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Arnold Toivonen was headed to work at 5:06 a.m. Monday morning on a wet highway winding east through the dark pines that came crowding up close to the road from out of the spring fog. Arnold worked at the Caterpillar shop in town, crawling into the iron bellies of enormous Caterpillar tractors, scraping his knuckles on their cold, sharp innards, dropping heavy wrenches on the concrete with that satisfying metallic ring, and wiping his greasy hands on gray cloths while he stood around talking with his foreman, Jack, about what to do next. Sometimes he wondered while he was crawling around in the guts of a machine if one day some dope would fire the thing up and grind him to a grisly pulp. Still, Arnold liked his job. It was steady. It paid well. There was vacation time and insurance, and somehow Jack got all of his workers off work during deer hunting season every year.

Arnold was doing the best he could to watch for deer now. He was getting a little sleepy. The sheephead game had gone a little long the night before and 4:00 a.m. had come around in what seemed to him to have been a wink of an eye. As Arnold reached the crest of a hill, at a place where the road curved off to the right into the woods, he saw Jesus standing by the side of the road.

Now Arnold didn't know how he knew he was looking at Jesus. According to the Vacation Bible School poster he had once seen in a grocery store in town, Jesus looked a little like Robert Redford with sandy hair and blue eyes. But it was dark and Jesus was a dark and shadowy figure, and Arnold stared at him in disbelief, but he let the accelerator up.

He was shocked fully awake now and just kept looking at Jesus even as he passed him. When Arnold returned his attention to the curving road ahead, he saw a moose right in the middle of it -- a bull moose, with a rack of antlers as wide as his car. Arnold slammed on the brakes and stopped a foot in front of that lumbering Paleolithic mountain of moose flesh which did not move, and which, if he had hit it, still would not have moved. Arnold had seen what was left of a Mack truck after it had hit a moose. Arnold wasn't driving a truck. Arnold's car was made of aluminum foil. He would have been smashed up to a grisly pulp. The shaggy black monster was now unperturbedly swinging his eight-foot rack of bone toward him; Arnold gripped the wheel, shivering, dizzy, all the blood draining out of his head into his gut. He knew that if Jesus hadn't slowed him down, he would have been dead. Jesus had saved his life.

Arnold threw it into reverse and backed the car onto the shoulder and drove it slipping and swerving backward on the shoulder until he reached the crest of the hill where he had seen Jesus. He got out of the car and ran up and down the road looking for footprints in the snow. He found nothing. He got back in the car shivering, coughing, his chest heaving from exertion, the windows in the little car completely steamed up. He switched on the defroster fan, got out of the car, had a smoke, and listened to the engine that, compared to engines he worked on, sounded like a sewing machine. The defroster fan was louder than the engine. There were no other sounds.

Arnold was silent as a stone all day at work, happy to be groping around in the guts of a power shovel where no one could find him or talk to him. But the longer he held the story in, the more vivid it became in his memory: the dark figure, the mountainous moose, the screeching brakes, the smell of the tires smoking, the roaring defroster fan.

"Almost hit a moose today," Arnold told the bartender after work. "He was standing right on the road, and he didn't move an inch. I was coming around the curve by Plankey's and there he was. Lucky I'd already slowed down or I woulda' slammed right into the sucker."

"Why'd you slow down?" asked the bartender, showing an interest in the story incumbent upon one of his profession.

Arnold realized his mistake too late. He had to say something now; he wasn't the kind of guy to be able to make up some story on the spur of the moment; as a child he'd been slapped up too many times by his old man for doing just that. Arnold knew he'd already paused too long -- long enough so that if he made up a story, the bartender would know he was lying. Arnold was trembling. The story was too strong for him. It had tricked him.

"Whadja' see, Arnie?" asked the bartender smiling.

Arnold looked up and down the bar, leaned forward and whispered, "I saw Jesus. I swear to God. I slowed down, because I saw Jesus, and if I wouldn't have seen Jesus, I'd be dead."

The bartender kept smiling and thought a little teasing would be harmless. "There's no place open that early out by you, is there Arnie?"

Arnold stormed out, trembling with rage. He knew what he saw. He knew it caused him to slow down. He knew Jesus had saved his life. When he pulled up into his driveway, he suddenly saw what a bad man Jesus had saved, what a useless bum he was to get a second chance. His front yard was strewn with toys and rubbish from the garbage can the raccoons had dumped over and ripped apart days ago. The rusty Nova he had driven when he was in high school was there on blocks. The vinyl siding on the house was peeled away in spots. His children were running around in the muddy snow with no coats. The sight of his house, the sight of his children whom he loved, and whom he had slapped and kicked to get them to behave, made him sorrowful to the bone. To think that Jesus saved a jerk like him. Arnold had to wipe his whole face with his oily coat sleeve to dry his tears. His wife met him at the door.

"The toilet's broke for good now. It doesn't work at all. The kids have been going at Hill's house, and they got mud on her carpet, and she came and yelled at me, and I told her that it was all your fault, because I'd been yelling at you for a month to get that stinking toilet fixed, and you never do anything around here, and she told me she didn't want to hear about my problems, and she 'specially didn't want my problems running around in her house, and she told me my blankety-blank kids should just go out in the woods, because they're all a buncha' animals anyway!"

"I know," said Arnold.

Now, normally a nasty retaliation would have been just on the tip of his tongue, and he would have had neither the energy nor the decency to hold it in. Or he would have pushed her out of the way. Or walked right back outside to throw things around on his workbench in the garage. "I'll get the parts and fix it after supper."

"Right," she said sarcastically.

She had already turned away, no longer believing anything he said. She was looking at a casserole in the oven.

"Where's Alex?" Arnold wanted to know.

"In his room."

"I'm gonna take him with me. Time he learned stuff like that."

She turned and looked at Arnold as if he had just said he bought tickets to the opera.

But he was gone.

And it happened. After supper, he and Alex went off to the hardware store to get the parts and came back and shut themselves up in the bathroom. About half an hour later, the two of them were laughing so loud she felt she wanted to be in on it, and she went down to check on them. They'd lost a bolt, and Arnold found he was sitting on it. Their daughters showed up, too, and they started laughing, because toilet parts were strewn all over the bathroom. That night Arnold and his wife both tucked all the children into bed; Arnold kissed all of his children on the head.

That summer, Arnold cleaned out the garage. He repaired the siding. He sold the Nova. He stopped smoking. He went with his wife to town to Home Depot to pick out some new cupboards for the kitchen and a new sink and a countertop. And the new hardware she liked even though they could have done with the old stuff. But other than letting it slip at the bar, Arnold had not ventured to tell anyone else the story about how Jesus had saved his life.

On his way home from work there was a church, and every day he drove by it, it seemed to be beckoning him to slow down and stop and one day, he saw some cars there, and so he did stop. It happened on that day that the ladies aid quilting society had concluded their quilting with an afternoon coffee break. Arnold came tramping in wearing his greasy, tattered, hooded sweatshirt, his unruly hair tumbling out from under a camouflage baseball hat. The ladies gave a perceptible start when they saw him and were greatly relieved when the pastor stuck his head out of his office to ask, "What can we do for you?"

Arnold asked if he could have a word with the pastor in his office. The pastor said, "Sure," and invited Arnold to sit across from his desk, and Arnold told the pastor about how he saw Jesus, about how Jesus saved his life.

"Mmhmm," said the pastor, smiling kindly as if he were looking down at his son who had just showed him a spaceship he had made of Legos. "Is there something we can help you with?"

Arnold hadn't really come to ask for anything. He had a job. A good job. He actually didn't know what he was doing there. Maybe you could say as the apostle Paul did today that Arnold wanted to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. Maybe Arnold knew what the power of the resurrection was but wanted someone to give him a name for it, to give him an idea of what to do to say "thanks." Arnold was definitely not comfortable talking with suits across shiny wooden desks. "Was it Jesus, or am I crazy, or what?" was all he could manage to blurt out.

"Well, many people claim to have seen Jesus or the Virgin Mary," the pastor began. He went on to lecture Arnold about how such things were often psychological phenomena through which indigenous people integrated intrusive Western religious traditions into their own cultures, and the pastor went on to speculate about whether the church had really converted such people or whether the people had simply assimilated the church as a way of placating their oppressors. Arnold just got up and left. He felt like he'd just been ground up to a grisly pulp, he was so angry and confused and embarrassed. He stormed past the ladies, and with a sort of grim satisfaction, he saw them all jump when he slammed the door.

They heaved a collective sigh of relief when he had gone, and again when the pastor actually stuck his head out of his office assuring them he was still alive after an encounter with such an unsavory character. He twirled his finger around his ear and shook his head and went back into his office. The ladies continued their discussion of the redecoration of the church kitchen.

Arnold showed up at the bar for the first time in many months.

"Haven't seen you for a while, Arnie. What can we do for you?"

Arnold glared at the bartender. Nobody could do anything for him. He didn't know what to think about anything. Had he seen Jesus or what? No one seemed to want to hear his story, so maybe it wasn't such a great story after all. Maybe it was just a story. Maybe he was just whacked -- seeing stuff.

"Glad to see you back, Arnie. We were getting worried about you. We thought you'd gone and joined a church and become a preacher."

"Church?" Arnold spat. "What's the church done for me? Just gimme the usual."

"That's my boy," said the bartender, reaching out across the sticky bar to clap Arnold on the shoulder.

I have not seen Jesus as Arnold had. Nor have I seen Jesus as the apostle Paul had. Nor, I imagine, have many of you seen Jesus. Even if we had seen Jesus as Arnold had, it's easy to see how quickly such a vision vanished in the fog of his doubt and confusion. It's easy to understand why our responses to Jesus fall so short of the utter devotion of folks like the apostle Paul who "suffered the loss of all things" for Jesus (Philippians 3:8).

Ultimately, however, it's not visions that save us. Nor do our good works save us. The apostle Paul's good works as a Pharisee made him so self-righteous he wanted to kill anyone who fell short of the glory of God -- folks like Christians. Arnold's good works, like many of ours, were as ephemeral as New Year's resolutions. Only a humble, searching faith, only the feeblest desire to know Christ and the power of his resurrection will lead us through this faith-killing world to the world to come. Whatever the story of your faith, make its promptings your goal, forget what lies behind, strain forward to what lies ahead, and press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus (from Philippians 3:13-14). Make your faith your own, because Christ Jesus has already made you his own (from Philippians 3:12). Amen.