Introduction
When I was a kid growing up on the farm, summers were about bare feet–the freedom and the ease of it–just to run outside without bothering to put on shoes or boots. In spring, we couldn’t wait for that first warm day to leave our shoes behind and walk on the tender, new grass, and then as summer unfolded to dig our toes into the fresh soil in the garden, to splash in the freezing cold, spring fed stream behind the barn, to jump in puddles, slosh in mud, wade in the river, to walk on the hard-packed paths made by the cattle. Of course there were hazards to going barefoot on the farm–bees buzzing over the fallen apples in the orchard, thorns and thistles, pine needles, sharp stones, leeches in the mud, and of course cow patties! We got dirty, we got scratches and bruises. By the end of the summer our feet were tough enough to run across the gravel farmyard without flinching. When we went back to school in September our shoes felt tight and constricting after a summer of bare feet. I realize now that as a child, I experienced much of the world through the soles of my feet.
Back then I would have loved that invitation to take off my sandals. Today as an adult I am more wary. Most adults don’t go barefoot very often. We don’t like the look of our feet with their bumps and bunions and calluses. We want to avoid hazards, injuries or infections. Maybe we hear the caution of our chiropractors to make sure we are wearing good quality shoes to prevent problems with our ankles and knees and backs. We need the support and the protection of our cushioned soles, our arch supports and orthotics.
As I was preparing for this sermon, I decided to take off my shoes more often outside, and I realized how soft my feet have become. I also decided to take stock of my shoes, to count how many different ways I have to clothe or cover up my feet. Well! It’s quite embarrassing! I counted 34 sets of footwear of some kind–some I don’t wear anymore, but I still have them. I have running shoes, walking shoes, hiking boots, ski boots, skates, work boots, rubber boots, gardening sandals, dress shoes and sandals in various styles and colours, dress boots, winter boots, ankle boots and several pairs of slippers. Shoes say a lot about a person. About our work, our play, our personalities and our resources. Shoes help us to be well prepared for any activity, they complete an outfit, they contribute to a “look.” So I am a little bit wary of this invitation to “take off your shoes.”
Exploring the Text
In our text today Moses was out doing his ordinary work, tending the family flock, far out in the wilderness, when he saw an amazing sight–a bush engulfed in flames that did not burn up. But it wasn’t right on the path. He had to turn aside to take a look. And it is only after he turns aside to look that God speaks to him–calls him by name, “Moses, Moses.” His response, “here I am.” That’s when God offers this caution, “Do not come any closer! Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). I want to explore two parts to this story: the burning bush, and the holy ground.
The Burning Bush
I have heard it said that the miracle is not so much the bush that is burning but not consumed by fire, the miracle is that Moses noticed and paused to take a look. Only when Moses paused did God speak. God wanted to be sure Moses was paying attention. It is so easy to miss the burning bushes in our lives. To walk through life on autopilot, distracted by other things, oblivious to the wonder of the world we live in.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet of the Victorian era, in her epic poem Aurora Leigh writes;
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
“Every common bush afire with God.” We could add every common tree, flower, bug, beetle, bird, vine, cloud, stream, every common creature. But only those who see take off their shoes. The rest don’t notice, don’t appreciate the wonder of it.
I spend a lot of time walking or biking on the Guelph to Goderich trail that runs through Elmira. It is part of my ordinary, every day routine. I spot lots of wildlife–birds and bunnies are plentiful. Sometimes it is a heron or another bird of prey. Deer sightings are not as common. But this summer on 4 separate occasions I have met up with what I assume is the same doe and her two fawns. The first time the doe came up onto the trail ahead of me. I stopped to watch her and give her space. To my delight a fawn soon followed her, still wearing its spots, and then a second one! I was able to watch them for a while. What an amazing experience so close to town! And I have encountered them three more times this season–each time the fawns are a little bigger. The last time I saw them they had lost most of their spots. What a gift! They were burning bush moments for me this summer.
Kenda Creasy Dean in her book, The Godbearing Life, writes,
We don’t know how long God has been trying to get Moses’ attention. Maybe God has been burning shrubbery for decades to no avail. Maybe God had tried more traditional means to attract a worthy candidate for the position, but no one applied. Or maybe one day God just decided that the person for the job was the one who noticed Yahweh’s presence… and so God ignited a bush for minutes or millennia until a miracle occurred: Somebody finally paid attention…Will Moses give in to this wonder, or is he just like all the others God has tried to flag down throughout history, others who were simply too busy or too careful… to pay attention (Godbearing, 74-75).
It is significant that Moses’ burning bush encounter, and mind, takes place in the midst of what was an otherwise ordinary day. Barbara Brown Taylor, in the introduction to her book An Altar in the World, a book that explores the sacred in the small things that we see and do, writes that all of us have some sense of “a longing–for more meaning, more feeling, connection, more life,” and she describes how “people seem willing to look all over the place for this treasure.” People travel, and climb mountains, and seek out gurus and visit monasteries, and go on service trips. But, she says, “the last place most people look is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives…The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are” (Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, xvi-xvii). Jesus too reminded his followers that they will “listen, but never understand and…look, but never perceive,” for their hearts have “grown dull,” their “ears are hard of hearing” and they have “shut their eyes; so that they might not look” (Matt. 13:14-15.)
The voice of God greets us in the wonder of the natural world if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Our natural world is a window into who God is and how God works.Margaret Guenther calls the burning bush “a picture of God”(Guenther, Toward Holy Ground: Spiritual Direction for the Second Half of Life, 2). Our natural world shows us God’s abundance (just think about how many seeds there are in one sunflower or one apple). Our natural world shows us God’s ingenuity and creativity. From the natural world we learn of God’s delight in diversity. We learn about how healing, restoration and regeneration, life, death and rebirth are baked into, built into the essential design of our universe, and we learn that from the massive to the microscopic we are interconnected to all other forms of life. This is the nature of God. This is how God operates.
John Muir (1838-1914) was an early prophetic voice of ecological consciousness in the Celtic Christian tradition. He described the earth as a “divine manuscript” and the wind, the water, and springs he said “are all words of God” (From John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth Sacred Soul, 151). He affirms that “every bush is a burning bush” and “the whole sky and the rocks and flowers are drenched with God” (154-155). Echoing Eriugena, another Celtic Christian from the ninth century, he says “there are two books through which God is speaking, the little [book], namely…scripture, and the big book, the cosmos.” It is a “living unfolding text, and God is still “writing passages for us to learn from”(152-153). For Muir the story of Moses and the burning bush is a spiritual revelation that “all ground is holy. Every moment is sacred. The invitation is to wake up to this sacredness in all things” (156).
As if to remind me, while I am working on this sermon, sitting on my front porch overlooking my flower gardens, a hummingbird darts in, nearly at my eye level to sip from the purple phlox right in front of me! Holy ground indeed!
Standing on Holy Ground
Relationship
In our text today the burning bush is only the first part of the encounter. Next comes the invitation to take off our sandals–to touch and experience the earth beneath our feet, for this is holy ground. Barbara Brown Taylor calls going barefoot a “spiritual practice” (Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, 66).
Our feet are loaded with sensors. We experience the earth through those multitude senses–electrical impulses of attraction. Going barefoot puts us back in touch with the substances of which we are made. In our industrialized, urbanized culture where so much of our life is spent indoors and so many of our experiences are mediated to us through a screen, we have lost touch with our essential nature. We suffer from what Richard Louv calls “nature deficit disorder” (see his book Last Child in the Woods). Going barefoot heightens our awareness and makes us more sensitive to the feel of the earth. The benefits of connecting to nature are now becoming quite well known and well studied:
- lower blood pressure
- reduce feelings of stress, anxiety or anger.
- help you feel more relaxed.
- improve your confidence and self-esteem.
- help you be more active.
For John Muir (1838-1914) connecting with the natural world is not just about seeing with our eyes; it is an experience with our whole body and soul. He says, “walking barefoot can be a deep way of knowing. We need to know with our heels, as well as with our heads…when our soles touch the earth our soul more readily awakens to the sacredness of the earth” (From John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth Sacred Soul, 156).
Vulnerability
But the invitation to take off your sandals is more than an opportunity to connect to the earth. It is also an invitation for Moses and for us to be vulnerable before God. Right now we have layers of protection between us and the earth–our shoes, the carpet, the floor, the basement floor. For Moses to take off his shoes meant to be real and honest, open and vulnerable before God. In his bare feet before God Moses will be unadorned, he won’t be wearing any role or identity other than his belovedness before God. This is when God can meet us–when we have shed our pretenses, the identities that we put on, our false selves that we project to others so they will like us. When we are no longer hiding from God and from each other. Moses is asked to become present long enough to let the experience change him and so are we. The invitation to take off your sandals is an invitation to take off and leave behind that which is not serving us. It is an invitation to be transformed.
Transformation
Allow me for a moment to tell the story of Moses briefly from the perspective of his feet.
Moses was born into a people in slavery, so he didnt’ have any shoes. Slaves went barefoot. His mother hid him to protect him–floating him in a basket along the bank of the Nile. Was it his cute little baby feet that saved him? When the Egyptian princess found him floating in the basket, was she smitten by those cute, chubby baby toes? When Moses moves to the palace of the princess, he is raised in privelege, as royalty with the best of everything. He has fine leather sandals for his feet, and walks on marble floors. And then one day his royal feet carry him back to where his people work as slaves in their bare feet. And he witnesses an Egyptian overseer beating a Hebrew slave. In a rage Moses kills the Egyptian and buries him in the sand. Did he kick sand over the body with his feet? Were his feet spattered with the blood of the man he killed?
Now, with a warrant out for his arrest he flees into the wilderness and finds himself among the Midianite people. What better way to disappear than to marry into another tribal group, have a child, settle into the life of this household. He has traded his royal privilege for the life of an ordinary shepherd. Now he wears worn sandals, and has the dusty feet of a shepherd.
But Moses can’t hide from his past. He can’t hide from his guilt. He can’t hide from God. He tries to. But God gets his attention in a burning bush. And God asks him to take off his sandals for he is standing on holy ground. The text doesn’t tell us if Moses took off his sandals. All we know is that he hid his face, afraid to encounter God face to face, knowing the warning that anyone who looked on the face of God would die. But Moses does not die. God does not destroy. Instead, as Kenda Creasy Dean writes, “God is here to transform not destroy…this is holy ground, the place where you leave behind your old person, and start over” (Godbering, 75).
I think Moses must have taken off his sandals because he is transformed by this encounter. Well, not at first. He argues with God. Moses tries to hide from his calling. He comes up with excuses–why he is not the one. His feet that once fled into the wilderness will now carry him back to Egypt, to confront the Pharaoh, to demand justice for his people. And eventually his feet will lead him back into the wilderness, this time shepherding his people, the Israelites in their exodus from slavery. And his feet will wander in the desert for 40 years, as he and his people learn to walk with trust in God. Time enough to wear out several pairs of sandals, crossing desert sand and climbing the mountain of God.
Application
Moses’ barefoot encounter with holy ground transformed him, and carried him back into the heart of the struggle to free his people from slavery. He is empowered and encouraged to walk toward their suffering, to risk the wrath of the Pharaoh and call for justice. Moses goes from being the one who fled to being the one who returns. From one who hides to one who leads. He transforms from one who kills out of anger to one who saves by putting himself in danger. From one who grew up in the palace of privilege and power, to one who confronts the powerful on behalf of the oppressed. How beautiful are the feet of those who bring a gospel of peace!
What does the story of your life look like if told through the perspective of your feet? Where have your feet taken you? Where have your shoes walked? Where are your feet going now?
I don’t know if as a kid I had a sense of being on “holy ground” when I ran around in my bare feet. Probably not. But I think I did have some sense of the delight of it all. In some way it helped me to be more in touch with the earth and its rich, abundant, goodness, and its delicate, vulnerable, ordinary miracles of life all around me. But as an adult maybe I have lost some of that by wearing my shoes all the time. The shape our planet is in suggests that too often we were not paying attention to the burning bush. We hurried on by choosing to ignore the invitation and call. We couldn’t be bothered. We didn’t have the time. We didn’t stop to take off our sandals. Can we now take off our sandals? Take off the history of how we have related to our earth in the past, and touch the earth with our feet and with our hearts. And may our encounter with holy ground transform us, and carry us back into the heart of the struggle to free the earth and its people from their suffering.
How beautiful are the feet of them who bring the gospel of peace. May it be so.