On Holy Ground

On Holy Ground

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 3, 2017

Scripture: Exodus 3:1-15

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

By last Tuesday I’d been thinking about and working on this sermon for a few days. As I read this passage from Exodus that we just heard, the part of it that jumped out at me was God saying to Moses “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” I’d been working through just what that line might mean for how we are to approach God. Then last Tuesday Jane and I went to a place Jane had heard about called Earth Sanctuary. It’s on Whidbey Island near Freeland. It is a rather large area that the owner has developed and set aside as a place of prayer and meditation. The owner worked in the Hindu or Buddhist tradition, but there are things at the place or readings you can pick up from many different spiritual traditions. At one place in the sanctuary you can walk down a short path and come to something called a “Native American prayer stone.” It’s a flat stone on the ground maybe 4 feet long by 2 feet wide. Something like that. As you approach it there’s a sign posted on a tree you walk past to get to the stone. That sign includes this line: “Please remove your shoes before stepping onto the stone.” Given that I had just been thinking through God’s direction to Moses to remove his sandals because he was standing on holy ground I was rather taken aback. Here from the tradition of Native American spirituality was the same instruction. Remove your shoes before stepping onto the sacred stone, the holy place of prayer. I was talking about my experience of seeing that stone and that sign at the lectionary group I lead every Wednesday morning at Brookdale in Monroe. One of our regulars shared that when he was in Turkey years ago as part of his work for NATO whenever he entered a Muslim place of worship there was a direction to remove your shoes. In our Gospel of John Jesus tells Peter that unless Peter lets Jesus wash Peter’s feet, Peter will have no part of Jesus. Once again—bare feet in the presence of the holy. I wouldn’t be surprised if other spiritual traditions had the same practice. Take off your sandals. Take off your shoes. The ground you stand upon is holy. If that same practice shows up in such different spiritual traditions, at least one of them—Native American—entirely unrelated to the others—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—there must be something universal about baring one’s feet in the presence of the holy. Moses from the Jewish tradition. Jesus and Peter from the Christian tradition. Places of worship in the Muslim tradition. A prayer stone from a Native American tradition. So for the next few minutes I’m going to explore with you what it can mean for us to approach the holy with bare feet, with sandals or shoes off.

It is a rather odd thing, isn’t it? Shoes and sandals are after all very useful items. Maybe we wear a certain pair of shoes because of its style, but more fundamentally shoes and sandals are quite utilitarian. They protect our feet. I guess if you go around with bare feet often enough the bottoms of your feet get hardened and can step on rocks and such without hurting, but that’s not the case for most of us. Shoes enable us to walk on surfaces that would hurt our feet without our shoes. Shoes protect us. Many people also think of shoes as protecting from the embarrassment of being seen with bare feet if they think their feet are unattractive, and many people do. Shoes protect. They guard our feet and possibly our self-esteem. We wouldn’t much want to live without them.

So why do so many traditions, including our own, say that we should take off our shoes in the presence of the holy? I’ve come up with what I think is one answer to that question. We take off our shoes in the presence of the holy because it is only fit and proper for us fallible mortals to approach the infallible divine with an attitude of humility and vulnerability. Taking off your shoes in the presence of God seems to me to be symbolically removing your defenses against God. Shoes defend out feet against rocks and thorns on the ground. Because they do that work of protection, we can see them as symbols of the way we protect our whole selves against all kinds of things. We protect ourselves from the cold and from embarrassment by wearing more clothes than just shoes. We protect ourselves from the rain by wearing Gortex or carrying an umbrella. We protect ourselves from true intimacy by not fully revealing who we really are because we are afraid of being hurt. We protect ourselves because we don’t want to get hurt, and there are so many ways in which we can get hurt.

And we throw up defenses against God all the time too, don’t we? We hear God through filters so that our cultural understandings and prejudices won’t be challenged. When we think we hear God calling us to do something we don’t want to do we act just like most of the prophets of ancient Israel acted. We throw up our defenses. I’m too young, or I’m too old. I don’t have the skills to do what you’re asking me to do. I can’t afford to quit what I’m doing and do what I think you’re calling me to do. We say what would my family think? We say I’d get in trouble with my boss. We say I don’t have time, or maybe we just say no, I don’t want to. We make God small by locking God up in a book or a religious institution so God won’t be so threatening. We are immensely creative in coming up with ways to avoid doing what at a deeper level we know God wants us to do.

Well, God knew that Moses was going to throw up his defenses too. God knew Moses wouldn’t be exactly eager to go rushing back to Egypt and tell pharaoh to let the Hebrew slaves go, something everyone knew pharaoh wouldn’t want to do. So as soon as Moses approached the burning bush God said to him: Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground. Our story doesn’t tell us if Moses actually took off his sandals or not. Maybe he didn’t because he sure threw up a lot of defenses against God’s command to go back to Egypt and get pharaoh really mad at him. He said “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?” He said I don’t know what to call you when the people ask me your name. A bit farther on in the story he says what if they won’t believe me. He says “I have never been eloquent” and “I am slow of speech and tongue.” Moses used every defense he could think of to avoid doing what God had told him to do. I guess either he hadn’t taken off his sandals, or he was a concrete thinker who didn’t get the symbolism of taking off his shoes.

Well, this morning I invite all of us to get the symbolism of taking off our shoes in the presence of the holy. It is only proper for us to come before God with our defenses down. To come in all our human vulnerability, with all of our limitations, with all of our need. It is proper for us to approach God in this way because when we don’t we forget that God is God and we aren’t. When we leave our shoes on we think we can bend God to our will, to our way of thinking, to doing and saying what we want God to do and say rather than what God wants to do and say. When we leave our shoes on we say I don’t have to fear God because God isn’t really different from me. But God really is different from us; and God can be scary. Our story this morning says Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God. Well, maybe he was afraid to look at God; but at least metaphorically speaking he left his sandals on. He still threw up his defenses. He still thought he could outargue God, sway God to his way of thinking. He couldn’t. As we know he ended up going to Egypt and bringing the Hebrew people out just as God had told him to do.

When we approach God, we need to take our sandals off. So right now I’m going to take my shoes off, and I invite any of you who are comfortable doing so to take yours off too. With our shoes off we feel the ground better, and the ground we truly stand on and in is always God. With our shoes off we remember our frailty, fallibility, and mortality before God; and that’s really important stuff.

But there’s some good news in taking off our shoes in the presence of God too. God is always the ground on which we stand. The only reason we stand at all, the only reason we exist at all, is God. Taking off our shoes, that is, symbolically removing our defenses before God, brings us closer to God. We feel God’s creation more directly, and in doing that we feel God more directly. Taking off our shoes in the presence of God expresses our desire to be in more intimate relationship with God, and it actually brings about that more intimate relationship. With our shoes off we feel God’s closeness, and in God’s closeness we feel love. We feel grace. We feel forgiveness. We feel hope when the world gives us nothing but despair.

So if you’re comfortable doing it, take your shoes off. Feel not just the floor beneath your feet. Feel God beneath your feet. Feel God holding you up. Feel God sustaining you in this life and beyond this life. Take off your shoes. Put aside your defenses. Enter into a more intimate connection with God. When you do you’ll know that that intimate relationship with God is the best thing there ever was or ever could be. Thanks be to God. Amen.