Midweek Study - Shake Off The Dust

Preamble:
Sunday’s study did not happen the way we planned. I was away at the Teamsters National Black Caucus, surrounded by people whose work is rooted in a familiar question: How do we keep pursuing justice when the pressure is heavy, the choices are complicated, and sometimes even our own vision gets clouded?

So tonight I do not want to simply recreate Sunday on a Tuesday.

I want to let the Haftarah take us deeper.

Isaiah looks at Zion after humiliation, captivity, exhaustion, and loss and says:

“Awaken, awaken.”

Shake yourself from the dust.
Get up.
Put your strength back on.
Loose the bands from your neck.

That sounds like liberation.

But liberation does not automatically give us clear vision.

Sometimes we are tired.
Sometimes we are angry.
Sometimes the pressure of life narrows what we can see.
Sometimes the very struggle for justice can make us so certain of the righteousness of our cause that we stop examining the righteousness of our methods.

And Torah asks the harder question:

What kind of people will we become once the chains come off?

Deuteronomy does not simply tell Israel to enter the land. It tells them what must stand in the gates when they arrive:

Justice.

Not justice only when it favors us.
Not justice only when we have time for it.
Not justice only when the facts are easy to see.

Justice, justice you shall pursue.

And then Acts gives us Saul—a man who knows Torah, has been educated at the feet of Gamaliel, possesses extraordinary zeal, and is still capable of hurting people while completely convinced that God is on his side.

That may be the uncomfortable thread running through all three texts:

What happens when we are trying to do right, but our vision has become clouded?

Zion is sitting in the dust.
Justice is standing at the gate.
Saul is lying on the road.

Three locations.
Three pressures.
Three reckonings.

And in every one of them, God is trying to get somebody up differently than they went down.