Pointing the Way (well, actually, it’s called evangelism)

by Bishop Robert O’Neill

When it comes to the birth of Jesus, you would think that something as momentous, life-altering, and universally significant as the arrival of the Messiah and the redemption of the human race by the Christ of God would be at least reasonably self-evident to any reasonably attentive individual.

All the evidence, though, is to the contrary.

When Jesus was born, it took place in obscurity under the cover of darkness while the vast majority of the world was asleep. So far as epiphanies go, it was rather counterintuitive, if not completely unremarkable — as if to say, “This is how God intends to redeem the world? Really?” The birth of Jesus was, as Philips Brooks put it, virtually a non-event. “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given,” he wrote, “when God imparts to human hearts the blessings of God’s heaven.…”

It is amazing to consider how hidden the presence of God can be in our lives, even when the need for divine love in this world is so very evident. More often than not, the activity of grace — the “God moments” of our lives — just plain go unnoticed. Our awareness of God’s activity in this world simply seems to get lost in the details and demands of each day. Which is why, of course, we need the season of Advent, which circles around every year like a familiar friend. Inviting us to renew our relationship with God, Advent issues a necessary and provocative challenge to all of us: “Wake up. For God’s sake, wake up!”

Central to the season of Advent, of course, is the figure of John the Baptist.

Quirky, enigmatic, and simultaneously inviting and off-putting, John the Baptist stands outside the mainstream. John is one who has some distance and perspective to offer the preoccupied masses. John is one who takes time to look and to watch and to pay attention to the signs of God’s movement in the world. Most important, John points the way so others might discover and experience for themselves the redemptive love of God breaking into human life. “Be transformed,” John says, “the kingdom of heaven is here.” John’s remarkably simple gesture — pointing the way and extending the invitation — is absolutely necessary. John invites others to see and know and experience the redeeming love of Jesus in a darkened and unenlightened world.

This is evangelism — a work, an activity, a spiritual discipline — a practice that is absolutely central to our life as the Body of Christ.

As I said at our diocesan convention this past October, we must understand that the cultural and religious landscape around us has shifted. We must recognize that the inherited and unchallenged assumptions of our past will not serve us well in the work of the gospel today. Gone are the days when we can assume that most folks have at least a modest and working awareness of Judeo-Christian tradition. Gone are the days when we can assume that anyone seeks out a church to attend just because that is the cultural norm. Gone are the days when we can delude ourselves into thinking that if we just build an attractive-enough building people will find their way to us and into the heart of the gospel. That, as the Eighth Bishop of Colorado, Bill Frey, used to say, is like “building the most attractive aquarium possible by the seashore and then hoping the fish will jump in.”

Evangelism, in fact, is actually not about inviting someone to Church. Rather, it is about inviting others into the life-changing reality of a dynamic and living relationship with the living God in Jesus. “Evangelism,” said Archbishop William Temple, “is the presentation of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, in such ways that persons may be led to believe in Him as Saviour, and follow Him as Lord within the fellowship of His Church.”

This is our life’s work, this work of evangelism. We commit ourselves to it at baptism when we say that we will “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.” It is not an optional exercise. As N. T. Wright once put it, the good news of God’s kingdom “did not spread by magic.” As Andy Doyle, the Bishop of Texas, says, “the very work of the Church is to bring people to God.” It doesn’t get any clearer than that. The fact is, evangelism is one of the essential marks of mission — a fundamental and indispensable piece of Christian identity and life. It’s just who we are: people who are called to point the way, to proclaim to those who do not know it the good news of the love that is Jesus in a world desperate to know what true love looks like.

There you are. Evangelism is a life-giving enterprise.

I am always mindful that I would not have experienced the love of Jesus (and I certainly would not be writing this article as the Tenth Bishop of Colorado) if Russell C. Cushman of Navasota, Texas, had not invited me years ago into an ongoing conversation about Jesus and about how that relationship might change my life. “Who do you think Jesus is?” he would ask. “What do you think it really means to follow Jesus?” he would say. Or, “What do you think it means to be a disciple? Have you ever experienced the Holy Spirit?” he wondered. Those conversations between two college freshmen raised the most basic issues of the Christian faith and life with a plainness and simplicity that most of us avoid but is, at the same time, most desperately needed. Ours was not a conversation about “the Church” but a conversation about the reality of life in a dynamic relationship with the living God in Jesus. Talk about transformational. It changed my life. For that, I will always be grateful.

I am mindful too, for that matter, that none of us in The Episcopal Church in Colorado would be engaged in our common life and ministry unless we had similar stories — unless others, somewhere in our past, who knew something of the love of Jesus, had taken the time to share that love, to point the way, and to invite us into an intentional, thoughtful, and ongoing relationship with the living God in Christ.

We are, all of us, heirs of the gift of evangelism. So for God’s sake, and for the sake of the human race, let’s claim it — boldly.

It’s a fact. We all need help to see — to accustom our eyes and ears and hearts and minds to recognize and understand and respond to what God is already doing in this world around us, how God is always at the door, ready to break into human hearts and lives through the love that is Jesus. Someone needs to have the perspective and the distance and the attentiveness and the gumption to point the way and to extend an invitation — to “be transformed and to bear the fruit of divine transformation” in our own lives. This is why the figure of John the Baptist is so important in Christian tradition.

So here is the question of the season: in our darkened and troubled world, who will point the way into love, and into life, if we do not?