A Time to Laugh

When we covered Bolgia 2 – the level of Dante’s Inferno reserved for flatterers where they wade knee-deep in excrement — my BJU Classical Lit teacher quipped, “After having two kids, I feel like I’ve been through this level of Hell.”

After potty-training two, I now understand what she means.

Now, this post is about poop. Or poop as a metonymy for sin (even Dante does that!).

Have you heard the one about the dog poop brownies?

I’m not kidding about this one. This story was an email forward that made the fundy rounds a few years back. It’s probably an old sermon illustration. It goes like this. . . .

A dad wanted to make a point to his teenage children, so he made them a plate of brownies (the kids should have known something was up at this point. Dad? Baking??). After they had begun to devour them, he asked them how they were enjoying them. He responded to their compliments with, “That’s good. I’m so glad. And I just put a little dog poop in them.”

After their gagging and puking, he feigned surprise, “What? Is that a problem? It was just a little bit!! . . . Oh? You don’t like that? REEEEEEALLY???? . . . . Well, how do you think God feels about just that little bit of sin in your life?”

:/

And lest you think this was just an old fuddy-duddy’s story from a by-gone era and that the new enlightened fundamentalist would never use such an ignorant illustration, I heard it again from one of my peers within the last month (listen at ~20 minutes in). Same dog-poop-in-the-dessert trope.

Sigh. I guess as we age and our illusion of control gets dismantled, in fundamentalism we resort to particular other delusions — harsher discourses of power.

Jesus talked about poop too. And vomit. But His take was completely the opposite of the fundamentalists’:

What Pollutes Your Life

^1-2 After that, Pharisees and religion scholars came to Jesus all the way from Jerusalem, criticizing, “Why do your disciples play fast and loose with the rules?”^3-9But Jesus put it right back on them. “Why do you use your rules to play fast and loose with God’s commands? God clearly says, ‘Respect your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone denouncing father or mother should be killed.’ But you weasel around that by saying, ‘Whoever wants to, can say to father and mother, What I owed to you I’ve given to God.’ That can hardly be called respecting a parent. You cancel God’s command by your rules. Frauds! Isaiah’s prophecy of you hit the bull’s-eye:

These people make a big show of saying the right thing,
but their heart isn’t in it.
They act like they’re worshiping me,
but they don’t mean it.
They just use me as a cover
for teaching whatever suits their fancy.”

^10-11He then called the crowd together and said, “Listen, and take this to heart. It’s not what you swallow that pollutes your life, but what you vomit up.”

¹²Later his disciples came and told him, “Did you know how upset the Pharisees were when they heard what you said?”

^13-14Jesus shrugged it off. “Every tree that wasn’t planted by my Father in heaven will be pulled up by its roots. Forget them. They are blind men leading blind men. When a blind man leads a blind man, they both end up in the ditch.”

¹⁵Peter said, “I don’t get it. Put it in plain language.”

^16-20Jesus replied, “You, too? Are you being willfully stupid? Don’t you know that anything that is swallowed works its way through the intestines and is finally defecated? But what comes out of the mouth gets its start in the heart. It’s from the heart that we vomit up evil arguments, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, and cussing. That’s what pollutes. Eating or not eating certain foods, washing or not washing your hands—that’s neither here nor there.”

A. Maz. Ing. The fundamentalist says the sin is out there and must not be touched. Jesus says the sin is in here and can’t not be touched. The fundamentalist judges everyone around him who doesn’t use his brand of spiritual hand sanitizer before communing. Jesus rolls His eyes at the absurdity. The fundamentalist tries to gross us out with a rather ridiculous and forced dessert recipe. Jesus just holds up a mirror. And a Light. A really, really big, universe-sized Light.

The fundamentalist separates from you because you might taint him. Jesus forgives you because He knows you have no other hope.

On some weird dysfunctional level, accepting the fundy view of sin seems easier. It promises some sort of control, offers some lie that we can get better with just a liiiiittle more effort. But it just sends you on a gerbil wheel of religion. A gerbil wheel that makes you kick off your cage-mates because you’re on a roll . . . so to speak.

My friend Lori Ramey has repeated Christ’s message on sin to me many times. She very patiently says it again and again when I ask. I need it here so I can re-read it when I forget. It speaks for itself.

But I just have to say again — I never, ever heard this in fundamentalism.

1. Sin is not a THING.

It doesn’t “exist” as its own entity somewhere, rubbing off like black tar on “good things” … so that we can simply keep ourselves away from the tar.… Sin is a twistedness, a perversion, a brokenness, a falling short. It exists only as the perversion of what is good….

2.and more precisely & biblically, sin exists IN ME. Not in objects. This point is well established in orthodox theological literature.

Paul writes in Titus that “to the pure, all things are pure.” Jesus says in Matthew (and He was speaking in that context of physical things, and in a conversation with the law-loving Pharisees), it is not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out from the heart that defiles a man. Jesus locates the problem of sin within humans, not outside of them. We are  “drawn away by our own lusts and enticed” (James 1).

Jesus then goes on to name a representative short-list of sins as His examples. His “going in” examples were food (reminds me of Paul’s meat discussion). His “coming out” examples are all sins of the heart — envy, hatred, lust, etc.

The sin problem is INSIDE ME. This is foundational to biblical thinking. As soon as you define any particular thing as sinful, you’ve missed the point…. because we must agree that God Himself sees all things yet does not sin.

So, a test case:
Is pornography sinful?
Well, lusting certainly is.
Adultery is.
The sins of the heart are the point. You can commit the sin of lust without ever opening a Playboy magazine.

Is it the physical photograph of the naked woman in her debauched pose that is the sin? No.

Jesus could have picked up a porn magazine, flipped through it, and wept over the exploitation of those girls (whether they realize it or not) and such blatant perversion of God-granted beauty… yet never lust. [Don't misunderstand my point: I'm not suggesting that men go look at porn. I agree with 99% of the godly ministers I know who argue that porn is a huge problem for Christian men. But my point stands that the sin is taking place inside the heart, and the object that stirs up the illicit desires for a wrong kind of sex isn't the issue. If an unfallen man (or a glorified one) saw a centerfold, he would not sin.]

We sin because we are sinners.
The sin is not in the object.
Thus….

3. Mature, growing Christians experience a growing freedom of conscience as their knowledge of God and His Word grow. (At least, as the Spirit applies the Word to our hearts, we ought to.)

Paul never commends the “weaker brother” for his weakness. All of the protections he mandates (Romans 14, I Corinthians 8-10) are there to prevent him from being “destroyed” by his unbiblical conscience. Implicit in these passages is the expectation that the weaker brother will grow into a mature faith, one that realizes that meat offered to idols is okay; that no day is more important than another … that our external expressions of liberty are NOT where sin resides...

Sin is in the heart.

If I do something despite believing in my heart by conviction (whether I’m right or wrong) that it’s sin, Paul says, I sin against my conscience. And THAT is the sin. Not the activity itself.

4. The battle is never about the top-level, external, surface issues. When it comes to defining sin, the gray areas are actually very small.

You cannot play a game and create some “gray area” which you label “not-sin” yet “still bad.” The Bible never goes there.

Wisdom is justified by her actions, yes, but you’re dealing in different categories (sinful vs unwise). It would not be wise for me to play heavy metal for you at dinner, or in your church service. But that action alone wouldn’t be a sin (other than, possibly, my obvious omission of “love your neighbor” and “do unto others…”).

If you can’t enjoy screaming heavy metal, fine. Don’t listen.
But understand: NO particular style of music is sin in itself. Period.

If you do, great. There are some sweet guitar riffs and incredible musicianship on display, often mirroring classical-era harmonies and chord progressions.

If you can’t look at Michelangelo’s David without being bothered by the nudity, fine. But understand — nakedness is NOT a sin.
If you can, great. You’ll weep at the incredible beauty of the sculpture.

5. So…judging someone’s spiritual status by their list of favorite music … movies… TV… books… businesses… where they buy their socks — it’s just silly.

We are justified.
We are sanctified.
We are made holy solely through the blood of Jesus Christ and the work of the Cross.… nothing else.  I cannot trust God for my salvation and then try to “work my hardest” to “keep Him happy” during the rest of my Christian life! (Read Galatians)

Yes, we are “to be holy” — to be “set apart” indeed. One might argue that Jesus helps us understand that holiness when He calls us to see that the Law’s demands are inward, and not just outward. And that we are to be known, as His followers, by our LOVE. Not by what music we eschew.

We are losers. Gone. Hopeless— APART from God’s redemptive work.
And THAT is Grace:
you are totally sinful, yet totally loved by your Father.

Your actions will never make you any more or less holy. “Righteous Lot” was tormented in his conscience outside Sodom — but God terms him “righteous.” Unbelievable.

And my sinfulness is on par w/ Lot’s. Both of us enter God’s presence through the Blood. No other way.