Pre-Dust Shake

Have you ever been in a conversation about who cleans your house? It seems to be kind of top secret these days. Growing up, I found it was almost always the woman in the house taking care of those chores. Now our world has changed, and in a marriage the chores are not divided like in days past. This leaves us with the top-secret question – who is cleaning your house? Is it the husband? Is it the wife? Is it the totally top-secret house cleaner? I find that these conversations happen in couple-on-couple situations. We secretly try to find out how the other couple does things to see if we are normal or not. Perhaps another hidden agenda is to gain firepower against our spouse when we find out someone else is working harder. I am a pretty open guy, but I am not going to tell you who does those chores in my house. (If you guessed Abby, well, you are right. J) No matter how those couple-on-couple conversations go, I have noticed that no one likes to dust. I have even heard it said, “We dust twice a year whether it needs it or not.”

Dusting is confusing to me. Where does dust come from? Why does this special spray help dust to disappear? Are there really dust bugs that God created, and why? Are they a product of sin? This is the point in the blog where you might be thinking, “Pastor Will, your mind has been ruined by your constant theological thinking.” Nevertheless, nobody likes to dust. We find it disgusting and want it out of our lives. I’m sure we have all been to a very dusty place where we sneeze and sneeze, and need to get out of there as quickly as possible. We hate dust. Yes, I just said hate, and because of that, we have a problem.

Unlike other readings in the Bible where we have to explain what it means, this is not the case for our text this week. In Mark 6:10-11 we read, “And Jesus said to them, ‘Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there. ¹¹ And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.’” Shake the dust off your feet is such a common saying now that it even finds its way into songs. We hate dust, so of course, we shake it off. If someone doesn’t receive the words we are sharing about Jesus, then we shake them off like dust. Those are strong words, but this action is intended as a last resort. Jesus first mentions staying there until you leave. He encourages them to share the Gospel first, and then only if it doesn’t work, shake the dust off their feet.

I think that we hate dust so much that we do a pre-dust shake off. Trust me, we could go into any house in America, or the world for that matter, and find a little dust. Dust returns as soon as we clean it. Look hard enough and you can find some dust, and therefore there is always some to shake off. Sometimes I think we want to find the dust in the lives of people we are talking to, which gives us a reason to not even share the Gospel. We want to jump to shaking off the dust. It becomes our excuse. If there is dust, we’ll probably need to shake it off, so we don’t even need to spend the time sharing the message of hope with them.

Looking at our own lives, we know that if Jesus did this to us, we would be doomed! If Jesus just looked at our dust and didn’t help to clean our house, we would be headed for hell. Praise be to God that He sent Jesus to clean our house, and then gives us the Holy Spirit to continue working on our day-to-day cleaning!

It is 4^th of July weekend and most of you will spend time with friends and family, just like Jesus was doing in our reading for today. Jesus was in His hometown of Nazareth. He was struggling with the people there because they were questioning Him, and they did not believe what He was teaching. You might find yourselves in a similar situation with your family and friends. Sharing the message of Jesus can be hard. It means we have to step outside of our day-to-day lives and care about the lives of others. Besides, some of these people already know we are Christians, so they could just come ask us. Yet, Jesus sends us out the same way He sent out the 72. He prepares us to be ready to share the victory we have in Jesus with others. He asks us to share the way we have seen our personal lives cleaned of dust. Jesus shared this message with His disciples to tell them, and us, that sometimes it is not the right time for someone to come to faith, or we aren’t the right person. He doesn’t want us to get frustrated, but He also doesn’t want us to give up before we start. He doesn’t want pre-dusters. He wants us to go into the situation looking for any opportunity to speak of the joy, love, and forgiveness we have in Him. This weekend we will talk more about this. I pray that God opens doors in your conversations this holiday to talk about the wonderful gift Jesus is in your life, and how He has cleared your dust away.