A friend on Facebook linked to this remarkable collection of some of the most tasteless Nativity Scenes that ever unaccountably failed to bring down the wrath of angels.

Except for the Dog Nativity, of course. The Dog Nativity is awesome.

In a letter to John Wesley in June 1735, his mother Susanna Wesley wrote these words:

The beauty, pleasures, and ease of the body strangely charm us; the wealth and honours of the world allure us; and all, under the management of a subtle malicious adversary, give a prodigious force to present things; and if the animal life once get the ascendant of our reason, it is the greatest folly imaginable, because he seeks it where has not designed he shall ever find it. But this is the case of the generality of men; they live as mere animals, wholly given up to the interests and pleasures of the body; and all the use of their understanding is to make provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof, without the least regard to future happiness or misery.

I take à Kempis to have been an honest weak man, with more zeal than knowledge, by his condemning all mirth or pleasure as sinful or useless, in opposition to so many plain and direct texts of Scripture. Would you judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure; of the innocence or malignity of actions? Take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.

(from Susanna Wesley by Eliza Clarke LONDON: W. H. ALLEN & CO., 1886)

I made a mistake today. I did a web search for an old friend.

Sometimes it’s better not to know.

This was a guy who, once upon a time, was (to quote Proverbs) “closer than a brother” to me. A guy I shared long road trips with, prayed with, shared confidences with, and sat up late with over pizza, talking about Jesus and how to win the world for Him.

I haven’t been in contact with him in years. We were drifting apart even then. I knew he was a pastor. I now learned that he’s been, for some time, an aggressive advocate, within the Very Large Lutheran Church Body Which Shall Remain Nameless, of what’s called “gay issues.”

My thoughts went back, inevitably, to an evening long ago, when I’d had dinner with him and his wife. The subject of homosexuality came up and I (on the basis of some very superficial recent reading) said that I thought I could make an argument for evangelical Christians supporting the homosexual movement.

“They seem to be just fighting for the right to be different from everybody else,” I said. “I think maybe we ought to support that. We can’t be confident that America will always be a Christian country. Someday we may be the ones who are different. We need to make sure that there’s a right not to conform in this country.”

My friend and his wife disagreed, spiritedly. I don’t clearly remember what they said, but I have the idea they pointed out that homosexual activists showed no particular inclination to respect the rights of those who disagreed with them. They pointed, I think, to the shameful treatment received by Anita Bryant, who paid with her career for daring to oppose their agenda.

In hindsight, I think it’s clear that they were right and I was wrong. I did not cling to that point of view much longer.

But, in one of those ironies that seem to me so common in life, today I’ve taken their side, and they’ve taken what was mine at the time (and gone far beyond it).

And I have to wonder, was that conversation the beginning, for them, of their movement to feelings-based ethics and zeitgeist-uber-alles theology? Or a significant step on the way?

I honestly can’t recall any argument I’ve ever won, in my whole life.

Is it possible the only one I did win was one in which I was completely wrong?