Grandma’s Marathon is a big deal in Duluth, Minnesota. It got its start in the mid-1970s when I was in high school here and it has grown into one of the major summer events in our community. One year in the near future I am going to train and run in this event. The thirty-second marathon was run this past Saturday, June 21.

This year I helped at a water station with the Duluth faith-based organization, CHUM. It is an effort to publicize our work and we use the marathon to raise money for a discretionary fund to help people with food, fuel, utility bills and the like. Helping required getting up at 5 a.m. and being at the station at 6:30. These are not my favorite times of the day, but I admit it was beautiful. I was at the station from 6:30 to about 11 a.m. and so handed water to runners in both the marathon and half marathon. In both cases, when someone reached out their hand for my outstretched, with a hand cradling water, they were reaching for something that they needed and I had to give.

So I was thinking, sometimes evangelism - sharing the good news of God’s transforming love for the world in Jesus Christ in a way that invites others into a new relationship with God in Christ - is a little like handing out water at a marathon. There are thirsty people in the world, people who see hurt, pain, suffering, existential angst (though they might not call it that!) in their lives, or people who feel lost, confused, cast adrift as a lonely person in the utter expanse of the universe (though they may state this differently!), and they reach out a hand looking for refreshment. There is certainly enough hurt and suffering in the world so that we might expect a few people to be looking for some good news, a cup of cold water for their thirsty lives, their parched souls. Hopefully we, as church, are ready and able to share the water of life that we have in Jesus Christ in a way that is good news to thirsty people.

But in prosperous cultures, it is not always so easy for people to see their own thirst. I am nearing the end of a novel I am reading with an interfaith book group which I facilitate. We went for an easier read this summer, and so took on a mystery – The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison. It is a story set in Tibet with Tibetan Buddhism as a significant element in the story. At one point, an American mining executive shares with the chief protagonist of the story – an investigator imprisoned in Tibet for crossing a Communist party official in Beijing – that while in Tibet he has heard of eight Buddhist hells, but none quite capture the hell he experiences in America. “The worst one. The one where everyone’s tricked into ignoring their souls by being told they’re already in heaven” (331). In such a situation, the church has often tried to convince people that they are thirsty, that their lives are not what they appear to be. Sometimes that has worked, but often not. The traditional language used for the life that’s missing the mark is the language of sin – but too many in our culture have such an attenuated version of “sin” that it is not often a helpful concept. In all honesty, we have few to blame but ourselves for this. On the one hand “sin” can connotes heinous acts, and to be told one is a sinner suggests an entirely depraved character. Few people see themselves in such light. On the other hand, paradoxically, “sin” has so often been used to describe the mildest forms of behavior – taking a drink of alcohol, dancing, smoking a cigarette, thinking a sexual thought – that it has lost any significant punch.

So how are we to share our water with the thirsty? Rather than convince them of their dire need, we might do well to convince them of the quality of the product – forgive this marketing language. What I am trying to say is that our reaching out with good news needs to be matched by lives that are transformed by God’s love in Jesus Christ. Evangelism could emphasize newness of life, renewed hope, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-discipline (Galatians 5), doing justice and loving kindness (Micah 6). The challenge of this kind of evangelism is that it changes us, we who want to share good news. But, hey, that’s not so bad. And frankly, even when the people we are sharing with are dying of thirst, they should be able to see that we have something that genuinely quenches that thirst.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David