Just one catch: It’s not real.

Rather, it’s a commercial that’s been airing on cable networks and local TV stations, sponsored by the United Church of Christ (UCC), arguably the nation’s most liberal church body. (They bill themselves as the country’s “most welcoming” denomination for gays and lesbians.) In the ad, the “bouncer” scene is interrupted by on-screen text reading: “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.”

There’s a minor flap going on over this ad, because a couple of networks (CBS and NBC) decided not to air it, with both calling it “too controversial” and one (CBS) adding that it implicitly endorses same-sex marriage. The UCC is complaining, of course, and you can kinda see why. It’s not as if those networks have much of a morality code — either in their programs (NBC runs Will and Grace, after all) or their ads — so it does seem odd to see them draw the line here. On the other hand, this ad is pretty blatant in its slander of Christians as bigoted thugs. Odds are the networks figured they’d actually have to deal with a fair number of complaints. And so soon after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl stunt, they’re probably not in the mood for any more of that for a little while.

In any case, it seems to me this flap pales in comparison to the real issue here: Not the UCC’s distortion of other Christians, but its distortion of Jesus Himself.

In a culture with a fading biblical memory, phrases like “Jesus didn’t turn people away” have a certain resonance: Most people have a faint recollection that He ate with tax collectors, had been known to speak to women of ill repute, and warned against being judgmental. Being modern folk, they eagerly jump to the conclusion that Jesus was a modern sort of guy too: a live-and-let-live sort who would’ve hated prudes and prigs and said stuff like “what people do with their personal lives is no one else’s business” and “everyone should feel free to choose their own lifestyle.” No doubt He’d have palled around with plenty of gay folk, to say nothing of straight couples living together out of wedlock. And surely He’d never have been more than “personally opposed” to abortion, never dreaming of “imposing His personal beliefs on anyone else.”

Sorry, guys. Not even close.

The actual Jesus related to sinners; indeed, in this world, he never related to anyone else. But He never enabled people in their sin; He confronted them with their sin.

When He met those who’d been sexually immoral, He made them face up to offenses they’d rather have buried (the woman at the well; John 4:16-18) and told them to “sin no more” (the woman caught in adultery; John 8:3-11) — and He reminded everyone that lust is a sin in and of itself (the Sermon on the Mount; Matthew 5:28). When he met those in the infamously corrupt field of tax collecting, He moved them through His teachings to confess their corruption and make amends (Zacchaeus; Luke 19:1-10). And when He warned against being judgmental (Matthew 7:1-5), He directed people not to ignore others’ immorality but to repent of their own — for He had come “not to abolish” the Law, but “to fulfill” it (Matthew 5:17).

That’s light years away from the approach UCC churches take. They ordain openly practicing homosexuals, set up special offices to promote gay activism (one of their officials bears the jawbreaker title “Executive for Health and Wholeness Advocacy/Minister for HIV/AIDS and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns”) and tell their flock to just keep on keepin’ on. (“When and with whom a person becomes sexually active is a matter of personal choice,” their Web site proclaims.) In short, they don’t welcome people who practice homosexuality to show them their sin and bring them to repentance. They don’t admit homosexuality is sinful at all. They don’t forgive it; they affirm it.

For professed Christians to take this line requires a high level of denial, of course. They have to either ignore the Bible or strain to reinterpret it. But as I’ve found whenever I write on homosexuality, or sexuality in general, I always hear from people all too ready to do just that — claiming that Scripture doesn’t really condemn the behavior per se, but only some twist on it (e.g., not homosexuality, but homosexuality tied in with gang rape or pagan rituals), and that Scripture is, really and truly, perfectly compatible with the spirit of the age today. In fact, as I’ve written about before, there’s a virtual cottage industry of folk dedicated to that cause.

Not that their labors hold up well under scrutiny. Take the work of one Debra Haffner, who left her post as head of a major sex-ed group to study at one of the largest liberal seminaries, Union Theological Seminary in New York, so she could build “a national ministry on sexuality and religion.”

According to Haffner, the Bible says premarital sex is OK, prostitution is actually encouraged (as a healthy outlet for preventing adultery) and even adultery itself isn’t so bad (it only violates outdated “property rights”). And homosexuality — why, it was practiced by some of the Bible’s greatest figures: David and Jonathan were lovers, and Abraham dallied with his male servant.

It’d take more space than I have here to tell you how Haffner and her tutors at Union Theological Seminary managed to get those interpretations from God’s Word. (You can read those details in the article I mentioned above.) Suffice it to say that their logic was pretty seriously tortured. To give a few quick examples:

• The notion that prostitution was recommended was built on Proverbs 6:26 (for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread, and the adulteress preys upon your very life”) — a verse clearly intended not to endorse the former by contrast with the latter, but to warn against both practices.

• The idea that David and Jonathan were lovers is a twisting of David’s words that Jonathan’s “love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” — when actually, as a theological team headed by Denver Seminary’s Professor Craig Blomberg noted, “David’s whole point in this text is that Jonathan was his ‘blood brother’ with a loyalty that surpassed that which mere eroticism creates.”

• Abraham’s supposed gay dalliance comes from one passage in Genesis 24:2, where the aged patriarch tells his servant to swear an oath by putting “your hand under my thigh.” But as Blomberg’s team points out, a hand under the thigh conveyed the seriousness of the vow, placed near the loins which were the source of children. “Only modern Westerners unfamiliar with the physical expression of friendship between men in the Middle East would mistake the Bible’s references for homosexuality,” they add.

That’s a highly charitable understatement. The interpretations by Haffner et al can’t be written off to mere ignorance, much less honest disagreement by people earnestly trying to discern God’s Word; the errors are too blatant, too consistently (indeed, invariably) favorable to the sexual revolution. This is a matter, simply, of people seeing what they want to see, and contorting Scripture to fit their desires. They want to see themselves as followers of Christ, and to be seen that way by others. But they want to go their own way, and they’re not about to let Christ block their path.

Jesus knew all about them, too. And there’s no escaping the power of His words, ringing as inescapably now as they ever did: When they say, “Lord, Lord,” His response can only be “I never knew you.”