By Reverend Laurie DeMott

This particular clip sent to me last week was well worth watching. Wintley Phipps is a Seventh Day Adventist minister who is the founder of the U.S. Dream Academy, an organization that works with the children of men and women who have been incarcerated and Phipps attributes his devotion to his work to his strong faith. In the video, he is giving a concert at Carnegie Hall and he introduces the song Amazing Grace by first giving the audience a music lesson.

“An old lady down south showed me something,” Phipps tells the audience. “Did you know just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano?”

Now, I don’t have a have Jumbotron to demonstrate this like Phipps did, so I’m going to have Peter play two familiar spirituals and ask you just to listen closely. When you listen carefully, you’ll hear that these two songs are using basically the same five notes, just arranged differently, and to play those notes Peter will use only the black keys. [Peter plays “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”] Those with pianos at home can try this themselves, experimenting with different familiar spirituals and, what you will discover is that many spirituals such as “Go Tell it On the Mountain”, “This Little Light of Mine”, and “Steal Away to Jesus” can all be played on just the black keys. Wintley Phipps explained to his audience on that Youtube video that when slaves came to America, they brought with them music from Africa that was based on a different scale than the scale used in western culture. African music was written using the Pentatonic scale, a scale of only five notes which can be found on the black keys of our piano With only these five notes, Rev. Phipps says, the slaves built “the power and the pathos of the Negro Spiritual”.

Now I want you listen one more time as Peter plays another song on the piano. [He plays “Amazing Grace”.] In this familiar song, we hear again the five notes of the Pentatonic scale. Like those other spirituals, “Amazing Grace” can also be played using just the black keys of your piano. When John Newton sat down to write a hymn describing the grace that he had experienced through the love and forgiveness of God, he chose to set his words not to the familiar music of the western ear but instead he set his music to the tones of the African slave songs. John Newton was the captain of a slave ship before he became a Christian and denounced slavery and, researchers speculate that Newton chose a melody for his hymn that he had heard many times rising from the bowels of his slave ships. Phipps says that the melody of “Amazing Grace” sounds very much like a west African sorrow chant. Every time we sing the hymn “Amazing Grace”, we are singing the notes of the sorrow of people enslaved, people taken from their homes, people sick and imprisoned, and over the top of that haunting lament, we are proclaiming the miracle of God’s grace.

I doubt that John Newton’s choice of melody was accidental. He knew the horror of the slave trade personally and lived with the knowledge that he had contributed to the suffering of his fellow human beings. When he finally recognized the inhumanity of his work as a slave trader and renounced it to embrace the Christian faith, he knew he could not undo the sorrow he had already caused, and yet at the same time, he also knew that he had experienced the capacity of God’s grace to forgive even the most horrendous sin and to work goodness and mercy even in the bleakest of circumstances. Newton realized that God’s grace cannot always erase the sound of suffering from our ears, but it can help us to find hope even in the midst of that suffering. Grace doesn’t eliminate the cross, but it does transform it.

Fred Craddock once said, “To be Christian is to cease saying, ‘Where the Messiah is there is no misery’ and to begin to say ‘Where there is misery there is the Messiah.’”

In John 9, the disciples pass by a man who was blind from birth and the disciples begin to quiz Jesus on the cause of the blind man’s disability. As we read this passage, we should become uncomfortable with the way in which the blind man is made into an object for speculation – the disciples talk about him as if he isn’t even there. This story captures our own uneasiness with the world’s suffering and sorrow. We, like the disciples, try to find intellectual arguments or mouth platitudes that give us a way to make sense of suffering and help us retain a sense of fairness in a universe we believe to be ruled by God. While secular thinkers may be comfortable attributing the man’s blindness to a fluke of a mutant chromosome, Christians want the world to make more sense and often go to great lengths to explain how terrible things are really a part of God’s plan. We have in our heads the mistaken idea that where God is, there should be no misery, and so if there is misery it must be somehow the fault of the person who is suffering or the misery only looks like misery when in fact it isn’t because it is part of a hidden plan that we cannot see. In essence, we want to believe that God’s grace erases the sound of suffering from our ears, and our desire to maintain a belief in God’s ultimate control over every event can lead to the same insensitivity we see the disciples show the blind man. Many years ago, I did a funeral for an 18 year old University student who had died of leukemia and his family reported that a well-meaning friend had told them that the boy died because God needed a rosebud for heaven’s garden. His mother was tempted to shoot back, “I think God has enough flowers in heaven; I don’t know why he couldn’t leave me this one.”

We try to explain the suffering of the world by attributing it to a hidden plan of God’s that we are simply not capable of understanding, or we blame the victim for not having enough faith in God or even for being too rooted in sin. (How many times have we thought, “Well, she got cancer because she smoked.” “He lost his job because he didn’t work hard enough.”) We debate the problem of evil in our Bible studies and mouth our easy platitudes at the bedside of the hospital patient, not really talking to the people who are suffering but talking to ourselves in an attempt to convince ourselves that the universe is ultimately fair and to stay safe ourselves all we need to do is stay right with God. Until we are the one to fall sick, or we are the one to lose our job, and then our easy platitudes turn to ash in our mouths.

It is said that when one of his students asked the Buddha to describe the human condition, the Buddha said, “We are like a man walking through a forest who is suddenly struck by an arrow. The observer has the luxury of wondering where the arrow came from and who shot it, but all we want is to know how to rid ourselves of the arrow and stop our pain.”

“To be Christian is to cease saying, ‘Where the Messiah is there is no misery’ and to begin to say ‘Where there is misery there is the Messiah.’”

While we want desperately to believe that where God is found, there will be no misery, the gospel of John reminds us that God’s grace does not erase the cross. God’s grace transforms the cross. It plays over the black keys of the piano to help us to find healing and love even in the midst of our suffering.

In verse 3 of the ninth chapter of John, the disciples discuss the cause of the man’s blindness and when they put the question to Jesus, Jesus’ answer is can be read in two ways. It can be read as most of our translations present: Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day...” But the Greek is not as clear as our Bible editors make it sound. This verse can also just as legitimately be translated in a second way, in which Jesus tells his disciples: “He was born blind with the result that God’s works might be revealed in him. So that God’s works might be revealed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me....”

Both translations are possible but the first translation – “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” – suggests that the man’s suffering is all part of God’s divine plan. The second translation, however – “he was born blind with the result that God’s works might be revealed in him,” shows Jesus refusing to be drawn into theological arguments and insisting on treating the man not as an object for philosophical debate but as a human being in need of healing. Later in the passage it is the man himself who tosses aside metaphysical speculation; when the Pharisees descend on the man and interrogate him about the source of his healing, the man blurts out, “I don’t know anything about the man who healed me or how it happened or why it happened; all I can tell you is that though I was blind, now I see.” At the end of the story, the man comes upon Jesus one more time and Jesus reveals that he is the Christ, the son of Man. The last of the man’s blindness – his spiritual blindness – falls away as he comes to understand that his suffering has been redeemed by the presence of God with him.

“To be Christian is to cease saying, ‘Where the Messiah is there is no misery’ and to begin to say ‘Where there is misery there is the Messiah.’”

We cannot erase all of the black notes from our lives; to be human is to encounter suffering, to know bleak times and times of sorrow, and no amount of faith will protect us from the frailty of the human condition. God’s grace, however, can reach into our deepest misery and sing a counterpoint to the notes of our lament. There in the darkness we will discover that we are not alone but that Christ has come to dwell in our darkness with us and sing continually of his love for us until by grace our fears are transformed into hope, our wounds begin to heal, and we find a reason to laugh again. And then we will say with the man in John, “I do not know how it happened, but this one thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”