THE DUST THAT CLINGS TO OUR FEET
Readings: Psalm 30; Luke 10:1-11
There’s a critical point depicted in the movie 1776, when Benjamin Franklin says, “A new Nation deserves a new name.” No longer will the colonies be known as the British colonies of North America but the former colonies, now ready to declare “independency,” breaking all bonds that tied them to the Crown; now the new nation will be known as United States of America.
By that document signed July 2nd and declared to Philadelphia on July Fourth, the newly declared free and independent nation sought to shake off the bonds of the past and to walk boldly into a new future. The irony is, of course, that there is always dust that clings to our feet. We never really free ourselves from our past; the question for us is how we use that past in constructing a future, whether it was as a new nation in 1776, a new church today, or developing a new theological framework for the twenty-first century.
Most people are uncomfortable with the word “theology.” For those of us who took a philosophy course in college, it conjures up abstruse categories and terms from the middle ages that make little sense to us. Classified by medieval scholastics as a subdivision of philosophy, theology was considered to be the “Queen of Sciences,” which developed the ultimate rational argument for the proofs of God’s existence. This kind of abstruse thinking makes little sense to us today and so we have rejected the idea that we even have a theology.
Theology is not just a set of beliefs about God, the nature of the world and how we relate to the world around us. Rather, I would argue that our individual theologies derive from our critical reflection on God and our relationship to the world we inhabit. The problem is, for many of us, is that in theology we think in categories that we have long ago put away in the rest of our thought.
Little wonder because our liturgical language reflects these old categories of thought. They bear little, if any, relationship to how we really think and there is a cognitive dissonance between our theology and the ways we think about the world in other areas.
As a critical reflection of our faith in relationship to our lives, our theologies should reflect the intellectual struggle that we have in our struggle of faith, our attempts to live faithfully in light of how we understand the Gospel and its demands on our lives. I say theologies because many, if not all, of us actually have several sets of theological frameworks concurrently. Some of them can live in relationship with each other; others cannot and it is when we are forced to face contradictory sets of beliefs that our theology changes and evolves into something new. Our theological framework is not stagnant but is always changing because we are always changing.
This is not to say that we are like the wind, shifting about. As thinking, sentient beings we grow and develop, so obviously, our theologies grow, develop, and change. Sometimes we have experiences in our lives that fundamentally shake our old framework and we find that we really need to change the paradigm of how we view the world. Such an experience can be as personally devastating as losing someone we love or as thrilling as reading a book that gives us a new viewpoint on our faith. But through any of these changes and developments, there are certain remnants of the old paradigms that governed our lives of faith. Those remnants are like the dust we cannot shake from our feet.
In this morning’s Gospel reading, Jesus is telling his followers how to face the world when they go out. It’s a strange set of instructions. Take nothing material with you. He is telling them to rely on the power of faith alone and on the trust that there are “children of peace,” as he so nicely puts it. Translating this into something that makes sense for us in our day and time, perhaps the best thing to say is that we should rely on our faith to help us through our journey in the world. We shouldn’t carry superfluous or useless trappings of faith but rely on a core deep within us that will carry us through. We need to realize that our journey will carry us into strange and unwelcoming places as well as welcoming ones. Learning to shake the dust from our feet is most difficult because we all want the familiar to remain in our lives.
Our journey of faith, our critical attempts to develop a theological framework that is coherent is often impeded by the metaphorical dust that clings to our feet. That dust is different for each of us as our life experiences are different. But this does not mean that we cannot live in community with each other for the core of our faith is an inclusive one. As children of peace we welcome each other with all of our differences for we recognize that we share the same journey that is encompassed in our individual and community attempts to live faithfully and in love.
Let us pray: Wonderful Creator who has given us inquiring and creative minds, help us, as your children, to be together in community as we grow in faith and love. Amen.