My
lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant… since
you have come to your servant.” Genesis
18:3,5
I picked up Sarge just outside of Oneonta,
and told him I was only going as far as Cooperstown, but he was welcome to the
ride. He was familiar to me, a fixture
of the Otsego County landscape, but we’d never spoken before. Sarge was maybe 75, a thin man with leathery
skin and squinty eyes. He always wore a
garrison cap and an olive-green army uniform, with a few medals sprinkled
across the chest. No one was quite sure
if he had actually earned them or if they were just window dressing. But in patriotic upstate New York, Sarge could
hitch his way from one end of the county to another by just putting on a good
show.
He began talking the moment he sat down
and kept it up for a solid half hour, a rambling discourse mostly about old
cars, and the evils of politicians.
Looking over after about twenty minutes, he noticed I was a clergyman
and launched into a discussion of true Christians and hypocrites. Sarge had been to most of the churches in
these parts, he assured me, and he could certainly tell the difference between
them. Catholics wouldn’t give a man like
him the time of day, and would you believe that they once ran him out of a
Pentecostal church because he stood up to speak his mind during the
service. But Methodists—they laid on the
best spread for coffee hours, and sometimes the fellas would even slip him a
few cigarettes.
It did cross my mind as he opened the door
to go his way that Sarge could well have been a kind of messenger. I was a little relieved that he didn’t seem
to know anything about Episcopalians, so he hadn’t turned up in my congregation
and discovered that we came up short. Wouldn’t
it be just like God to separate the true believers from the false ones by the
way they responded to a mysterious stranger?
