This is the latest installment in the Songs of Sacrilege series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a song that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please send me an email.
Today’s Song of Sacrilege is If He Showed Up Now by Scott Cook.
Lyrics
If he showed up now, you wouldn’t know what to do
He’d be flat broke as usual, filthy too
And the worst thing about it when he comes to town
Is the kind of people that he brings around
But all of your life you have called him your friend
And promised you’d stick by him right to the end
So you’d say, do us the honour, have something to eat
And he’d say, where were you when I was living on the street?
If he showed up now there’d be trouble, I bet
He’d be talking revolution, or did you forget
When you told him you’d follow him, he said, if you
Were anything like me, they’d kill you too.
You’d say, I’ve been calling you, haven’t you heard?
I live by your name and I’d die for your word
And I’d fight to defend it in every detail
And he’d say, where were you when I was in jail?
If he showed up now, would you recognize him?
If he came as a pauper when you expected a king
Or as an illegal, scrounging for bills
Or a defenceless child in the Syrian hills
You’d say I’ve been fighting your cause all along
I studied your pages and sang out your songs
And it was in your name that I closed every prayer
And he’d say, where were you when I was sick and couldn’t get care?
You’d say, if I’d known it was you I’d have come
I fought for your honour and all that I’ve done
It was under your banner in the name of the Son
And he’d say, where were you for the weakest ones?
Where were you for the weakest ones?
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Fantastic take on Matthew 25 (that part of the Bible that so many believers conveniently pretend isn’t there…)
Dammit, this post deserves at least a hundred heart emojis. Because THIS was the message that my liberal Catholic nuns and other teachers in the 1960s/70s were pounding into our heads, in a hundred different ways. I absorbed that message, even if I’ve now disconnected it from the underlying religion. It fuels my progressive US politics.
If my conservative parents knew anything about that, who knows how I might have gotten a good education, since local public schools at the time were struggling fiercely with race issues, and I was not a member of the majority race in my school district. (Which is not commentary on anyone of any race, simply observing an overwhelmed education system which had avoided grappling with reality too long, and as a result left a whole lot of kids of almost every race/ethnicity struggling. In an extremely multiracial/ethnic/cultural city, in 1976 when I graduated Catholic high school, the public school system was just dragging itself into the 1950s.)
This was where I landed before I finally left Christianity.