15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Image: Hands, all together
from Art in the Christian Tradition, 
a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

Click here for scripture readings.

July 5, 2015

"If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them." (Mark 6:11)

Palestine is a dusty land, and into that dusty country Jesus sent his disciples.

He told them that when a community rejected them, they should stop outside the village, and shake the dust of that experience off their feet.

It was a symbolic action against the village and a healing action for the disciples.

This gives us a clue to how we should handle life's experiences of failure: "Shake off the dust."

First let us look at how we get dust on ourselves.

We get some dust on us just by walking through life.

It never is smooth sailing all of the way.

Life is a mixture of hills and valleys, ups and downs, successes and failures.

Another way we get dust on ourselves is by falling down.

Sometimes we make an awful mess of life; we fall flat on our faces.

Failure can be a shattering experience.

Sometimes we get dust on ourselves by sitting down in the middle of the road.

We just quit and stop trying.

It is one thing to lose the game; it's another thing to forfeit.

It has no place in the life of a Christian.

What does dust do?

For one thing it accumulates.

We are all familiar with this aspect of dust.

This a a perfect analogy to failure.

Dust will accumulate in the corners of your life.

If you let it, it will pile higher and higher until it covers and colors everything that you do.

You will begin to think of yourself as a born loser.

You can hear people say, "I can't do anything right."

That person has allowed the dust of failure to contaminate their life.

When we collect, and remember, and brood over our failures, though many of them may be insignificant, the weight can become crushing and destructive.

How are we to deal with the dust of failure?

The first thing we should do is learn from it.

Some people learn from failure, while others never recover from it.

Once you have learned whatever there is to learn from a failure, leave it behind.

Shake off the dust; don't carry it with you.

In his poem, "Write it on Your Heart," Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

"Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.

Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

This day is too good and fair.

It is too dear with hopes and aspirations to waste a moment on yesterday."

The last and most important matter is, try again.

"Jesus said, 'As you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet.

So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent.

They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them." (Mark 6:13)

We can translate that as:

forget your failures and keep on going.

Our failures do not have to be fatal or final.