Bullshit Christianity

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Everything else is bullshit.

Those aren't my words. They’re Paul’s in his letter to the church in Philippi.

After going through and checking off all of the theological boxes a person was expected to be able to check off in order to be an counted as a member in good standing of the people of God, Paul declares that all of it is “garbage” or “rubbish” compared to knowing and following Jesus of Nazareth. Except words like “garbage” and “rubbish” are just sanitized euphemisms put there by translators worried about the delicate sensibilities of conservative American Christians who wouldn’t be happy to discover the actual Greek Paul chooses to use here means “excrement” or, to put it more bluntly, “shit.”

This is not an accidental choice of words, nor does Paul have a perpetual potty mouth. Paul understand the power of language and is trying to convey in the strongest possible terms just how meaningless everything was for him compared to the joy he found in being a follower of Jesus. Compared to the love and grace and radically inclusive fellowship of Jesus that would welcome to the table of God even a terrorist like Paul, everything else was bullshit.

That included all the churchy stuff Paul had once thought so important not just to his own identity, but to what he believed necessary for his identity as member of the people of God.

All the extra hoops and dogma, all the extraneous rituals and rules, compared to the love and freedom and grace found in Jesus, everything else was bullshit he no longer needed to worry about because he had fallen off the horse on that famous desert road and had his eyes opened to something new, something better, something that welcomed anyone and everyone from everywhere no matter who they were all for the sake of making the world a better place for everyone, not just a select few, but for all of creation. Paul had caught a glimpse of the sort of place God envisioned in the very beginning when creation was in harmony and compared to being a part of that, everything else was a waste of his time.

We profess that sort of singular focus a lot in the Church these days, at least in worship music and sermons, tweets and memes, but the reality is so much of what fills our churches and passes across our lips today is bullshit Christianity, extraneous if not outright anti-christ dogma, rules, and acts of exclusion that not only have nothing to do with the good news of the gospel, they’re acts of internal sabotage in the building of the kingdom of God.

Some of this bullshit is obvious, things like televangelists promising earthly prosperity if you’ll simply make a love offering of $49.99 or politically hijacked preachers chasing conspiratorial windmills while endangering their own flock with cries of personal freedom.

Some of it is more sanctified, ingrained in tradition and rulebooks and plastered with proof-texted verses that give it a veneer of biblical credibility. Women may have been the first people to preach the good news of the resurrection and Jesus may have made welcoming the unwelcome and ostracized a foundational cornerstone of his ministry, but drawing lines in the sand of who gets to sit in the pew and who gets to stand behind the pulpit have become rallying cries with churches more concerned with maintaining their holy misogyny and righteous discrimination than actually living out the sort of radical inclusion that got Jesus nailed to a cross.

But the bullshit runs deeper still and becomes all the more subtle as it gets packed inside the warm fuzzy language of “faith” and “personal relationship,” two things that sound wonderful and indeed should be wonderful, but instead have become holy excuses for a radically inward and hyper-spiritualized faith that ultimately is all about me and my salvation and has little if anything to do with loving my neighbor or meeting their tangible, practical needs in the here and now. Sure, we’ll try to save their souls, but they’re on their own if they want to save their home from foreclosure or speak up for their civil rights.

We’ve become a people consumed with ourselves, intoxicated with power, and full of self-anointed righteous anger that we’re all too eager to spew against anyone who doesn't profess or believe or love or look or sound or vote just like we do.

It should be no wonder then to see people leaving the Church in droves when we’re all busy wallowing around in our own shit.

The early church father Augustine once said, and obviously I’m paraphrasing here, no matter how sure you are of your interpretation of scripture, no matter how great your exegesis might be, how proficient you might be in biblical languages, or how many verses you might have to back up your theology, if your interpretation of the Bible doesn’t lead you to love God and your neighbor, then it’s wrong.

Period.

Or as Paul might put it, it’s bullshit.

What we are in need of right now in the Church is actual, tangible, life changing good news. The kind of good news that affects and changes our lives and our neighbors lives and even creation itself not just in some far off moment in eternity, but in the here and now. The sort of good news that actually affects the lives of the people who hear it in the same way it changed the lives of the people who heard it when Jesus preached first preached it. The kind of news that heals the sick, sets the captive free, and even brings new life to the dead. The kind of news that actually creates good in the life of the single mother trying to pay the bills, the refugee desperately clinging to a raft in hope of a chance at a new life, or the guy just trying to get to work without having to worry about being pulled over and shot to death by a police officer because of the color of his skin.

The kind of good news that brings about tangible transformation and a bit of resurrection in the lives of those that hear it and experience it.

If the gospel we preach and the lives we lead as a Church can’t speak to or serve those that need good news the most, then it simply isn’t good news.

It’s bullshit and we’ve been bullshitting ourselves for far too long into thinking that the sort of self-help, vote this way, keep those people out, and make sure you say a magic prayer at least once at an altar is the good news of Jesus.

What we need is the sort of faith that’s so compelling and all consuming it makes you sell everything you have to a buy a field because you found a treasure there that makes everything else look worthless in comparison.

The kind of faith that explodes from a center of love and guided by that love throws open the doors to the kingdom of God to invite everyone to sit down for a heavenly banquet no matter what they look like, who they love, what they believe, how they identify, or where they come from. 

The kind of faith that is actually Christ-like, that rejects power, stands with the oppressed, embraces the marginalized, empowers the weak, and blesses the poor without agenda, manipulation, or concern for how it will affect budgets or our membership roles.

What we need is love centered faith that compels us to imagine new ways each and every day to listen to, learn from, love, and serve our neighbors without expectation of reciprocation or reward.

What we need is a genuinely Christ-like Christianity that casts the scales from our eyes and helps us see that all those prootexted rules and regulations, those unholy lines in the sand and sanctified selfishness and all that other stuff that distracts us from the way of Jesus and gives us an excuse for not laying down our lives to love and serve

our neighbors wholly and purely, it’s not good news.

It’s bullshit.