Shake the Dust
This morning, I was reading from Matthew 10 where Jesus prepares his 12 closest followers to go on a journey. He sends them into the surrounding villages and towns to tell the people there who he is, what he’s come to do, and invite them to follow him too. Jesus gives them a lot of helpful instructions and authority, but what I want to hone in on is something that you’ve probably heard before, if you’ve been around church or Bible studies for any time at all. And if you haven’t, welcome to the party. Right in the middle of Jesus’ instructions to his followers, he tells them that, if a town refuses to listen to them, rejects them, or attempts to cast them out, they are supposed to leave that town and shake its dust off of their feet as they go.
I’ve thought about this directive from Jesus a lot. There were many years when I took this at face value, probably like you just did if this is the first time you’ve heard it. I heard Jesus saying, “if a town doesn’t want to listen to you when you tell them about me or accept what you’re teaching, then to hell with them! Don’t even keep their dust on your feet”. Now, I think there’s one sense in which Jesus does mean this. He is not unkind or unjust. I think that Jesus means for his disciples not to waste their time speaking to or reasoning with people who don’t want to listen. That’s not unkind or unloving, it’s just wise.
But what I didn’t know for a long time and sometimes forget is that there is a cultural context to the shaking of the dust off your feet. In first century Palestine, people usually traveled by foot. If you were going on a journey to Egypt, and you weren’t wealthy or royalty, you were walking. And, if you were walking anywhere in first century Palestine, your feet were going to get dirty.
Something that you need to know before I go any further is how Jewish people, historically, thought about their homeland. You can look at a Bible map or use Google to find the geographic boundaries of ancient Israel. These boundaries are what Jewish people have, for centuries, referred to as the “Promised Land”. Thousands of years before Jesus walked the Earth, God promised a nation of descendants and a specific plot of land to Abraham. His descendants, Jews or Israelites (named after his grandson), referred to this as the “Promised Land”. Jewish people, today, are ethnically descended from Abraham (so are other ethnic groups). When God rescued them from 400 years of slavery in Egypt he, eventually after many detours of their own making, brought them to the “Promised Land” where they drove out the inhabitants and took up residence.
So, the relationship between Israel and their geography is historical, religious, ethnic, complicated, and deep.
By the first century, the people had developed many cultural practices surrounding their homeland, including this one about shaking the dust. When someone in first century Palestine went on the aforementioned, hypothetical journey to Egypt and then returned home, they would shake the dust of the pagan (non-jewish) nation off their feet before walking into the “Promised Land”. It signified leaving behind the pagan, godless, nations and walking into God’s land.
What I want you to notice are not the social or theological issues here. I want you to understand what Jesus’ disciples heard when he told them to shake the dust off of their feet when they left a town that rejected them.
Another thing. In this passage, Jesus specifically tells his followers not to go to any Gentile (non-Jewish) towns or Samaritain (another story for another day, also complicated and not strictly Jewish) towns. He tells them to ONLY visit towns inhabited by Israelites. When he references shaking the dust off of their feet, his disciples would have understood that he was insinuating any town that rejected his followers and their message about him was just like the godless, pagan nations abroad. They were not part of Israel. Jesus was saying that, in spiritual terms, he wasn’t super concerned about someone’s ethnicity or ancestral heritage. He was concerned with whether or not their hearts were open to him.
Now, there are references to this kind of thing ALL OVER the Bible. For fun, spend some time researching the Jewish practice of circumcision and then look up all the references in the Bible to circumcision of the heart. It’s never been about the cultural practices, per se. It’s always been about what they signify, what they point to.
There were many times during my years in Radford when I thought about shaking the dust off of my feet. I would bring up this sentiment in conversations with wise or trusted people and talk through all the reasons that I thought it might be time to leave. I thought that, because I never got any “traction” in college ministry, students weren’t responding to the Gospel. I believed that, because I just couldn’t figure out a consistent pipeline of leaders and students taking ownership of the ministry, campus was rejecting me. I told myself that, if they were receptive to the Gospel, then Young Life College would be the biggest and best thing on campus.
The problem, as is usually the case, wasn’t with the students, their response, or the Gospel. It was with my metrics. When I talked about traction, I meant that we didn’t have large numbers of people showing up to our clubs and events. When I thought about pipelines, I was really thinking about recruiting leaders for the whole area in a way that would enable us to tell more students on campus and in the community about Jesus. And, worst of all, I equated receptiveness to the Gospel with large events and popularity.
To be clear, I’m not taking all the blame for this. I was told these things both explicitly and implicitly. What gets celebrated gets repeated, after all.
All this was true and, in hindsight, I still think that the Lord was telling me to shake the dust from my feet. But it wasn’t the students or the campus that was rejecting me. It was the spiritual community around me.
If you’ve read my blogs over the past year, you’ve heard enough to know that I was never accepted in the church that I went to for eight years of my time in Radford and I struggled to find a place on the Young Life staff where people weren’t giving me side-eye and doubting my ability to do effective ministry.
It wasn’t the students or the campus that was rejecting me. It was the spiritual community. That’s whose dust I needed to shake from my feet.
That’s the dust that Jesus and his disciples were shaking from their feet all throughout his ministry. In telling his disciples to shake the dust of the Israelites who rejected them, Jesus was telling them to shake the dust of religious legalism. Read the accounts. Time and again, Jesus gets into it with religious authorities because they think that the traditions and the practices are the things that count. They’ve completely missed the heart and meaning of the traditions and practices and have made them into ends of themselves. And they’ve rejected the very people that the Law of Moses and Jesus himself encouraged them to embrace with radical hospitality: orphans, widows, and foreigners (the marginalized).
If you’ve read this far, it’s safe to assume that you’ve seen or experienced brands of Christianity that do the same. I’m in my reputation era and I think that the healed version of me is going to be a lot more aggressive than anticipated, so I’m going to offend some people with the following list of examples of traditions or practices that have become ends of themselves in 21st century western Christianity :
The King James Version of the Bible (or the NKJV for the “edgy” fundamentalists)
A leadership team comprised entirely of people with Y chromosomes
Full immersion as the only “valid” form of baptism
Memorizing the Catechism
Purity culture
[Just to be clear, I’m not even 100% against all of these things. A few of them have some good points and healthy expressions. Except the KJV and the all-male leadership team things. As a bilingual and intelligent person, I cannot engage in the KJV conversation without my blood pressure rising at an alarming rate. As a woman gifted to teach and to lead and who has seen too many men who have no business leading even their own households given an alarming amount of authority because of their charisma which they wielded to the irreparable damage of thousands of people, I cannot stand for the other.]
I could go on and I’m sure that you could add some to the list, too. The point is this: people rejected the coming of the Kingdom of God because they didn’t like the way it came. Jesus told his disciples to treat those people like they were outside of his Kingdom, his “Promised Land”, because they were by virtue of their rejection. Jesus told me to shake the dust of Radford from my feet, not because my students didn’t like the way that the Gospel came to them, but because the spiritual community didn’t like the way that I brought it. They found reason after reason to discredit me. Some of those reasons were valid, but it’s not like I was trying to hide my imperfections. And it’s not like they were perfect either. They just presented better. They were cleaner. Their lives were whitewashed, like so many first century tombs.
I don’t think the dust-shaking had to happen like this, though. I don’t think that I had to be kicked out of town. I think that, if I had understood what Jesus was actually saying to me, I probably would have left anything even remotely smelling of evangelicalism (including Young Life) and found another way to minister to those God gave me to love. Maybe I would have ended up moving before I was shown the door. I won’t take the blame for the sin, blunder, and insensitivity of others, but I wonder if part of the pain comes from the fact that I didn’t understand what Jesus was trying to tell me.
Live and learn.
I can tell you this much: I’ve shaken all their foul-smelling dust off my feet and I’m never journeying in the land of fundamentalist evangelicalism again. Better for Sodom and Gomorrah, indeed.