“Whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words,

when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.”

(Matthew 10:14)

“Have you been baptized? Have you been baptized?” runs the refrain in the Negro spiritual and so runs the thinking of a narrow salvationist Christianity. Whenever the subject of spiritual security in time and eternity arises; whenever the question of personal well-being comes up, this type of religious mentality reverts to the stock easy standard: “Have you been baptized in the prescribed manner and by the proper ecclesiastical agent?” If you have, all is well. If you have not, your assurance of salvation is shakily suspect.

May I be so bold as to suggest that our Lord has instituted another sacrament, a sacrament indispensable for our day to day spiritual salvation, which is tragically neglected by many an orthodox Christian — a sacrament no one else can perform for you. John Orman calls it the Sacrament of Failure. Yes, that’s right, “The Sacrament of Failure.” Ominous sounding, isn’t it, in these ears of ours which have been tuned to catch only the siren strains of the success symphony? The Sacrament of Failure, what is it?

Why, it is shaking the dust of your failures off your feet and moving on to the next task with faith and courage. Our Lord instituted this symbolic ritual when He dispatched the Twelve on their first round of church work. He sent them out through the neighborhood two by two, to proclaim the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth, to teach God’s word of truth and His gospel of love, to heal the sick in His name, and to cast out the evil spirits that ruled in the hearts of men.

After outlining the job they were to do, He then mentioned the equipment they would need — which, by the way, should sound strange enough in our gadget minded age for it consists chiefly of advice on what not to take: no money, no food, no change of clothing, no mimeographs, no sound scribers, no typewriters, no public address systems. Their facilities for performing their mission were to be mental and spiritual, from within and above. He had taught them and the Spirit they had received from Him. But finally, and this is most important in our present inquiry, He gave them something to safeguard the success of the whole venture — a ritual and sacrament to perform in time of failure.  “Whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house, or that city, shake off the dust from your feet.”

It was a well-known gesture to the Jews of Jesus’ day — shaking off the dust from one’s feet. Pious Jews did it to register disgust in the presence of shamelessly sinful people. The Pharisees did it when leaving a pagan land to return to Jerusalem. Their purpose was to preserve the sacred soil of the Holy Land from pollution. But as Jesus so often did, our Lord seized upon an old custom and filled it full with a new spirit.

In initiating this sacrament our Lord is ordaining that whenever the proclamation of the gospel message is unheeded, whenever the merciful mission of His church is rejected, His disciples are to perform this simple sacrament — shake off the dust of that experience from their feet, not in injured pride, as “Well if you won’t listen to me!” not in belligerent hostility, not in vindictive bitterness, but in love, accepting both the fact of the rejection and the right of the human spirit to be free, and at the same time trusting in God to use, in His good time, the work that has been done and the witness given in His name, then move on to the next assignment.

The sacrament of failure — how indispensable to the ministry of His church, how necessary to our own soul salvation. Do we practice it? Do we avail ourselves of the wonderful grace it supplies for daily living? This sacrament of failure Jesus has given us is indispensable for our soul salvation because it gathers up in the image of its ritual three imperishable truths we must never let go of.

First, it symbolizes the fallibility of man. Do we need a sacrament to remind us of this? That man is weak, prone to evil, liable at any moment to fail? Ah yes, we are all prone to commit the angelic fallacy, to think the old adage, “to err is human,” is meant for the next guy or the next. Surely for our wife or husband, certainly for our children, but never, never, for me. Especially in doing the work of the Lord do we fall into the angelic fantasy.

A minister was in a desperate plight. His position, his reputation, his future were in jeopardy. He had made some terrible mistakes. Yet his friends and parishioners still loved him and offered their help. But one who was closest to him and wanted most to help took the most pessimistic view possible of his salvation — because the minister never had admitted his failure or confessed his mistakes. There is no hope for him until he comes to this humbling moment and begins the first movements in the sacrament of failure.

I commend to you young people especially our Lord’s gracious sacrament of failure. Take it early for your constant use. Learn its simple routine. You are wonderful and your successes and triumphs will surely dwarf into insignificance our generations’ mightiest accomplishments, but you are human and you will on occasion fail. It won’t always be entirely your fault. But when failure crashes in upon you, your salvation, your hope for ultimate victory, paradoxically depends upon your ability to recognize and admit that momentary defeat in order to grasp future triumph. You must learn in His spirit of love and trust and obedience to shake off the dust of that experience from your feet.

Then again, the sacrament of failure, as Jesus instituted it, enshrines in its ritual not only the fallibility of man, but also the relentless on-rush of time. There are those who insist that Jesus remarks to the Twelve on their first missionary journey have relevance only to that specific situation, namely the necessity of proclaiming the gospel throughout Galilee in the brief time remaining to Him. Jesus realized that He could not do the job before Him alone. He needed help. So He called the Twelve, instructed them, dispatched them, and lastly gave the word about shaking off the dust from their feet when they came upon disinterest or rejection, in order that they would not delay at any point but press on to cover the allotted territory in the time available.

But I strongly insist on the universal timeliness of this sacrament. Life is an on-going stream. It is not a stagnant pool in which we can aimlessly puddle about forever. When the Athenians would not accept the gospel he proclaimed, St. Paul went on to Corinth. The gifted illustrator, N. C. Wyeth, painted two classic pictures to illumine the pages of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. The first depicts “a young virile Rip (with gun in hand) retreating from his termagant wife to spend a day in the hills, and the second is a picture of old Rip’s return after a twenty year sleep of enchantment (with long white beard and shaky limbs) to find his house silent and deserted.” (Time Magazine) Others than Wyeth and Washington Irving have been impressed with “the weird swiftness of human life” gone before we know it — as a sleep.

One indispensable requirement of making the most of this brief life — which is, as the ancient bard described it in relationship to eternity, as a swallow’s swift flight through a lighted hall — is to practice the sacrament of failure as Jesus taught, shake off the dust of failures and rejections and disappointments without bitterness and remorse and press on, remembering time waits for no man. Beware the peril of being caught working over-long with an impossible past, trying to shape anew events and characters that have hardened into stone.

Finally, the sacrament of failure gathers up in its symbolism, as does any sacrament, the ever available future crammed full of God’s grace. Jesus bade the Twelve to shake off from their feet the dust of rejection, failure, and disappointment wherever they encountered it, not because he counseled pessimism and foresaw failure, not because he wallowed in self-pity and wanted them to, but rather because He was assured of ultimate victory and ever moved among men with an undiscourageable hope. “I have overcome the world,” he cried exultantly. “All things have been delivered unto me in heaven and in earth … Fear not little children for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” He knew the end. He had read the last chapter. Calvary and Easter give us the preview.

In dark Gethsemane, Jesus gives three commands to His puzzled disciples. First: “watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.” But every time He came back to them, He found those well intentioned, but weak men not at their prayers but nodding in sleep. Then, their Lord says to them, when the issue is decided: “Sleep on now.” Finally, He commands: “Arise, and let us be going.” So Jesus teaches us the three proper attitudes at the appropriate times. There is a time for activity, watchful, prayerful work. But that time passes and inevitably the time comes when in every enterprise our being anxiously wakeful about it will no longer accomplish anything. His word then is: “Sleep on about about that. Let it be.”

But there is the third phase: “Arise, let us be going” for whatever the past failures, there remains the ever available present and future. It is before us, crammed with His grace.

Emil Brunner says we should think of the “time process as passing from the future, where it is not yet, through the present, where it is now, to the past, where it is no more … The movement of this stream is always from not yet to now and to no more.” (E. Brunner — Faith, Hope, and Love — Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1956) Now this may be backward to the way some of us are accustomed to think of the time process. We may think of it as flowing from the past through the present and into the future and of ourselves as standing at the vanguard of the present moment peering into the unknown beyond. But, be that as it may, the important part of Brunner’s concept of time is that in it God stands always above the time stream. “For God there is no future; there is no past. He sees all time as present. The future is filled with His grace and ready for us. Our Christ makes us free from our past by making us free from our guilt … Forget about it, He says. Shake that dust from off your feet. I carry your past. I carry your guilt. Faith in Christ means that our past is buried in Christ under the cross. This is justification by faith.”

At the close of 1957, we can thank God for our Lord’s sacrament of failure. Used well how wonderfully saving it is in all of life, now and unto the end. For by it we can say with Robert Louis Stevenson: “Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much … Nor will we complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field: Defeated, aye, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius! But if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit — undishonored! … Give him a march with his old bones; there out of the glorious sun colored earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy — there goes another Faithful Failure.”