Shake it off
July 3, 2022 + Lectionary 14 C + Galatians 6:1-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20 + Pr. Craig Mueller
I’ll admit. I can’t name any songs by Taylor Swift.
But there is one that fits with today’s gospel.
It’s called “Shake it Off.”
In the song in which Taylor talks about her haters and her critics
and how she doesn’t care what people say about her.
Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break
And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off (hoo-hoo-hoo)
Shake it off, I shake it off.
When you shake someone off, you wash your hands of them.
Not that different from Jesus telling the disciples to shake the dust off their feet when their message is rejected. Except “shake the dust off your feet” is from the King James Version. The New Revised Standard Version has “wipe the dust off your feet.”
Touché.
I’m going with shake. Because when you do all you can, and you don’t get through to people, you just need to move on.
Is that what Jesus means by shaking the dust off our feet?
We will be like sheep among wolves, Jesus also says. But everyone seems like a wolf these days, out to get each other.
And I’ll amit sometimes I’d like to shake off about a third of the country. Not something I am proud to admit on this Independence Day weekend. The southern two-thirds of Illinois would just as soon shake off liberal Chicago from the state. Some folks would be glad to have their state secede from the United States.
And I am weary of what some call “minority” rule in this country. The effect of conservatives working at the local and state level for decades while many of us were only focusing on national elections. The reality of a senate in which Wyoming has the same representation as California. Leading to a Supreme Court lacking any ideological balance. Then add the sad fact that for most people in this country Christianity is linked with one political party.
A progressive approach to public policy—based on the way many in this congregation interpret their faith—is lost to most people.
No wonder today’s gospel about going into the world with the gospel is complicated.
There’s enough trauma in our bodies already from the events of the past several years. Everything from Covid to George Floyd to January 6. Couldn’t we just shake it off, shake it out, forget the past and move on? Should we just shake off those who get our blood boiling, who seem to be living on another planet? Or should we respond like my young nephew, threatening to move to Canada if things get worse.
There will be a plentiful harvest, Jesus tells us. But everyone may not welcome our message. When the most important thing these days is being right, it will be tough to be bearers of healing and compassion. We may get called out. People may just want to shake us off.
Jesus gives some snappy, one-liners for marching orders.
Travel lightly.
Embrace vulnerability.
Proclaim peace.
Trample on demons.
And don’t be afraid: nothing will harm you.
Another problem is that a growing number of folks are done with religion all together. And I can understand why. It’s been too damaging, too hurtful, too empty of meaning.
Brian McLaren, a pastor who grew up as an evangelical, has written a book called Do I Stay Christian?
A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned.
McLaren names good reasons for leaving Christianity. Things like:
a legacy of antisemitism and crushing dissenters,
Christian colonialism which included the support of slavery,
white Christian nationalism,
rigid theology,
an anti-intellectual streak that rejects science
and encourages poisonous politics,
and an aging demographic that tends toward regressive views.
Maybe this doesn’t accurately represent Lutheranism or the ELCA.
But unfortunately it is what many people think church is.
No wonder when we hear a Supreme Court ruling about allowing prayer on the fifty-yard line, many of us cringe. Are kids being coerced into that kind of Christianity?
One person at our Wednesday scripture study suggested, in response to the Supreme Court ruling on public prayer, that we need more religion in public life, not less. It caught us off guard and got us thinking.
Or to say it from a Holy Trinity lens:
we are sent from this liturgy with a mission. Rather than shaking it all off, will you join this congregation in witnessing to a different kind of Christianity? In other words, let your faith be known!
For the past several weeks we have been reading some key passages from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. The young Galatian community was struggling with the contentious issue of whether Jesus’ followers needed to also be circumcised according to Jewish law. It would be easy to just shake off those who had the wrong point of view on this. But instead, Paul gives the Galatians—and us—practical wisdom for then and now:
Love is the fulfilling of the law.
Live by the fruits of the Spirit.
Bear one another’s burdens.
The most important thing is a new creation.
That doesn’t sound like shaking off other people. Maybe the Spirit is calling us to something different: not shaking people off but shaking things up.
As many these days—on the left and right—are discouraged and pessimistic about our country, let us be a faith community that shakes things up. Shakes up our country not with hatred and division, but with compassion and openness. Shakes up our country not with the need to be right and call people out, but with humility, trying to imagine what is like to walk in our neighbor’s shoes.
Brian McLaren calls us to envision a new kind of Christianity, not consumed with how our institutional church will survive into the future but with these questions:
How shall we humans survive and thrive?
How can we align our energies with the divine energy at work in the universe?
McLaren then exhorts us as followers of Jesus to become the most just, kind, and humble versions of ourselves, practicing a faith that expresses itself in love, leaning with others into a new kind of humanity, open to every good resource that can help us, whether explicitly Christian or not.
God’s work, our hands, a tagline of our denomination.
You could say that is our mission: God’s work—our hands, our feet, our voices.
People of God,
there is food for the journey at this table.
For we have a mission.
We are sent.
Let us go forth, to be bearers of peace.
That’ll shake things up, I promise.