I believe it was somewhere around springtime, when the first warmth opened café doors and bathed the candy red cobblestone of downtown Freiburg with sunshine. The warmth blew secretly through the town like an angel of life, passing around smiles to all of her residents, weary of winter’s darkness. On such days, I wanted to be downtown, where Kaiser-Josefstrasse met Bertholdstrasse and old women bought bread and young women shopped for trendy clothes. One such day, I saw a group of old men engaging people with a special sort of consistency. They wore old suits that were comically colorful – not even the kind of old suit my grandfather would have worn, but rather, the kind of old suits unstylish old men in movies wore. As I approached them, one of them handed me a small book, bound in a cheap, green leather-imitating cover. No question what it was – a New Testament, a gift of love, from the Gideons.
According to one of the blogs on the Economist website, this year marks the 100 anniversary of the group. 100 years of distributing Bibles, without apology, without desperately grasping at cultural relevance, intellectualism or marketing strategies. 100 years of weary travelers knowing an unstylish, comforting spiritual guidance lay in the top drawer, right next to the bed.
In my experience, they use the old translations – King James for English and Martin Luther for German. It is a bit of a comfort-food evangelical outreach, successful through faithful persistence, trusting that if they make God’s word widely available to everyone without cost, the Holy Spirit will deeply bless someone.
It is casting a wide net. I wonder if the old men in Freiburg ever really saw the fruits of their labors. Perhaps they sometimes feel like Sisyphus, pushing the rock up the mountain with no end goal in sight. Probably, they feel more like the story of the boy on the beach, tossing starfish back into the ocean before the dry out. When told by an adult that he would never be able to save all of the starfish, he smiled and said, “I just saved that one.” I know they did not see me, later on in an Irish Pub between glasses of Guinness and Paulaner (would they have approved of this?), I looked up 2 Corinthians 5 so I could explain to an unbelieving German the ministry of reconciliation in his own language, and how he too, could be reconciled to God.
I don’t if my German friend truly understood it. But what I do know, and what the old man in the unstylish suit knew, in our persistence, was that if you make God’s word available, good things can happen. Reconciliation can happen. Gospel can happen.
Happy birthday, Gideons.
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