As a preacher, one of the guiding questions I use when considering my sermon each week is, “Where is the good news in this?” Asking and endeavoring to answer this question focuses the message that I hope my congregation will take with them. It also ensures that I am actually preaching the gospel and not either giving a lecture on Scripture or diagnosing the myriad problems that surround us in the world without offering a reason for hope. In the Christian context, the good news is not false comfort or shallow positivity, but the very reality that God is redeeming all things through Christ.

While part of my vocation is to quite literally proclaim the Good News of God in Christ in the particular form of a sermon given from a pulpit, the vocation we were baptized into calls all of us to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.” For people like me who grew up in a more conservative religious context, these words can invoke discomfort and memories of billboards or people holding signs proclaiming God’s impending judgment with very little information about why God’s judgment might be good news. These methods felt like they were conveying a threat rather than good news: “Either be a Christian or burn in hell.”

In my own life, I have not experienced the Good News of God in Christ as a threat at all but as a loving and hopeful promise, and it is this that I strive to convey both in my words and my actions. I hope and pray for the grace to communicate in what I say and in the way that I live that there is nothing to fear, not even death, because Christ has overcome death and the grave, and nothing I can do or say or be has made me worthy of that gift. To proclaim the Good News in our lives is more than an attempt to be a “good person,” but asking for the grace to undertake a qualitatively different way of living, a way of living our world desperately needs examples of.