I’ve been gone from St John the Baptist parish during January to cover all the Holy Spirit Sunday Masses while Fr. Gilberto was out of the country. My absence has probably given you an opportunity to either miss me or be relieved that I wasn’t here. If you where of the individuals who was relieved I wasn’t here because you’ve come to discover you don’t really like me as a person; well I’m back… and just so you know, this is how God made me! I am who I am! What you’ve seen is what you get, I am not going to change and you get this for a minimum of six years!

I’m just kidding, I don’t actually think like that… but many people do… many people think of themselves as “fixed.” If you don’t like me, that is your problem, I am who I am, deal with it, nothing can or will change me. This way of thinking is very limiting, we limit ourselves, others, and we limit what God can do in our lives.

This is not what St. Paul is saying when he says: by the grace of God I am what I am. What is the difference?

The difference has to do with the word grace. Grace is one of those words that we hear and often do not really know what it means. In theology, grace is the collaboration of divine freedom and human freedom. It is to give God the opportunity to enter our lives and move us towards the direction he needs us, which means that as Christians we are never fixed, grace is constantly at work through, in, and with us so that his kingdom come, his will be done in the world. Grace then is transformative, it has the power to change every aspect of our lives including deep rooted convictions, thoughts, feelings, values, behaviors and worldviews.

This is something that St. Paul had to learn and experience because for most of his life he was like many today, stubborn: I think what I think. I believe what I believe. This is the way God made things. I am the way I am, and nothing can change me.

Although he was a well-known Jewish teacher, highly educated and brilliant, he was also racist. He believed that God had chosen the Jews alone to be his favorite people and he could not imagine that someone from any other culture could be included, and so he made it his mission to make sure no one else was included and so began to persecute the Church and put many Christians to death. He thought he was collaborating with God when in reality he was placing limitations.

But then he has an encounter with Jesus which helped Paul realize that in spite of all his achievements, his stubbornness, “being set in his ways” had blinded him and he had lost the vision for what collaboration with God really meant. He realized that the power of God is not limited as he thought, and even though he had placed limits, God’s love for him and others through Jesus Christ was not limited and that realization was the beginning of grace, God’s movement in his life which led to a complete transformation.

Reflecting back on his transformation he calls himself one born abnormally, not fit to be called an apostle, but by the grace of God I am what I am now, because his grace has not been ineffective, it has changed me.

Grace allowed him to see possibilities he could not imagine otherwise, God would always work beyond his own limitations. That is echoed later when he writes to the Philippians from prison and tells them: whatever was to my credit I now consider a loss for the sake of Christ, I consider it all rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be united to him.

The gospel tells us of another man who also and needed to have an experience of grace. Peter was very different compared to Paul. He was a blue-collar worker, he did not have much education, not known, there was nothing too remarkable about Simon Peter. He was spiritually dead, going through the motions of work every day at the same job, coming home tired, smelly… he too needed to experience the transformative grace of God.

Jesus encounter him on a bad day, a day when he is frustrated and discouraged after having worked for hours under the hot son and all for nothing… life seemed to be wasting away, and at the worst of times Jesus comes to him and says go out and fish again, put out into the deep all the way back out from where you just came from.

Now, though he is tired, Peter is also greedy and ambitious, he does not want to be seen as weak. As a small business owner, he wanted to be successful, which is why he was driven to work hard day after day, that’s just who he was. So when Jesus comes to him, this famous person he has seen walk around and heard others talk about, though he acknowledges he is tired and it probably will be a waste of time, he sees it as an opportunity to impress a rabbi or perhaps get a miracle himself which will mean more money so he goes along with it. To his surprise he gets the biggest catch of fish in his lifetime, but his responds was different; depart from me Lord for I am a sinful man.

Why does he respond that way? If anything he should have felt the adrenaline of the catch, driven to throw in more nets, to call for more boats, to begin to negotiate with Jesus and make him his business partner… it would go on par with the person that he is… but instead he says depart from me Lord for I’m a sinful man!

The encounter with Jesus made him feel weak, afraid, and he wanted that feeling go away, for Jesus to go away lest it becomes worst, besides that is now how he is! Grace is at work in Peter, calling him to be honest about how limited his spiritual life really is, about how little trust he has in God’s power, that no matter how much he tried, he could not achieve what he wanted by his own efforts.

He is in danger of letting his stubbornness get in the way of this moment of transformation, so Jesus responds immediately: do not be afraid! I know what you’re feeling, give me your frustrations of not being able to achieve the life you want for yourself and I will give you a new life based on what I can do through, with, and in you…  from now on you’ll be at the service of people, casting the nets of the very grace you are experiencing right now so that others who are also stuck in the routine of life might be brought to life.

Grace is powerful, it is not subject to whatever limitations we tend to put on ourselves. We tend to pull things towards us, the gravity that comes with thinking “I am who I am” and nothing can change me. When I think that way, then I demand that everyone mold to my ideas, that everyone cooperate with me, even God. Grace saves us from this by entering the soul and then radiating outward, countering the gravity of our sinfulness, making me free to collaborate with God, so that through the grace of God, I may be what God needs me to be, become who God has made me to become.

Paul learned he could never force people to follow the covenant by making the rules more clear and strict. Trying to do so just made him frustrated to the point of killing people in defense of the faith and in so doing he violated one of the most basic commandments that he was constantly teaching. Peter learned that the meaning of his life could not be dependent on the guarantee that his fishing business would be successful, that would just have made him more consumed by greed and even more frustrated that life was not as he wanted it to be. Both had to acknowledge their need of God’s grace, and once they did the rest of their lives was an experience of continual transformation, continually being changed, making their new Christian faith an adventure awaiting to see where God would lead them.

God wants us to cooperate with him. That means that grace is something we have to ask for, especially when we are undergoing difficulties and are more susceptible to want others to cooperate with us. Pray for grace. If you are struggling with something like alcoholism, recognize that you cannot stop whenever you want just as you keep telling yourself… you need to depend on the only thing that is stronger than your will weekend by a substance. Whatever the struggle is, this is not who you are, and nothing is impossible for God’s grace.

We also have to remain in grace, which for us as Catholics it is through the sacraments, especially Mass, where it is through Him, with Him, and in Him, that we are transformed. We start every Mass asking that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us. Stay close to Mass, even when it doesn’t seem to be making a difference.

No one of us is fixed, unchanged, stuck, unless we chose to be. By the grace of God, you and I are what we are today. By the grace of God, you and I can become what God needs us to be tomorrow.