God visits His people in strangers

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?

Welcoming the little ones

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”  St. Mark 9:37

“We’re taking a bit of a chance on him,” the headmaster told me, “It will probably be a tough adjustment.  Make sure you keep an eye on him.”  Joey, let us call him, was one of the students assigned to my advisory group at Saint James School.  We classed him as a tenth grader, but he had been in and out of so many schools over the past few years that it was hard to tell where he actually belonged.  My first impression was that Joey was a nice enough kid, but he couldn’t really understand social cues.  He laughed at things that weren’t funny, and he had trouble following a conversation.  He seemed extremely nervous, shell-shocked almost, always fretting about whether he would be able to remember when this class met, or what he was supposed to wear for football practice.

Saint James is definitely a college preparatory boarding school.  We didn’t really have what are termed, in the trade “second chance students.”  The schedule was tight and there were lots of things to remember, and we left students to supervise themselves a fair amount of the time. 

I did watch out for Joey, though, and I could soon tell that he needed it.  Nothing seemed to go right for him.  He soon fell far behind in his classes.  He was danger in hurting himself and everyone else on the football field.  His backpack was like the Bermuda Triangle—things went in there, and never seemed to come out again in one piece.  And for much of the time, he was an emotional wreck, breaking down in tears or blurting out inappropriate things in class almost every other day. I met with the assistant head of school and looked at his file, quite a few pages of assorted psychological disorders, lots of meds, a broken home.  The kid pretty much had everything stacked against him, and the results we were seeing seemed to fit well into what could be expected.