powerful presentations of this Presbyterian-turned-Roman-Catholic-theologian who brings a wonderful evangelical dynamism to his teaching of the Catholic Faith.) Scott Hahn would keep me awake, I thought. So I grabbed the tapes and made for the car.

Some hours later - in fact, after midnight - I was driving through Coffs Harbour and Scott Hahn was preaching about grace. God’s grace. You know, the free, totally undeserved gift of his love and salvation.

Hahn got to the point of ridiculing editors of hymn books - even Catholic hymn books - who sanitize, not just the language, but also the Gospel. Of course he was referring to the hymn “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” There have been a number of attempts at getting rid of the word “wretch”: “that saved and set me free” . . . “that saved a soul like me.”

Now Hahn pointed out that this is not just a mangling of the poetry of the former slave-trader John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, it is a betrayal of the Gospel. “Give me a break!” cried Hahn on the tape. “That’s what makes grace so amazing - it saves wretches; it takes nobodies and makes them somebodies! It takes ordinary folks like us, through whom God does extraordinary things.”

For a number of obvious reasons I was feeling particularly fragile at that time, and the Holy Spirit knew that I really needed to hear the Gospel message again. The simple message that grace saves wretches, that there is nothing we can do to deserve God’s blessing, that our part is simply to gaze at the Cross of Jesus, trust in his goodness, thank him for his love, and expect to see him use all the circumstances of our lives to his glory.

It might sound strange to you, but I was so moved by this truth I myself have preached for 37 years, that I had to pull over to the side of the road. I played that section of the tape twice more and shed a tear or two. Eventually I started the car, turned the tape off, and found myself singing songs of praise to the Lord all the way to Sydney!

I arrived at Blacktown Hospital in the morning, and was able to be with my mother for her last seven hours. My father and brother were present when, with sadness mingled with thanksgiving, I had the enormous privilege of giving my mother the Sacrament of Anointing through which Jesus touches the sick and the dying with his love.

Just an hour later my mother slipped into eternity, trusting in her Saviour.

On my return to Brisbane a couple of weeks later it became clear that some people at the heart of All Saints’ Wickham Terrace were unable in conscience to accept the only terms on which the Archbishop of Brisbane would allow them a priest of our tradition - i.e. that the priest and the parish at large should declare their acceptance of the sacramental ministry the Archbishop and his assistant bishops and not hold back on account of their practice of “ordaining” women.

A number of us had originally thought of PATMOS HOUSE as a ministry that would resource orthodox Anglicans regardless of “jurisdiction” for evangelism, teaching and worship. However, the pleas of some former All Saints’ people, including parish councillors, made it clear that in fact a new worshipping community was necessary for those who felt they had been “unchurched” by the demands of the Archbishop of Brisbane.

The rest is history. A public meeting was held at which a new parish of the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia was formed. Our first Mass was on Sunday 28 August at CHEERS TAVERN, Spring Hill. So much has happened since, and already we can see how God is blessing us as we grow - we believe - into the kind of community of which we read in the Acts of the Apostles, actively witnessing to the Gospel and proclaiming by word and deed the whole Catholic Faith.

Surprisingly, some words from my first Newsletter have been quoted on a number of websites. I still stand by what I said, that we must all be “Christ-centred, Bible-believing, Gospel-driven Catholic Christians,” and that “without these things Anglican tradition is an empty shell, and not even true to its own self.”

I went on to say, “The occasion of the of the community’s formation was a crisis of conscience experienced by some parishioners of All Saints’ Wickham Terrace . . .” but I warned us all against “becoming a ‘Lot’s Wife Society’, constantly looking backwards, talking about the past, or even criticizing those who are not ‘with’ us . . . while God used that crisis to bring us together, he desires now to shape us by his Holy Spirit into the kind of local community of which it was said in Bible days, ‘See how these Christians love one another.’ He wants to use us and our community life to reach out to people who do not yet know Jesus as their Saviour and Lord. He is calling us forward in Faith.”

In other words we have been called to become a community demonstrating in its own life that GRACE SAVES WRETCHES!

It is difficult to think about grace without calling to mind the great theologian of grace, St Augustine of Hippo. He defended the doctrine of grace against those who thought that our attempts at goodness just needed “topping up” by God. Augustine’s own experience as well as his discernment of the Scriptures assured him of the doctrine of “original sin” and of our TOTAL reliance on God’s GRACE for salvation.

An intellectual giant, Augustine was born in 354 AD in what is now Algeria. In his youth he developed skills as a teacher and debater; in fact it was because of his pride as a philosopher and his sense of intellectual superiority that he initially rejected the Christian faith of his mother. At the same time he fell into a lifestyle of indulging in every form of immorality available. He eventually entered into what we would call a de-facto relationship in which he fathered a child.

Yet God had chosen this man to become one of the greatest Christian teachers of all time.

You can read the story of his conversion in The Confessions of St Augustine - available in a number of translations. It is a thrilling story of God’s GRACE at work in Augustine’s life.

As we are involved in sharing the Gospel with people caught up in the same kind of moral and intellectual morass as Augustine, I want us to notice five factors that led to and sustained Augustine’s Christian experience:

First, his mother Monica never ceased to encourage him and pray for him. St Monica is the patron saint of all mothers who pray with tears for their wayward children. Augustine never doubted that his mother’s faithfulness was the most important factor in his conversion.

Second, Augustine was genuine in his search for truth and wisdom. He loved the writings of Cicero and the Platonists, and even his seduction by the cultic Manichaeans was partly due to his seeking of “higher things”.

Third, Augustine experienced a growing sense of emptiness, futility and dissatisfaction with his life. His goals seemed to be eluding him and neither his learning nor his “lifestyle” brought the fulfilment he sought.

Fourth, at Milan, the teaching of St Ambrose changed Augustine’s attitude towards the Scriptures, awakening both his mind and his heart. (Even so, he had a three year struggle before surrendering his life to the Lord.) Augustine writes:

“. . . slowly I saw that what Ambrose taught was the truth. My trouble was that I wanted to be able to understand every part of the truth myself, as clearly as I see that two and two are four. As if a mere man can understand everything about you, my God, who are infinite and eternal Truth. Then you began to enlighten my mind. I saw that a man cannot discover all the truth about you by reason alone. It is necessary that you reveal yourself to us. And you had done so in your Bible, and above all when you spoke to us through your beloved Son, Jesus.”

Fifth, the worshipping life of the Church community in Milan had a profound impact on Augustine. During his struggle of faith he was supported by the community’s prayers. At the time of his baptism he was touched by the community’s worship. He writes:

“We were baptized [i.e. at the Easter Vigil, 24 April 387], and disquiet about our past life vanished from us. During those days I found an insatiable and amazing delight in considering the profundity of your purpose in the salvation of the human race. How I wept during your hymns and songs! I was deeply moved by the music of the sweet chants of your Church. The sounds flowed into my ears and the truth was distilled into my heart. This caused the feelings of devotion to overflow. Tears ran, and it was good for me to have that experience.”

Augustine eventually returned to Northern Africa where he became a priest and the Bishop of Hippo. His most famous books are The Confessions and City of God; but all his published writings have been influential in the Church’s theological and philosophical reflection across the centuries.

The points I have just listed are obviously transferable to our time. They reflect the experience of many pilgrims searching for the Truth - the prayers of practising Christians who love us, the imperative that our search be genuine, our creeping lack of satisfaction with the old life, an awakening with regard to the Scriptures and Christian teaching, and the supportive life and worship of a local Christian community. These factors taken together brought Augustine to Jesus, and they held him in his sacred embrace. They are important for us as we reach out to others.

Looking back over his conversion, and the AMAZING GRACE that had brought him thus far, Augustine was to write those much quoted words in the first paragraph of the Confessions:

“ . . . you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”

Later on, he speaks for each of us when he says to the Lord:

“. . . I embraced the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who is over all things, God blessed forever, who was calling unto me and saying: I am the way, the truth, and the life . . .

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved you! For behold you were within me, and I outside; and I sought you outside and in my ugliness fell upon those lovely things that you have made. You were with me and I was not with you. I was kept from you by those things, yet had they not been in you, they would not have been at all. You called and cried to me and broke open my deafness: and you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness: you breathed fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for you: I tasted you, and now hunger and thirst for you: you touched me, and I have burned for your peace.”

As we prepare to celebrate Christmass 2005, may the story of St Augustine help to renew each of us in our relationship with God; and as we face all the excitement and challenges of 2006, may our life together as the Patmos House Community alert those around us to Jesus and his truly amazing grace.

May Our Lady, St. Joseph, St. Monica, St. Augustine and all the saints pray for you and may the Lord bless you with his love.

Published in the PATMOS REVIEW, December 2005