Question: Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
Response: I will, with God’s help.
Sharing the Good News of God in Christ is a part of that path of reconciliation and generosity that is at the heart of God’s relationship with us. It begins with the understanding that we are all interconnected by our common source in God’s creative activity in the world, and that we bear mutual obligations to each other to care for each other.
Sharing the Good News of God in Christ means sharing the peace you’ve found in the love, healing, and teaching of Christ with others.
Some wise person once said, “Preach the Gospel often; sometimes use words.”
Sharing the Good News of Jesus can mean being brave enough, if someone asks you why you may be showing more evidence of kindness, patience, equanimity, perseverance, even in the face of difficulties, that you share as you can in the ways you have experienced the presence of God in transforming your life.
But your loudest testimony is often simply living a life of integrity, or attempted oneness, with Christ’s examples of generosity, healing, compassion, empathy, teaching, and meeting others where they are. It can be through living a life that centers building up good and seeing others as beloved of God.
Episcopalians have often been reserved. We are not prone to flashy displays of piety. But we must also share our testimony of God’s goodness in a world that can seem cruel and vengeful—even among our fellow Christians.
Going Deeper:
“We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”
-- Madeleine L’Engle, celebrated author (and Episcopalian) who wrote the classic A Wrinkle in Time, correctly made this observation in her book Walking on Water.
Likewise, Anne Lamott, a popular writer of humorous novels and spiritual reflections Once famously said, “You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Sharing the Good News of Jesus starts from a place of positivity. It does not have to mean knocking on strangers’ doorbells, or standing shouting on streetcorners with a Bible in our hands or cornering people so that they can’t escape and telling them all the ways they are wrong, or sinful, or less-than. It doesn’t mean scaring people with images of a fiery eternity of torment. It also means, in the Episcopal Church, taking the Bible far too seriously and reverently than to take it literally or use it as a bludgeon to denigrate others.
Sometimes, sharing the Good News means reminding us all that the same God who has had mercy on us means also reminding us that God calls on us to likewise ground our actions in mercy; this reminder is especially important to those who hold power over others, as Episcopal Bishop of Washington Mariann Edgar Budde witnessed on January 21 of 2025 in a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral.