I found my time in seminary to be quite challenging on many levels. After the years I have spent in my own home, living in a dorm had its moments. I missed my family. I didn’t have time to keep up with my old friends. Making new friends for an introvert takes some work, and I was doing that work, but along with the academic load, I often felt overwhelmed and incapable of succeeding. But I had finally made it to seminary, so I certainly did not want to appear overwhelmed and unable to live up to the challenge now that I was there. One September afternoon, feeling bereft and overwhelmed, I indulged in a little self pity and procrastinated a few minutes before beginning the next in a list of never ending assignments.
I wandered down the deserted hallway and into the dorm’s common room. The late afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows and shone on the bookshelves. Drawn by the light, I went over and stood gazing at the hodge podge collection of books.
This book caught my eye, My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers, an old copy of a classic spiritual devotional that I had heard of but had never read. So I pulled it off the shelf and opened it.
First, I read the fly leaf. And then, for some reason instead of just jumping into the devotion for that day to see if I could find any inspiration, I turned past the first blank page to the title page. Someone had written an inscription on this page.
“To Tom with prayer. Best wishes in this new venture! In His Love, Virginia Henderson, September 1, 1968.”
I could not believe my eyes. I had no idea who Tom was, but I would have recognized that handwriting anywhere, and she had signed her name too, so there was no mistaking the fact that one of the precious friends of our family in Goldsboro when I was growing up, Virginia Henderson, had held this book in her hands, written the inscription in it and then given it as an encouraging gift to someone named Tom way back when I was only in the 8th grade. How like her! Virginia Henderson was one of the most encouraging supportive people I have ever known, an unfailingly present friend to our family. Her love language was gift giving. When she came to visit with my parents, she always brought my brother, sister and me some little treasure.
Now, here I was in the late afternoon with the sun slanting through the windows of the common room, no longer alone at all. Across the decades, I could feel the presence, warmth and love of this old friend. She was now addressing her encouraging words to me.
I could feel her prayers for me, her best wishes for me, her love for me.
I tell you this story because it is one of the many tangible and totally unexpected examples of God’s grace that I’ve received throughout my lifetime. I’ve done nothing to earn these gifts. They’ve just shown up as divine surprises, as this unexpected and seemingly impossible gift from an old friend did.
In its entry on Grace in Christianity, Wikipedia defines grace as “the help given to us by God because God desires us to have it, not because of anything we have done to earn it. It is understood by Christians to be a spontaneous gift from God to people, “generous, free, totally unexpected and undeserved, that takes the form of divine favor, love, clemency, and a share in the divine life of God.”
Grace shows off God’s eternal generosity, love and care for us. And God’s gifts of grace come to us in the ordinary commonplace things in our lives, like books for me, and fish for Simon Peter.
Simon Peter must have been tired and discouraged on the day that Jesus was down at the lake shore sharing the word of God. Peter and his crew had been up all night fishing, had caught nothing, and so now they had given up and were on shore cleaning their nets. Peter and Jesus were already friends, so I’m sure that even though he must have been worn out, Peter was willing to let Jesus use his boat as a floating pulpit. When Jesus asked, he and Jesus got in the boat, and Peter put out the boat a little way from shore, and sat there listening to Jesus talk—pretty restful, probably, the boat gently rocking on the gentle waves lapping the shore. Maybe Peter even dozed off!
When Jesus finishes speaking, Peter must be relieved, for now he can go home and sleep for a bit before going out to fish again.
So when Jesus says to him, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch,” Peter pushes back. “Been there, done that, no luck, Jesus! But, OK, if you really want me to, I’ll try again.”
The result—an act of God’s grace—more fish than Peter could imagine for one catch! Enough to fill two boats nearly to sinking!
And Peter, to his credit, recognizes that those fish flopping in his boat, scales shining in the sun, are gifts of grace from God—spontaneous, generous, free, totally unexpected and undeserved.
Because Peter recognized those fish as gifts of grace, Peter was blown away and full of humility. He knew that he had done nothing to deserve such a gift. In fact, he had been grumbling about even trying, just as I had been grumbling to myself that afternoon about the hardships of seminary when I received my gift of grace.
Peter doesn’t say thank you, assuming that maybe Jesus is just paying Peter back for letting Jesus use his boat, giving Peter what he had earned. Instead, Peter throws himself at Jesus’ feet and says, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” Peter sees himself for who he really is, an ordinary, flawed human being like the rest of us. And Peter also sees who God is, right there in front of his eyes, the God of creation, the Lord of all, the one who has loved Peter and has just up and given him a gift of grace.
So let’s leave Peter there at the feet of Jesus for a minute and join up with the Apostle Paul, who is in Ephesus, a papyrus sheet in front of him, mulling over what he wants to say to the Christians in Corinth who are having some disagreements with one another and want Paul to weigh in.
In the passage that he is writing, the one we’ve just heard, Paul reminds the Corinthians of the good news—the fact that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are God’s unbelievable and incomprehensible gift of grace given for you Corinthians. Paul says that the Corinthians know this gift is true because Peter, the disciples, a large crowd, James, and all the apostles– saw Jesus alive and resurrected and in their midst.
Paul was not in the group of people that saw Jesus after his resurrection. In fact, Paul was out persecuting and hunting down these very people, surely sending some of them to their deaths. Paul was the very last person on earth that you’d think would ever meet Jesus.
But there it is! God’s act of grace! Paul writes that last of all, Jesus appeared to him, in a blinding light brighter than the sun, even though Paul was unfit to be called an apostle because he persecuted God’s church, and was totally unworthy of ever seeing Jesus.
Then Paul says,
“By the grace of God, I am what I am…and all I have done has been the grace of God that is with me.” Even Paul, with his gigantic ego, realized that the gift of God’s grace was nothing he had deserved or earned—but instead, God’s love poured out on Paul—the one who had been actively trying to kill off that very love.
The stories of Peter and Paul are stories of God’s amazing grace.
But the most important thing about their stories is what these two did in response to God’s grace.
Jesus told Peter not to be afraid, that Peter was going to become a fisher of people. When Jesus left the Sea of Galilee that day to continue his proclamation of the good news, Peter (and James and John) left everything and followed Jesus—their response to God’s grace—they put out into the unknown deep with Jesus and let down their nets in a whole new way.
When Jesus gave Paul the opportunity to follow, Paul too, decided to let Jesus transform him, not having a clue about how things would work out. Paul also put out into the deep, and turned out to be history’s greatest evangelist. Paul tells the Corinthians that God’s grace toward him has not been in vain. As Paul writes, “I, Paul, have worked harder than any of them (there’s that ego) BUT it was not I, but the grace of God working in me.”
We, too, are constantly receiving God’s gifts of grace in our lives. Sometimes we recognize these gifts as grace, sometimes we don’t. But when we see ourselves for who we are in the light of God’s love, then we recognize that what we have received from God is all grace.
As I was finishing this sermon, I opened My Utmost for His Highest again, wondering if I’d find any graceful words of wisdom for all of us today.
The title of today’s meditation is this. “Are you ready to be offered?”
To offer ourselves to God is our response to God’s grace at work in our lives.
And as Chambers writes at the end of today’s meditation, “Tell God you are ready to be offered, and God will prove to be all you ever dreamed God would be.”
And I’ll add that when we offer ourselves to God in response to God’s grace and follow Jesus, we will be more than we ever knew we could be, through God’s grace working in us.