What I want to know is how do they get away with it?

After all, The Salvation Army is a church. I wonder how many people (particularly non-Christians) who drop their change into those red kettles know that they are supporting a church whose mission is “to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination.”

It is a simple fact of grade-school life that the more colors you have in your box, the more stuff you can draw.

Yet, for some, having sixty-four choices is just too confusing. Thus, there is an unfortunate propensity among many of us humans to try to reduce everything in the world to only two choices, for example: Pepsi or Coke, Mac or PC, David Letterman or Jay Leno.

As a nation, we just experienced several months of this with our paltry two-party political system that forces us to choose either Democrat or Republican.

When I was a mischievous, rambunctious kid, the idea of the antichrist scared the hell out of me thanks to the above-referenced movie which was released in 1976. Then, four years later, Ronald Reagan was elected president and I remember someone telling me, “Ronald Reagan has six letters in both his first and last names. If his middle name also has six letters, then all three of his names make 666.” So, being a curious young lad, I looked up some info on Ronald Reagan and found out that his middle name was Wilson. I was terrified. Reagan was the antichrist! I hid under my bed for hours, convinced that, now that I knew his true identity, something evil was going to happen to me.

The parking lots open at 7:00 a.m. regardless of when the game starts. This past Saturday, October 18, the game against Indiana started at 7:00 p.m. This gave the diehard tailgaters a full twelve hours to accomplish their frivolity.

I know, it is a wretched if not blasphemous thought at worst and a juvenile one at best. It is not something that good Christians are supposed to talk about.

That’s why I like it.

But I did play hooky from my regular church last Sunday to attend McKinley Presbyterian Church which is located at 809 South Fifth Street in Champaign.

McKinley is typical of campus churches with its progressive theology, which I deeply appreciate, and its outreach to students. In fact, college students and professors must be the norm for McKinley’s congregants. I was asked by a friendly gentleman who sat in the pew behind me, “Are you a student?” to which I replied, “No, I’m a little too old to be a student.” He then asked, “Oh, you’re a professor?” I answered, “No, I’m not a professor.” He then asked, a little confused, “Then what do you do?”

In other words, the Bible suffers from the same malady that afflicts Jesus as different people have projected their individual biases, desires and agendas, turning both Jesus and the Bible into something they never were intended to be.

But even if we took away all of the crazy notions about what the Bible is, we are still left not with a single, unified book, but a collection of books written at different times by different people who also had their own peculiar biases, desires and agendas.

When I go to a gas station I’m usually already pretty irritated for the obvious reason of having to pay $4.00 a gallon for gas. But sometimes I go to gas stations and don’t even buy gas — yet I find myself irritated anyway. This is because the only other reasons I stop there are to satisfy my addictions to Mountain Dew and Camel cigarettes. So when I walk into a gas station it’s either because I’m itching for more caffeine, more nicotine, need more gasoline, or some combination of all three.

The first email was from a local conservative Christian evangelical church leader praising Sarah Palin whom he had just seen delivering her acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for vice president. He noted how wonderful it was that the Republican party had nominated a woman for vice president and then drew a parallel with his church which he also thought was wonderful for having female leaders. Funny, I don’t remember him writing anything similar when Hillary Clinton was one of the final candidates for the democratic presidential nomination. And he must have “forgotten” that Geraldine Ferraro was nominated as the democratic candidate for Vice President in 1984. Apparently nominating women as leaders is progress only when Republicans and/or conservatives do it.

When I consider many of the issues that consume the political and theological dialogs of the world, it seems that this ideological battle between Sith and Jedi is always present. On one side of the issues are the Siths who want to believe that the world is black and white, that there is only one answer — their answer — to every problem. On the other hand there are the Jedis who see the world more realistically, in shades of gray.

After living here in C-U for a while, I thought it would be nice to take my mother out to eat for Mother’s Day at one of our fine local eating establishments. I really like ribs, but my mother likes healthy things like salad and salmon, so being a thoughtful son, I called Famous Dave’s Barbecue and made a reservation. When we showed up that Sunday to claim our table, we were told we would have to wait an hour and a half. “But we had a reservation!” I protested. “Sorry, we overbooked,” was the answer.

Perhaps the problem is that we have been too narrow in our definition of what science actually is. For example, the creationists have been telling us for a long time that the well-thought-out and researched theories of evolution are no match for the mythologies of the Judeo-Christian traditions. Perhaps they are on to something. After all, they’ve written books and in so doing have helped us to see that books are no longer the domain of well-done, peer-reviewed, scholarly research. The creationists have also opened a Creation Museum thus showing us that museums are no longer a place where scholarly research can be disseminated to the common person.

I believe having a sense of community is a powerful, spiritual force in our lives. The central act of Christian worship is (or should be) Communion which isn’t just about drinking wine and eating bread, but about doing those things with a community of believers to symbolize our unity, love and acceptance of one another.

There are a couple other places that provide shelter for women who are victims of domestic abuse and runaway teenagers, but for the most part, the above facilities are the only places that house the homeless in our community.