Our Witness

Michael O'Keefe and OCU

Michael O'Keefe taught graphic design at Oklahoma Christian University for 41 years. No more. Less than a month ago, he was fired. Some students--it's unclear how many--were offended by words a guest speaker used in O'Keefe's class, words the speaker--who'd taught part-time at the Oklahoma Christian and was himself an alum--warned them he'd be using as he detailed the uniqueness of his life.

O'Keefe wanted his soon-t0-be-graduating seniors to recognize what students might encounter when they graduate, if they determine to live by a different code than others in their field. One of the speakers, the one who used graphic language to explain himself and his story, was gay. 

O'Keefe was summarily dismissed. Ostensibly, someone else is leading the class he was teaching. He's no longer welcome on campus. 

Do the math. O'Keefe couldn't have all that many years left before retirement. 

It was a tough job Christ had--I mean the sacrifice, the excruciating pain of separation from God, the pitiless humiliation of the cross. But he'd also suffered from the outrageous condemnation of the local religious authorities, the Pharisees, who had long ago determined the proper limits of an approved religious life. It was  meticulously outlined, then proclaimed, and determinedly enforced. Good religious people weren't to associate with sinners--with tax collectors, with fallen women, with--yucch!--Samaritans. That wasn't at all kosher. It was verboten. Don't even think about it.

See what's happening in this cartoon drawing from The Naked Pastor? Six of us are carefully drawing in lines that help us gain a certain righteous exclusivity. We're each outlining a fortress into which we--and we alone--can live. The lines are walls; we mark off what's exclusively ours, lines that allow us to believe that we can hold off the claims of the Devil, sin itself. 

And that guy in the middle, in the crown? That's Jesus Christ, who is unmistakably erasing the lines we draw on the concrete. 

I grew up at the end of an era, a time when stock traders were thought to be speculators and gamblers. They could be church members, but they certainly couldn't hold church office because they dealt in dealing. 

I grew up at the end of an era when public confession of sin was a thought to be the earmark of a true church. I once saw a pregnant young woman standing at the front of the church undergoing what the elders claimed was "church discipline."

I grew up at the end of an era when divorce was so evil that those who left their marriages thereby lost their place at communion. 

I grew up at the end of a time when most of the righteous people in my church did not--glory be! would not--turn on a television on the Sabbath. 

I grew up at the end of an era when the college I attended told student dorm counselors to, come the Sabbath, put tape over the coin slots on pop machines, at the end of an era when dancing was strictly verboten, when a 26-year-old student was put on probation because someone from town had seen him, in a restaurant 20 miles away, having a glass of wine with his meal. 

I grew up at the end of an era when lots of people looked exactly like the half-dozen of us in the picture above, when drawing lines meant to define what was good and proper and what wasn't seemed an admirable characteristic of most Christian fellowships, when Christians students from Wheaton were appalled by Christian students at Calvin holding cigarettes, but when Christian students at Calvin were appalled by Christian students at Wheaton who frequented restaurants on the Sabbath.

I can't help but think that the LBGTQ horrors evangelicals confront today is what's outside the boxes we're working so hard to draw in. 

Isn't it wonderful that Oklahoma Christian feels itself a bit more righteous today because it so decisively acted to keep its students pure? 

I'm saying we've seen it all before. We call O'Keefe's firing "a witness" because it is. 

Of what? That's the very difficult question that has no easy answers.