“Let thy house be a meeting-house for the wise;
and powder thyself in the dust of their feet;
and drink their word with thirstiness.” Yose ben Yoezer
The above quote is from the Mishnah, a collection of Jewish Rabbinic thought. There is a current, popular religious saying derived from this quote. It says, “be covered in the dust of the rabbi.” The saying is both instructional and instructive.
Instructional in a simple manner, we are to meet in our house, include the wise among us, and listen to heed their word. We call the Christian version small groups and bible studies.
The instructive aspect demands more. Jesus spent a ministry illuminating more. In his footsteps, there is no shortage of dust.
Dust is a dirty business. No one likes it. Our first reaction is to spit it out and wipe it away. Our Gullah brethren would tell us “dayclean” (daybreak) sweeps the night clouds away and perhaps life’s dust as well.
Erma Bombeck referred to dusting as “small particle rearrangement.” She understood dust’s persistence and our hopeless battle with it. Dust alights and alights until we grasp its permanence.
Casting light on permanence and truth, the sun rises upon our spires. Beneath them, we strive toward a self-sanitized, self-justified, self-imaged imagined world. No one desires to be dirty. In the spire’s shadow, God’s dust rests; his wisdom and his word await our willingness to get dirty.
Our reasoning interferes with our good sense. Grace comes. Our possessive nature covets the joy while time presents the inevitable conflict – we have been fed, but now we must feed!
This is Jesus’ dust. It is the bottom line of his ministry. “I have come to serve,” Jesus said. It’s a dirty business. Our intelligence says “yes, go.” Our intellect says, “wait a minute, let me think about this.”
The battle between good and evil exists on many levels, but Satan’s favorite battlefield inheres in our heart and mind and the indecision existing between “yes, go” and “wait a minute, let me think about this.” Mankind’s history is the void between.
Faith is never easy, and we prefer easy. Dust is hard. Grace, beyond acceptance and gratitude, demands decision. Ours is to accept Christ, to accept the One who sent Him and the dust in his footsteps. Trust and faith in God begins when we have asked our final “why me,” relinquished our last “what could have been,” overcome our reluctance to commit, exhausted the last excuse and discovered our vanity wanting.
For some, the path is circuitous. For others, faith is only a breath away. Dust is hard. God, in His love, turns the prism we use to view the world and others into a mirror allowing us to see the reality residing in our heart. The profundity is transforming.
Dear brethren, truth is worth the dust. Be covered in the dust of Jesus.
“Those who have ears to hear, let them hear” (Matthew 11:15).