While we’re building the kingdom of God, however, most of us in the West “drink the kool-aid” of the productivity-equals-success/respect/love poison our society ladles out for us during our construction breaks. Even though the drink tastes bitter, and we say the Church is in the world and not of it, and we say we hate the stuff, we preachers keep going back and holding out our cups for refills.

While we drink, we look with dismay at that partially constructed kingdom and see all the work left to be done. So we double our efforts, squeezing more tasks into the cracks of time, adding a patch here, pouring cement there, but seemingly to no avail. Because the work is never done and the task lists only seem to grow larger. And that’s in a non-pandemic year.