“Going Barefoot”

August 28, 2005

Scripture Reading:   Exodus 3:1-3:14

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

Blue Point Congregational Church

You can’t wear shoes at the beach.  It just doesn’t work out.  At Scarborough beach, for instance, I will plan on wearing my shoes until I go all the way onto the beach and find a good place to lay down my towel and camp for the afternoon.  I attempt this plan because I am carrying so much other stuff, taking off my shoes until I land in some spot would be impractical.   But, it never happens that way.  No matter how much stuff I am carrying, the sun block lotion, the books, towels, snack food, beach balls, colorful plastic buckets, skim boards for the kids, I have to drop it all at the back of the first dune and take off my shoes.

If I am wearing sneakers, sand has a way of slipping down and into my shoes within a few steps.  If I am wearing flip flops, sand will kick back onto my legs and spray the person behind me at every step.  If I am wearing sandals, the irregular surface of the sand has a way of making my foot slide uncomfortably in one direction off the sandal in another direction.  No matter what my plans are, I always have to succumb to the greater demand of the beach, and take off my shoes.  So I untie my laces, pull off my socks, roll up my pants, and place the shoes in the overstuffed bag.  The beach does not care if my bag now performs avalanches, stuffed to overflowing with the shoes.

When Moses saw God in the burning bush, he too had to take off his shoes.  The reason was that he was standing on holy ground.  I am sure he couldn’t argue much either.  He couldn’t say, o.k. I’ll take off my shoes once I find a good place to sit.  Love so intense that it ignites into flames demands that we approach it in certain ways.  We can’t just pass by it as a curiosity.  We can’t subject it to our time table.  We can’t simply shake hands with it.  We have to take off our shoes before it.  There is a saying that actions speak louder than words.  So the action of taking off your shoes speaks about the way  we are to approach this fiery love of God.

When we pray to God we do some things with our bodies.  We might fold our hands.  We might bow our heads.  We might sit, kneel.  We might even stand when the mood seems right.  But we never take off our shoes in order to pray.  Why don’t we?  Standing on holy ground is special.  But we never really do it.  Perhaps it is because we don’t recognize God down here on earth with us.  We don’t notice the spots where Earth is crammed with heaven.   Why not here in this sanctuary?  Is not every brick is ablaze with God?  But, I had to think long and hard about taking off my shoes here, and asking you to take off your shoes.  It was so, well, awkward. 

  As a kid I took off my shoes all the time.  Now, as an adult I rarely do.  Except at the beach which is the last barefoot walking I do.  So I thought I might learn something from walking barefoot on the beach.  Something about what taking off my shoes might mean about being in God’s presence.  Even before I see it, the ocean’s roar demands that I give up my footware no matter what the manufacture's guarantee.  The ocean made that sand.  It pulverized the hardest rock torn down and carried to the sea from the peaks of the Appalachian mountains.  Nothing can withstand the oceans terrible force

Once I take off my shoes immediately the sand starts to burn my feet, especially if I have arrived on a warm summer afternoon.  In fact within a minute of walking, I simply can’t stand it anymore.  I wonder why did I ever come to the beach.  Why not read in my hammock in my back yard?   I have to drop the piles of debris I brought with me and run for cool wet sand nearer the pounding surf.  Cool, cold  wet relief.   Unwilling to venture onto the hot sand again, I decide to abandon any other plans I might have presumed and walk along the waves.  There is something about sand with bare feet is extremely comfortable.  It has to do with my foot molding to the sand.  The sand exactly supports my arches.  It pushes my toes apart slightly so that I gain stability.  My heels dig in deeper then the balls of my foot so my posture is suddenly more upright.  So naturally comfortable is the sand, that I heard shoe manufacturers such as Berkenstocks model their shoes after sand walking.  I lift up my foot and see the footprint recognizable in such shoes.  Each step perfect print.   

 I play with the waves.  Like the four year olds laughing nearby, I step over the tongues of water, jump over the smaller waves, get caught by one I didn’t see, and my pants are wet up to my knees.  Sure I am as not overt about it as the children,  I preserve my dignity, and hardly admit it to myself,  but really am doing the same things as they are.  Sand squirting up between your toes is delightful no matter what age you are.  The ocean is my partner in this barefoot sticky dance.   Back and forth we go.  Some strong waves push up the beach far and chase me back.  They recede and I go with them toward the water.  Then another catches me again.  There are a couple of insubstantial fingers of water, then another surge to make sure I am watching.  Back and forth we go.  Yet, I am flirting on the edge.  The immensity of my partner, it billion year history, the cauldron of life itself, thousand mile horizons, its dark impenetrable depths, all of this is connected somehow to the bubbles that are tickling  my toes at the moment.  I  am glad I have  taken off my shoes so I can touch back in an acknowledgement of what I do not know. 

After Moses took off his shoes, he asked God what his name is.  In one of the greatest lines of the whole Bible God responds that his name is, “I Am Who I Am.”  That is God’s name.  God is the One behind ten thousand things.  The ocean is the great one to which all the rain drops,  rivulets, streams, brooks, mighty rivers, flow and merge into.  What does the name of God sound like?  In Hebrew, “I am who I am” is pronounce “Yahweh.”  “Yahhhh….Wehhhhh”  It sounds to me like sighing.  Did God just breath when Moses asked his name?  But, the breathing had to be tremendous.  And the sound of surf, of waves rolling in and rolling out, crashing and sighing, that sound, is like the name “Yahhh…Wehhh.”  Yahhh….the waves roll in.  Wehhhh…the waves roll out.  The sound scourers anything else from your mind.  Any thought of God is less substantial, in fact trivial next to the basic fact of God being there, being in the bush, in the churning, in the fire, in the intense present love now crashing, then burning.  Yahhh….Wehhh…

It is around now, that I notice something, the most important thing there is to notice about walking on the beach barefoot.  After all this dancing, this back and forth, this sound of a great name, I stop and turn and see that behind me without my awareness all my foot steps, have been washed away.  Of hundreds of steps that I have taken along the shore only a few broken tracks remain.  It is only a matter of time when all of my dance will be gone.  But, I don’t feel sad about this.  Instead, I feel glad.  For it seems as if the ocean has taken my moments into its roaring, consuming, heart.  It has swarmed the memories of my steps and hungrily taken them with it.  I have not been lost, I have become one with it. 

Isn’t this what life with the divine is all about.  We may approach prayer with an agenda.  Think our path is going to take us to some certain place.  But, what really happens in the relationship is that we forget any kind of thinking we may have had about it.  We forget any kind of question we may have wanted to ask it.  We become bare and open, exposed like the long wet, dark sand left behind with our footsteps.  Then a unity happens.  Whatever thoughts, whatever questions, the name alone suffices, “I am who I am.”  Yahweh. 

Taking off my shoes has delivered something important to me.  Being barefoot before the ocean I encountered what was essential with life.  It helped me learn what the ocean, the great I Am, had to teach.  It gave me a moment of true living.  It helped me pare down in a Spartan like way before the immensity of God and to live deeply.  Anything that was not essential truth was banished in this encounter.

I do have to return from the beach at the end of the day.  I gather up my things, left mostly abandoned and lug them back down the path to the parking lot.  But, my shoes are still off.  I can’t put my shoes on with m feet are caked with sand.  At some beaches there are hoses, where you can rinse your feet.  Wash all the sand off.  Foot washing.  Isn’t that what Jesus did at the last supper?  Remember in the gospel of John it says that Jesus after during the last supper got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.  Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash their disciples feet.  Peter objects and Jesus answered, “You do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand.”  Peter objects again and Jesus says, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.”   It is one of the only few times taking of one’s shoes before God is mentioned after Moses and the burning bush.

It is one thing taking your shoes off at the beach.  It seems natural, and right.  But it is another thing going barefoot in the rest of the world, and the rest of your life.  If God is in the world and every common bush is afire with God, should we not go around barefoot everywhere?  Yet, when you enter the world barefoot it begins to take on other meanings.  In biblical times prisoner were not allowed to have shoes to make it harder for them to escape.  Impoverished children go barefoot in our day and age.  Off the beach and beyond the burning bush shoelessness is  coupled with humiliation, poverty, and vulnerability.      

That is why it is so hard to take off our shoes here in church.  The action is demeaning and lowers us.  The power of Jesus is that he recognized and took on just this.  He took on our rejection, our suffering, humiliation, and poverty.  He took it all on by stooping to wash our caked and dirty feet.  The lowest of us becomes the honored guest. 

Just so, the spigots at the beach derive the water from the ocean.  Jesus delivers God even to our bare feet. 

So I put on my shoes again, my feet are cleaner than before I started.  I throw all the stuff into the back of my car, get the kids in and drive home.  There is always sand in my car after I go to the beach.  No matter how much we brush off we end up carrying some of it with us.  Sometimes in the middle of the winter, I flip the seat down for some reason and see tell tail sand, of the warm sunny day at the beach 6 months earlier.  I am glad I never can get rid of it entirely.  With layers of socks, and boots, insulating my feet it reminds me of the day I walked barefoot and will walk barefoot again.