Another thought-provoking sermon this morning by Mitch Randall at NorthHaven Church.1 Nietzsche’s main criticism of the church in his day was that it was simply about the world to come, and that a religion that was of no value in this world now was of no value at all — a sentiment articulated in Joe Hill’s poem “The Preacher and the Slave”:
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die….
When Jesus read a Jubilee text from Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, he didn’t say that someday this would be fulfilled, but that it was fulfilled “today.”
May it be so, even today.