Jesus invited disciples to put down their fishing nets and start hauling in believers. The catch was a motley crew of outcasts and sinners: tax collectors, prostitutes, cowards and doubters. Yet he was willing to die for them.
This lesson is lost on many of today’s Christian churches. Instead, they slam their doors in the faces of would-be members. The issue is sex. A loudly assertive minority of Christians has shrunk the grandeur of God to the narrow space between navel and knee. No 13-year-old boy was ever half as fixated on sex as the God of modern Christian conservatives — be they the United Methodist leaders who have voted to crack down on same-sex marriage, or the traditional Catholics battling at the crumbling ramparts of a discredited hierarchy.