How Christianity Is a Load of Crap, and Why I'm Still Buying It
A shocking story of an actual *and* metaphorical pile of feces
I once dug through a pile of feces for treasure.
Gross, I know.
I was 8 or 9 years old, and my parents didn’t know about it.
It happened in my hometown of Dedougou, Burkina Faso. A neighbor one block down from our backyard had decided it was time to empty his outhouse. I don’t know who was “volun-told” to do it (I can’t imagine anyone offering). It’s unlikely that there was a paid service. Anyway, it was hand-shoveled right into the dirt street.
When one squats over a hole-in-the-ground toilet, it’s not uncommon to lose pocket change. That’s what my friends and I dug for, and that's what we found. With sticks, shards of plastic we’d collected from the dump another block from my house, and our bare hands, we pulled one coin out after another. Some of the treasures were new, and others old. Circulating coinage was for morning onion-filled donuts and afternoon sessions of fussball and shingome (chewing gum) at the local boutique.
The old coins we found were mostly from the early days of French colonization. They were worthless for everything except my budding coin collection. I kept them in an old cardboard Bible box from the States. Not long after starting the hobby, I found out I could go to the colonial-era section of the marché in Bobo-Dioulasso, which we visited a few times a year, to acquire other strange monies. I collected coins from all over the world and from political regimes past. To this day, I mourn the loss of my precious collection. It got left behind when the Ivorian war broke out in 2002.
Scribes were the religious professionals of Jesus’s day who knew how to handle the Scriptures because they were tasked with safeguarding them. Careful copying of the Law and the Prophets led to them being experts in all of its delightful jots and tittles. Jesus said that Scribes prepared for the kingdom were the one’s who knew how to bring out treasures new and old.
I wonder if digging through feces for old and new treasures was the beginning of my vocation as a theologian.
I think that my outhouse archeology could be allegorized in a number of ways. Perhaps it shows the ways in which this crappy world has a lot of good left in it. Maybe it’s about how trauma can still have a silver lining. Or maybe it’s the tale of social media: one has to scroll with a bare thumb through the excrement of opinions to find something that’s valuable and so worth pocketing.
If any of those things resonate with you, have at it.
If, on the other hand, you find all that to be a load of crap, I won’t be offended.
The point I want to make is this: To be a disciple of Jesus is to believe an old faith, one that many lived have before us. Its oldness is worthy of somber reverence.
But it’s also new. The Spirit of the Living God is always doing novel things, and we’re promised that he will make all things new on the Last Day.
As one reads the history of the church, one will inevitably find a lot of things that turn one’s nose up in disgust. And, similarly, anywhere there seems to be a new move of the Holy Spirit in our day, there’s almost always a putrid streak of malpractice. It’s off-putting, and one can despair that the church is worth it. Perhaps the church has sullied you against your will when you were most eager to be clean.
The prophets were not reticent to call God’s people repulsive in various ways:
Ezekiel was told to cook bread over human feces as a sign against Israel.
Hosea called God’s people a willful whore.
Jeremiah called the remnant in Jerusalem a basket of rotten (and smelly) figs.
Perhaps calling the church an inside-out latrine like the one of my childhood is something the prophets would resonate with. Maybe that resonates with you. I know it has with me.
Even still, I’m selling all I have to buy the outhouse, the pile of feces, and the entire property. Because I know there’s treasure old and new worth pocketing. I’ve found treasures untold in the lives and writings of Christians long gone, and I’ve seen the Spirit of God do something new in our day, crap notwithstanding.
I invite you to keep digging with me.
And in between—donuts, chewing gum, and a good game of fussball are always on me.
What a panic!!! I'm just hoping that the pile will be coprolites not fresh goo. The fresh goo is almost untouchable at times, though in Slow Burn, you are often excavating the fresh goo. You're a bolder man than I.