First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

1Kings 21, Luke 7, and Galatians 2

“A Good Man is Hard to Find”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

June 17, 2007

My first real impression of people, seeing people, came with my grandmother. We would sit in her apartment, number 13, as tenants would walk through the parking lot where she was the manager. She would say, “Now, that’s a good one” or “That’s one of the bad ones.” I can remember as a young boy being baffled by this. I would look at the way they walked, how they were dressed, what time of day they came through. And none of these things seem to determine a good one from a bad one. She just seemed to know.

As a teen I remembered her words when I read John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row with its opening lines description a knot hole in the fence. Steinbeck gazes through the hole in the fence and describes drunks and bum, whores and cheats. Then he says to the reader look again. This time you see angels and good mothers, caring fathers and faithful children. With a foreboding of the story to come he says, same people.

Sometimes it only takes a glance, a second, to size someone up. In college I worked in a grocery store where there was a fair amount of chaos. It was a drug neighborhood, a gay neighborhood, and a rich neighborhood all at the same time. This goes to say that it was a rather wide array of people who came through the door.

One type of person who came through the door was the person who was going to steal. As I trained a new employee one day, I said, “People steal here. It happens. Don’t panic; simply ask for the item as they try to leave. If it gets crazy there are people here to help you. After a while you will be able to tell who is going to steal."

The new employee gave me a look that suggested I was being a racist or a bigot. “How do you know?” he said with a rather obvious lilt of suspicion. “You just can,” I said. Looking to the other side of the store almost on cue a man walked in and I said, “That guy. He is going to steal.” The eyes of the new employ went from suspicious to incredulous. “Come on,” I said and we walked down the check stands to the other end of the store.

Just as we made it to the end the man whom I said would steal was coming around from one aisle to the next. As he did this he lifted his shirt to put a quart of milk into his pants. “See, he’s going to steal. You can just tell after awhile.”

When the man who was stealing the milk saw me point him out, he walked directly to us. Reaching us he slammed the milk down on the counter so hard the top blew. With everyone covered in milk he shouted at me, “You want to fight?” Before I could answer he said, “Wait” and he took out his top teeth and laying them on the counter, then said, “Now, you want to fight?” The new employee just stood there stunned, motionless, covered in milk. Before I declined the invitation for a brawl I turned to the new hire one more time and said, “You’ll just be able to tell.”

Sometimes this is called a first impression, other times it is experience, other times people are just so terribly transparent that they are easily seen by all. I can remember the first time I met Paul Mkandawire. Paul is a few years younger than I am but in some ways he is so much older. Paul oversees three hospitals in the North of Malawi and countless clinics and programs and women’s guilds that are willing to give up their time to fight malaria.

I met him a year ago when we were traveling around the country of Malawi looking at all the efforts being done to fight the disease which kills so many and cripples their economy. My first impression of him was that he was a good man. I saw it in his laugh. Anyone who has met Paul remembers his rather persistent laughter. In the midst of awkward exchanges or the irony such pervasive suffering produces, Paul would laugh and thus give you a sense that he is not ready to yield to despair.

Yet, the moment where I truly started to see Paul was in worship. Here was a man giving up his life, fighting the good fight, a devoted father and husband, yet, here also was a man who seeks the presence of God in prayer and song and reflection. To hear Paul speak of his church and his pastor is a great moment, because for him, this is what is going to change the world. And the kingdom of God is coming.

I am excited to tell you that Paul is coming to Canada in the Fall to do doctoral studies. I have told him there will be a train ticket ready for him at all times so when he’s homesick or just needs to not fall upon the sword of academia, he can come to Watertown and be amongst friends. Nothing would thrill me more than to introduce you to Paul.

For he is living his life the way the Apostle Paul did; he has given his life over so it is no longer he who lives. It is clear to see, to find in him. When you hear him and get to know him, you will just be able to tell. It is clear.

The irony is that it is just as clear as the man with poor teeth and a desire for free milk. Walking in a door a hundred feet away, his life was so terribly clear, so completely transparent his actions were easily anticipated. Where with Paul Mkandawire it is a clear faith and hope and love, with the man who didn’t want his teeth broken his misdirection, his lost spirit is just as clear.

In our passage from the Kings scroll we have such a transparent moment. The character of Ahab is rendered naked. He is weak and selfish and petty. Here we could easily say he is at his worst, or, yet, was he just being himself? The writer of Kings doesn’t give a great deal about Ahab in terms of what we could know. What we are given, though, is all bad, all small. Ahab is as easy to see as the man walking in the door. Ahab and the Apostle Paul are easy to see, like the tenants at my Grandmother’s house walking back and forth. The good ones and the bad ones I now understand are easy to see.

In our passage today from Luke though we see the possibility of contrast. Like Steinbeck’s knot hole we have two radically different images of one person. The Pharisee sees a “sinner” as he calls her; Jesus sees a soul set free, a faithful person.

There are moments in each of our lives where people have seen what is best and what is worse in us. Each of us have had moments of pettiness or brokenness like Ahab and the man trying to steal and people have discerned rightly that we are a bad one. And in the same fashion there have been moments where we have given our life away. We may not be the Apostle Paul or a man seeking to save a nation like Paul Mkandawire, but there have been moments where people have looked at us and said, “there is a good one.”

Those are not very difficult moments though. When we are so transparent it is easy to see the one or the other. Yet the woman at the feet of Jesus is not such an easy sight. Remember the Pharisees are always right in the gospel. We may not like what they say or what they do, we may find them hypocrites or those who would abuse power, but they are right. The woman is a sinner. She is a prostitute; she is a woman “ill gotten gain” and the nard she poured is proof of that.

Jesus knows this as well. He is not debating with the Pharisee as to whether or not the woman was a sinner. He was debating with him whether or not she was thankful and gracious. He looked past her faults, her brokenness and said, your sins are forgiven your faith has saved you. Again, the Pharisees were right to balk, for who is to say such a thing.

This week I was down at Syracuse at the Rescue Mission for a tour. It is a homeless shelter for men, housing hundreds of broken people each night. Some come for a day, some come for months, some come for salvation.

I was told the story of one man who recently found salvation at the Rescue Mission. He was someone who was wanted in other states for crimes, and when he hit bottom he found himself at the Rescue Mission. Over the course of months he found a new life, Christ started to live in his heart. Slowly he reached a point where he needed to confess not only to God but to others, so he returned to the states where he was wanted for crimes. When he met with a DA in Indiana he was asked how he wanted to plead, he said, guilty. Although the DA believed he was guilty he asked why? “Because I did it,” he said.

In the course of the conversation the man from the mission described how he had given his life to Christ and was seeking to start again. When he appeared in court and the judge asked the DA what the recommended sentence was for his crime, the DA said, “We don’t want to punish him; we don’t want to send him to prison.” So he was set free. He went to the next state where there were warrants and confessed again and again, the DA of the state recommended no prison time.

The director of the mission told this story not to suggest the mission is a get out of jail free card, but to suggest that the power of God was at work and that great acts of mercy were there.

One of Flannery O’Connor’s greatest short stories is entitled “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” In it she chronicles a vacation gone awry where a grandmother ultimately sees Christ in a man who is the vilest of creatures. O’Connor’s point was to suggest that in the people where sin is so obvious we can find Christ; indeed, we must. To find it in the nice people, the right people, is not a challenge. If you meet Paul Mkandawire you will have no problem seeing the image of God in him. Just in the same way the Apostle Paul was so transparent in his faith it was all people could see.

Yet, it is the other ones, the moments when we are less than good. To see Christ in one another at a moment where we are at our worst is not as easy. It is often risky. The DAs in the Midwest that set free the man who found salvation in the mission will not be commended for that; they will be seen as soft on crime, fooled. And if the man who has given his heart to Christ is tempted and commits a subsequent crime they will be deemed as to blame and blind to whom the man really was.

This was the Pharisee’s honest complaint. The prostitute may be sorrowful now, but what happens next week? How can you say she is forgiven, when she hasn’t really lived a life worthy of grace? Yet, here is the rub: our vision of how people are, whether or not we see them as a good one or a bad one, whether or not we believe they deserve grace or wrath, has no real power. Believing someone is bad doesn’t protect us from future ill; just as believing someone is good doesn’t guarantee future blessings.

It is in that moment, the glance, the walk in the door. What are we looking for? In the store I have to tell you I was trained to look for what is ill. And for all intents and purposes I could find it. As a child with my grandmother hearing her declaration I didn’t understand how she could tell, but now I do. It was a choice to see people as such.

Jesus before the prostitute is not suggesting she was good person, or that she wasn’t a bad person. He says, she is giving her life to God. We can look to one another as good ones and bad ones. We can feel that we are protecting ourselves or commending what we admire. Yet the real question is have we given our lives to Christ and do we look for this life in others? Is this how we look at people, looking for the life of Christ in them?

That is what the DAs saw in the man from the mission, I believe, and it is this very same thing I believed I saw in Paul Mkandawire. Yet, is this how we look to each other and to ourselves?

My hunch is that most of us see ourselves in the middle. We are not saving the world from malaria, but we are not stealing milk either. But what if there is no middle? What if the middle ground is where we simply have stopped looking for Christ in us and others?

It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. Does that ring true in your heart? The Apostle Paul was ready to count all as loss, all as rubbish except for this. And from this all of life was recast. Is this where we stand, how we count, how we decide what is good and bad? In the end those who steal milk and those who fight the good fight all stand on the same earth, under the shadow of one cross, asked one question: whose life are you living? This is the difference between a good life and bad life. It is ours to ask. Amen.