Love the spitter, forgive the spit?
An Oklahoma pastor has apologized for rubbing his own spit on a man’s face during a sermon on Sunday after a video of the incident went viral and sparked outrage.
Pastor Michael Todd, of the Transformation Church in Tulsa, Okla., was preaching on the “clarity of vision from God” when he used his own phlegm to illustrate a Biblical story of healing.
In the story, taken from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus restores vision to a blind man by spitting on his hands and touching the man’s eyes.
Todd — who has been the lead pastor of the church alongside his wife Natalie since February 2015 — invites a man to the stage to illustrate his point.
As the man, who was identified as the pastor’s brother, keeps his eyes closed, Todd turns him away and spits on his own hand.
After holding his spit for about two minutes, he tells the worshippers, referring to the man:
“What I’m telling you it’s just as he’s physically standing here, knowing what’s coming, God’s saying, ‘Can you physically, and spiritually, and emotionally be able to stand when getting the vision or receiving it might get nasty?'”
Todd then rubs the phlegm on his brother’s face, who just stands there, as gasps can be heard from the crowd.
A clip from the video, which was posted on YouTube, quickly took over social media timelines, and the reaction led the pastor to issue an apology the following day.
“It’s never my intention to distract others from God’s Word and the message of Jesus… even with illustrations! I apologize for my example being too extreme and disgusting! I Love Everybody,” he tweeted Monday.
In a video accompanying the tweet, he said he wanted “to acknowledge what happened yesterday when the spit hit the fan. I watched it back and it was disgusting, like that was gross.”
“I want to validate everybody’s feelings, that that was a distraction to what I was really trying to do. I was really trying to make the word come alive and for people to see the story, but yesterday it got too live, and I own that,” he added.
According to Todd, he’s “passionate” about helping people who are “desperate to be able to find hope” in such a way that he gets to do “extreme things to help people get it.”
“And yesterday I crossed a line,” he admitted.
