On Friday's commute I shared the subway car with the pastor of the Narrow Path Church. From 125th Street to the terminus at 207th, he delivered a sermon that was by turns pedantic, hateful, and paranoid. What set him apart from your typical raving maniac is that he was a well-dressed man who, if not for the words coming out of his mouth, would have seemed entirely normal and middle-class. He started out with the usual Jesus talk, and peppered everything with scriptural references, but often veered into what I will call 'generalized raging asshole' territory. Some highlights of his sermon:

• "Everyone listens to their iPods these days. You wear the headphones so other people can't hear you. But you've got it so loud that they can hear you even if you're standing on the other side of the subway car! And what is that doing to your ears?"
• "You put your food in microwave ovens, and what does it do? It changes your food at the molecular and atomic levels, so instead of being nutritious, it becomes toxic! But you don't want to do the research.
• "Oh, I got another one." [Obligatory statement that the WTC was brought down by "implosion devices placed strategically throughout the buildings."] "You would know that if you did the research!"
• Several minutes of anti-gay material, culminating in the impersonation of a stereotypical gay man's walk while saying "When a man walks like this, it's not right! A man's hips were not meant to do this!"
• Recitation of various Biblical story fragments, followed by the rhetorical question, "Is that too deep for you? Am I getting too deep?"
• "People think Christmas is celebrating the birth of Christ, but how can that be when Jesus wasn't even born in the winter? How can Easter be celebrating the resurrection when bunnies and chocolate have no...correlation...with the way...that we celebrate Easter? Last year Easter was before Passover. Jesus died during Passover. How can he be resurrected before he died?!"
• "People might tell me to shut up, they might call me an idiot. But how can they do that when they don't even know that the word 'idiot' comes from the Greek idios, meaning 'for yourself'?"

The reason I was able to identify him is that he at one point gave us the URL of his website: NarrowPathChurch.com. There you can order his books and DVDs, and gain insights such as how he grew up "in a CULT CHURCH and how he got DELIVERED from this CULT known as the United House of Prayer for All People."

It's interesting how he sprinkles grains of truth and obscure facts into his messages, a time-honored tactic to be sure. There's also a very long tradition of church movements that seek to steer us back to morality, assailing us for our sinful ways. But I really have to wonder about the size of this guy's congregation when he keeps telling everyone what idiots they are. Oh, sorry--guess I shouldn't use a word if I don't know what it meant two thousand years ago.