I Am What I Am

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I Am What I Am

1 Corinthians 15:1-11
August 7, 2011

Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I
proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand,
through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message
that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain. For I
handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that
Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was
buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the
scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he
appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most
of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James,
then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared
also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle,
because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what
I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I
worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God
that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you
have come to believe.

I think I’ve already shared with the fact that back in the spring of 2002, I had
the privilege of spending 10 days in a monastery in a beautiful valley near
Snowmass, Colorado. It was a beautiful space run by a even more beautiful
set of Benedictine monks-good people who were providing a space to gather
for those interested in deepening their prayer life. It was a time of intense
prayer—or at least it was time of intense prayer for me—we gathered
together for almost 5 hours of silent prayer every day, starting at 5:30 AM,
and ending late at night. It was a great experience, but it was definitely one
of those religious highs—you probably know what I am talking about—one of
those moments where you just feel incredibly grounded in God, and
therefore you feel just incredibly grounded in yourself. By the end of this 10
day retreat, I had this ambitious plan to rejuvenate my spiritual life, with
more prayer, more Bible study, more focus on God, more everything—in fact,
if there was a way to jack up the spirituality quotient of any given spiritual
discipline, I was going to do it—let me tell you, I had a plan on how to make
myself into a spiritual superman—no one would have anything on me, at least
not when it comes to God. Super Christian, Super Spiritual Guy, I was going
to do it and I was going to finally get all those loose spiritual ends of my life
tied up and or at least pulling in the same direction. This retreat was going
to be the start of something new, a new day in my life, especially spiritually—
me and God were going to be closer, best friends, you know what I mean?

But then I arrived back home…and back to the real world, and you probably
know the rest of the story, don’t you? I don’t think I kept any of those new-
found spiritual disciplines…I mean, you just get lost in the real world, oddly
enough, you get lost in the ordinariness of it all, those simple things like
paying your bills, and making it work on time, and dealing with the family, the
kids, the partner. I mean, we know that experience, don’t we? Its what
happened to a lot of us when we were younger, when we came back from
church camp, on fire, ready to change ourselves and the world…and then it
just happened…or I should say, nothing really happened…life went on and the
Bible was left unread, and prayer remains stale and the same old stuff
happened, just on a different day. That sort of thing just happens when you
aren’t wonderfully stuck up in the mountains, at a monastery where the sole
work of the people gathered there is to pray. You know, when things didn’t
change, or at least they didn’t change as dramatically as I had hoped, I spent
a few months in a spiritual funk, wondering what I had done wrong.

But you know, after some time, I did get it, I did get the grace I needed, the
transformation I had hoped for, but it wasn’t the kind I expected. I had
been going in overdrive for years, actually, and to some degree, I still am,
but I got what I needed out of that moment, out of that time in that
beautiful place, and it was this truth: I just needed to lighten up, and I just
needed to realize that I didn’t need to change my life over a couple of weeks,
and more importantly, GOD didn’t need to change my life overnight. The
grace of those two weeks in Colorado, which is certainly what I was searching
for during that time, grace—the fierce mercy needed to change my life—the
grace of that time for me was that I got the truth that I needed to slow
down, but slow down in ways that were unexpected—I didn’t need to put
together some ambitious plan to get it all together—I simply needed to be
open to what grace was doing in me in that moment. I just needed to be
who I was meant to be at that moment, and to allow God the grace of taking
her own time in changing me from the inside out. Change surely comes, but
its not going to come at the pace that I wanted it to come and it was just
time to let God be God, and to allow God to do that fierce work of wonder
and grace in my life.

The apostle Paul, in the New Testament passage we heard a few minutes
ago, seems to be pointing us in that direction as well, this idea that God will
do what God needs to do in our lives, on God’s timing, not our timing. Paul’
s letter to the church at Corinth was written to a church in turmoil in the city
of Corinth—someone reminded me this week that something like 90% of the
New Testament letters are written responses to churches and Christians who
were in the midst of fighting with each other. Paul has spent time telling
them about spiritual gifts, and reminding them about what really matters,
which is love for each other, amidst all the painful disagreements—and then
he finally reaches what we heard this morning—he begins to talk about
resurrection of the Christ, about the resurrection of the dead—for him, both
of those realities are what make life worth living, a reminder to the church at
Corinth that the end of the story, the end of every story and any story, the
end of the story is life, it is resurrection, and not death; the end of it all is
hope, not hopelessness. Martin Luther, the great Reformer of the church,
once said, something to the effect “that “this is not the end…but it is the
road…”

But what I love is that moment where Paul is trying to get them to
acknowledge him as someone worthy of being listened to—“listen,” he seems
to be saying, “I may not be as close to the events of Christ’s resurrection as
others, there were others who gave witness to him before me, and God
knows, I’ve persecuted the church early on, so I admit I lack a lot of the
moral authority that others may have…” Paul is being very humble here, I
think, because he knows that they know he was once on the other side, with
those folks who were pretty hostile to the growing church. But then he
writes this line, something that just stood out when I first read it: But by the
grace of God, I am what I am, and that grace towards me has not been in
vain. How incredible—“grace has done its work in me,” he seems to be
saying, “though it took its time, and will take even more time in the future,
but it was a grace that has done what it was supposed to do, at least for
this very moment, and it surely was not a grace that was thrown away,
because God knew what he was doing.” Paul simply reminds them at Corinth
that he is where he is supposed to be, at this moment, that he is who he is,
in that moment, because that is who is grace has shaped and molded and
crafted him to be. It may not be where he needs to be tomorrow, he may
not be the man he is meant to be tomorrow, a greater person of faith—grace
may shape him differently tomorrow, or it may smooth out the edges that
need to be smoothed out, but at least for this very moment, writing on some
ancient parchment thousands of years ago, he can say to them, honestly
and truthfully, this is who God’s grace has shaped me to be, at least for this
day, though I know that grace will surely shape and do a new thing in me
tomorrow…and the next day, and forever. I may not be where I need to be,
but I am where I am supposed to be, at least for this very brief moment—the
grace of the past, the grace God has given him has not been thrown away.
Grace is never thrown away, actually—grace always gets its way, at least God’
s grace does, though it is rarely does it on my schedule, which has been a
huge disappointment for me personally.

But I am getting better at handling the fact that the change in my life,
spiritually and otherwise, I want so badly does come, though not as quickly
as I want—grace works on its own time, of course. It did for Paul—grace had
to work long and hard on him—it takes a lot of grace to get from stoning
Christians like Stephen when he was younger, when he was persecuting the
church, to the point of being the greatest missionary the church has ever
known. Grace took its time with Paul, and grace takes it time with us, but it
always gets there, it always gets to the place where it is supposed to be, to
the nook and crannies of our lives, even those places where we don’t want it
to get to. I suppose the key to being changed, is not so much “a doing of
something”—I mean after all, grace is not given to you and I because of
anything, of something we do—it is a complete gift, so much so that we don’
t even need to recognize the gift we’ve been given. The giver of this gift has
no need for us to acknowledge it—no thank you cards are required, or
expected, or even needed. And that also means that we’re not going to get
double grace if we work double hard on our spiritual lives—Paul said he
worked hardier because he was not like those early disciples who knew Jesus
first hand, but it was, in fact, the free gift of grace inside him that worked
harder in him, not he himself. If anything, our Christian faith reminds us that
our stories as people of faith are not stories of what we have done, but,
rather, they ought to be stories about what God has done in us, and
through us, despite our best efforts to get in the way.

So, maybe the one thing we are asked to do, I believe, is not much of
anything, it is not really a doing—it is not a making a list of the thousand
things on the mountains of our lives, or the monasteries we briefly spend
time in, things we believe we ought to work on to change of our lives. No,
friends, it is not the working hard on our spiritual lives that will change us; it
is not our determination that will give us the change we are desperately want
in our lives. That work of transformation is God’s fierce and gentle work in
us, work that will last a lifetime, work that continue even into eternity. The
work of transformation is God’s job, and letting go of the lists of things we
are determined to change is perhaps the only thing asked of us, or at least
that is what I think we are asked by God.

Let me put it this way—think of yourself as being in a shallow river, a stream
perhaps, and it is not a river that you need to step into—you and I, we have
always been in that stream all of our lives—it is the stream of grace.
Salvation for us Christians is the moment when we notice what has been
flowing by and over and through us during every moment of our lives.
Salvation is simply seeing the world the way it really is, full of grace and light
in a world where the shadows still remain, where crucifixions still happens,
but seeing that resurrection, resurrection is still the end of the story. The
water is always all around you and I, the grace flowing by us, sometimes
raging by us and through us, sometimes just barely trickling by us, but it is
always flowing, it is always moving, this grace that never stops going
“towards” us, as St. Paul writes in the 1 Corinthians.

What we are asked to do, the one thing that we can do while we are standing
in this endless stream, this raging river of grace, is actually not something we
do—rather, it is a choice to see something, something we discover along the
way, which is to simply acknowledge that we have been standing in this
stream of grace all of our lives, and that this river of grace has been flowing
around us since the day we were born, and this river is smoothing out the
edges of our lives, like water over stone, it is slowly shaping us into the
people God wants us to be; simply put, God’s grace is doing that work in us
that we thought we could do ourselves in our mountaintop experiences, in
our church camp experiences, in our monasteries experiences. We always
get the grace we need in any given moment, and the rest, the rest will come
when it is needed. God’s been doing this a long time, this business of grace,
and I suppose that we will have to trust God to know what he is doing.

Why is seeing this river of grace that flows all around us so important to our
lives, more than making lists on the 30 things we need to do to change our
lives? Because if salvation is the moment when we see how much we have
always been loved by God, if it is the moment we see the grace all around us,
its clear that what we see in this world is just as important as what we do in
this world. Seeing the work of God in our lives, the slow, steady work of
God is what will change us—and not the addition of a million important
spiritual disciplines. The hard work in our lives is seeing where we are and
seeing how God is working in our lives, and then realizing that this work
requires patient with ourselves, but most importantly, it requires patience
with the God who is doing this incredible work of transformation in us.

I am what I am, St. Paul says to the church at Corinth. I am not the person
I need to be for tomorrow, but I am what I need to be for today, for this
particular moment—I am the person God has molded and shaped me to be,
though I know there will be more work done on me by the living God so that
I will become the person I will need to be for tomorrow. The future will come,
with all of its important and needed lessons, some lessons that are easier to
learn than others, spiritual and otherwise. Our job is to be here in this
moment, is praising God for how grace has brought us this far, and praising
God for how grace has created the beautiful and strong and fragile creature
that each of us are. Grace will take care of the future, as it has created the
good and yet sometimes difficult present, but that grace is enough, it is
enough for me, and I suspect it is enough for you, to know that you and I,
together, stand in a river of grace that will never stop fiercely and gently and
roughly flowing by us, and over us, and through us. So let it be, so let it
be. Amen.