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“What a useless waste of time,” I thought to myself, some years ago as some senseless argument endlessly dragged on at one of our Methodist annual conferences. With just a small effort, I could imagine any number of better ways to spend a sunny afternoon in late spring. At the time, I happened to be sitting next to the president of a Methodist, and he shared my agitation. He leaned over to me and said, “This discussion reminds me of what Woodrow Wilson once said as he watched a similar argument in a faculty meeting at Princeton.” I turned to hear this: “He said, ‘This debate is intense because the stakes are so low.’” Yes. It’s surprisingly easy to over-invest in any enterprise; even one that you discover is either trivial or meaningless.

I remembered that comment this week. I don’t know about you, but occasionally I find myself looking back over my life and wondering about roads not taken. When I wake early in the morning to watch the sun come up from somewhere behind Long Island sound, I find myself evaluating my life – a common pastime at my age, I’ve learned. Like the fishermen Luke describes in today’s lesson, who’ve thrown their nets into Lake Galilee all night long with nothing at all in their boat to show for the effort, you arrive at a bend in your life and you just naturally begin to wonder, “Is it worth it? Or have I been just wasting time by filling time?” I know. I know: this is partly the darker side of my own personality. But it’s also an honest evaluation of a life. “Am I making a difference?” is a question that can haunt any one of us at any time. You can’t look down into your life’s rowboat and feel, well, some disappointment if the catch seems unimportant. If you’re hoping for marlin, or a tuna, and there’s nothing there but a few little catfish, you wonder. You can’t help it.

And it can happen even to the young. This week I opened a religious journal and found an essay by Adam Copeland, a young Presbyterian pastor in his first church out of seminary. He describes the generational challenge that he, a twenty-something, faces in ministering to octogenarians. He confesses that the age gap began to grate on him when his flock kept opening the door to a pastoral visit with a comment like, “My, you are young!” Nodding my head, I found a few lines in his essay catching my attention. “A few weeks into my call,” he writes, “the congregation celebrated two wedding anniversaries; each couple had been married for 69 years. I tried to fathom the extreme dedication and love that makes a marriage thrive for almost three times as long as I’ve been alive….” In addition to this skepticism, Copeland continues, there is “the effort to keep up in other ways with members of the Greatest Generation. As that generation reaches age 90 and beyond, I sometimes wonder, what’s left for Generations X and Y? Sometimes I wonder if we should lower our expectations and strive only to be the ‘Second Greatest Generation.’” (Adam Copeland, “Generational ties,” The Christian Century, February 9, 2010, page 11.)

Though I’d hesitate to give Adam any advice from my own very different generational viewpoint, I’d love to thank him for his honesty. Like me, he’s looking down into at the catch in his congregational boat, too, not to just his past effectiveness by seeing what’s there, but to evaluate his life’s investment in ministry as he imagines what will be there. Looking ahead, not back, he wonders what kind of fish he’ll catch, and if they’ll be worth the effort. He’s articulate and observant. So many of us question both our expectations and our accomplishments; soon and late, we all want to make some difference to someone or something.

I risk that observation because I hear Paul looking back at his own life, even as he pulls the church in Corinth from the shallows of their petty squabbles into the deep water, where life’s bigger questions swim. “Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters,” Paul says, sounding every bit like a true big brother, “…I … remind you … of the good news [the “gospel”] that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved….” (1 Corinthians 15: 1-2) “Keep your focus,” Paul seems to say. “Remember the gospel.”

And what is their focus? What are they to remember; the core of their faith. And what is the core of their faith? Here it is, condensed for their remembering, and ours: “Christ died for our sins … he was buried … he was raised…” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4) It’s simply put, but it’s a big message, and the heart of what they, and we, all believe. It’s a big message, one that implies a Godly love binding them together, each to the other, and the solitary to the whole. Paul reminds them that they all know the one common experience of faith: once I was lost; now God has found me and claimed me; and you, too. Christ died for our sins. Ours. All of us share in both the guilt of our humanity and its hope as well. We in the church are painfully bound in our sin; and we are united as well in the redemption that sets us gloriously free.

That core gospel truth is the context in which Paul then looks back on his own life. Or, to use again the metaphor from the gospel lesson, he looks down at the catch in his boat. And he sees there, the church at Corinth, new Christians, flopping on the deck, mouths gasping for air, and bickering with each other, and unable to accept the simple wonder of Christ at work in and through them all. It’s not a very pretty sight. Yep, these immature Corinthians bounce off one another in Paul’s little boat. They are a pretty sorry catch for a brilliant rabbi like Paul.

But listen to how Paul describes his own life, for them and with them. We remember him now as St. Paul; but he knows himself better than we. He knows his faults, his failure, his cruelty, and his sin. He remembers holding the coats of those who stoned Stephen. He knows himself. He knows that was at war with the church. So it’s a small miracle, he says, that the risen Christ “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” (1 Corinthians 15:8-9) something happened to redeem, to transform that rudderless life, Paul says: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. … I worked harder than any … though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” (1 Corinthians 15:10-11)

Grace. It’s always grace. Our life of faith boils down to the God’s goodness, not ours. We do our best, and either it turns out well or it turns out poorly, or as with most things in life, doing our best brings us to a life that falls for the most part somewhere between great and ghastly. And if life is pretty good, it is so because God uses us in spite of us. God takes what we do, and makes the most of the effort. In the gospel, when the tired fishermen listen to Jesus, they catch the fish they’ve missed all night. It wasn’t them, Luke tells us. It was the Lord; the Lord of grace.

Still, the Lord uses disciples – followers who are all too human, like us. The disciples weren’t over-achievers, brilliant, or especially business-savvy. But when they listened to Jesus, dropped their nets when and where he instructed, the nets were full. Again, it was grace, that’s all: God’s eye-popping grace. Or, to use Paul’s language, “…by the grace of God, I am what I am … I worked … though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” What makes the difference in a life is seeing God there. For God IS there, whether you’re opening the days up fresh in a new parish or looking back at the dents, and scratches on a life perfectly dreamed but humanly lived. Life is bound to have accident, true. And this too is true: the best parts of every life are always a bit of a surprise. A gift. And “gift” is just another word for, you guessed it: grace.

Even at the beginning of his ministry and his life, young pastor Adam Copeland has discovered the graceful presence of God, showing him where to drop his net, even when Adam doesn’t have a clue. Here’s how he describes God’s goodness in everyday moments: “…before I can get too discouraged, I catch a glimpse of grace that snaps me out of generational assumptions and makes my life as a pastor unpredictable and exceptionally interesting – like e-mail from the 80-something who questioned a post on my blog, or the Facebook friend request from a great-grandmother…. At times like these I remember that our God of the ages isn’t bound by generational distinctiveness; God moves in the nursing home as well as on my Facebook homepage.” (Ibid.)

Thanks, Adam; looking back on my life, I can see the same grace of God. Whenever God has been present, it hasn’t been because of me. And when God wasn’t there – or, more accurately, when I couldn’t see God’s presence nearby – it wasn’t always my fault.

Our lives are never merely about us. Our lives always, gracefully, have God at their center. The table we share is a gift, from God, for us the people of God. Like the bread and the wine, like sunlight and fresh air, life is always a gift. And faith, like life itself, is always God’s grace.

Amen.

Mamaroneck United Methodist, February 7, 2010.

 

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