Turn Aside and Take Off Your Shoes

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Third Sunday of Lent by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.

The governing metaphor of Lent is the journey through the wilderness. These 40 days mirrors Jesus’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness, and the 40 wilderness years the people of Israel spent wandering in the Exodus. On this journey in the wilderness, in the desert, our usual patterns of self-reliance are disrupted. We’re invited to repent of our lonely self-sufficiency and return to God, who longs to gather us under the shadow of her wings.

In the wilderness, God is revealed as the source of all life on whom we all depend. That’s always true, that’s the basic reality of being created, but it’s made especially clear when the illusion of providing for ourselves is taken away. Out in the sand, where nothing can grow, the children of Israel are fed with daily bread, gathered right outside their tent doors, bread from heaven that falls new each morning. In a barren and dry land where there is no water, they drink cool streams from the rock miraculously broken open. 

During his time in the desert Jesus is nourished by his communion with his Father. Rooted in that intimacy and loving-kindness that is better than life itself, Jesus able to turn from the temptations for self-satisfaction—turn these stones into bread—to believe he can nourish himself, the temptation to power over others—all these kingdoms will be yours—to be Lord in the usual exploitative sense of that word rather than to be among us as one who serves, and, trickiest of all, the temptation to grand self-sacrifice and false martyrdom, to fling oneself at destruction as a sign of holy devotion. That looks flashy but it’s a cheap way out of attending faithfully to the small calls and demands that life makes on us day by day. No, Jesus eventually goes to the cross not out of some self-interested desire to prove himself but for love, love overflowing, love that can’t help but pour itself out for others. As the letter to the Hebrews says, “he endures the cross for the joy that was set before him”—the joy of loving each one of us—yet despising—not craving—the shame of it. 

This journey of Lent can be treacherous. Paul talks about the law being repurposed by sin as an instrument of death, and I worry that we can unwittingly use this time to reinforce our sense of separation from God, our sense of unworthiness, our belief that we must do it all ourselves and that we are failing to measure up, or worse, that we are succeeding all on our own! Practices meant to draw us into closer communion can be taken up with violent intent, turning “God” into an object we use to self-harm. “Repent or perish,” Jesus says, and I’m afraid we hear it as a threat, rather than the invitation into life that it is. 

Today’s Gospel passage illuminates the violent impatience we turn on ourselves much of the time. On this Third Sunday in Lent, we’re about to the point in the season when I at least find myself inclined to stomp out with a clipboard to inspect the vineyard of my spiritual life (rather curiously separated off from the rest of my “real” life, notice that) and to start exclaiming in disappointed frustration: “See here! For three whole weeks, I have coming looking for fruit on this blasted tree, and still, nothing. Cut it down! What a waste.” What contempt there is in the vineyard owner’s voice. Frustration, certainty and hopelessness, the impulse to destroy it all now: it's never going to bear fruit. 

So often we give this violent self-rejection a religious guise. We imagine God rejects us as resoundingly as we reject ourselves. We come at our lives with the pruning shears, the winnowing fork. We start stoking the refiner’s fire. Burn, baby, burn. But that’s not what the gardener in Jesus’s parable does. God is far more generous and forgiving and kind, tender and kind, toward us that we are toward ourselves. “Let it alone,” the gardener says. Let it alone. Put down the pruning shears. All is not wasted. Let it alone for another year, let me dig around it and put manure. I will patiently tend it. I love this tree, I placed it here, and it may yet bear fruit, because I care for it. 

Fruit trees take time to mature and so do people. The Levitical codes for planting a fruit-bearing tree know this—the first three years after a fig tree has been planted, no fruit is to be harvested, and what little may appear in those years is plucked off to promote more growth. And the fourth year the fruit is gathered up and given as an offering of thanksgiving to God. So the gardener in Jesus’s parable knows the law better than the self-righteous vineyard owner. He has comes looking for, no, demanding, fruit too soon. The owner, as we so often do, has come with unreasonable expectations for himself, and then threatens violence when frustrated. How often are we inclined to give up on this stunted tree, cut it down, and call that holiness, uprooting what God created and called good in the name of a sterile and lifeless perfection? 

These things take time. The outworking of the Spirit through our lives takes time, the unbinding of Lazarus takes time and takes a village. And the gardener is more savvy: it’s only been three years, give it another year, and if it bears fruit, then well and good. If not, then fine, you can cut it down. In that enigmatic “well and good,” I think we hear the confidence of one who knows how trees grow, who tends them carefully, and trusts there will be fruit at the appointed time. 

The repentance Jesus is calling us to—not just in Lent but always, turns out—is not that of the impatient vineyard owner who’s trigger-happy with a chainsaw. Repentance is much more like Moses on his desert journey, tending his father-in-law’s flock and following that strange sight flickering out of the corner of his eye, and taking off his shoes before the burning bush. Repentance after all means simply to turn. To turn, to change the direction we are looking, to allow our center to shift back to its true home, as sunflowers turn toward the sun. And turning is exactly what Moses does. He sees and he turns aside. He allows himself to be distracted from his important work—something the vineyardist hell-bent on productivity can hardly fathom—Moses notices, and says I must turn aside and look at this great sight. God shows up on the margins, in your peripheral vision as a distraction from your tasks and games and cultivation. I am that I am. And, by extension, You are that you are. God’s being dwells in you. Slowly, imperceptibly, God is tending each of us and all of us together toward fruitfulness, if we’ll only allow it. 

This allowing, this letting alone, is the key. There is no coercion in love, and God will not force us to be good. God won’t force us to do anything, as the state of the world readily attests. God’s will is not yet done on earth as it is in heaven, it is easy to see. News of war in Ukraine and the growing numbers of displaced people in that country show us that clear enough. No, love will not force us, but love won’t leave us alone, either. Gently yet quite insistently God invites us, shows up flickering just on the edge of our perception over and over, until we lay down our tasks and our work, our heavy burdens and turn aside, to see this great sight, to hear the source of all being call out our names, to take off the constricting shoes we wear as a defense against reality and come into barefooted, vulnerable contact with reality, just as it is. I am that I am. God as being itself is revealed to Moses in the burning bush. And God shows Moses who Moses is, too. He is called by name. Having turned to God and opened himself, taken off his shoes, Moses will be asked to re-turn, to keep opening. God calls him to do crazy things, in fact—to lead the people of Israel out of slavery under Pharaoh because God has heard the people’s suffering and come to deliver them and this strange man taking refuge among the sheep—otherwise known as a stuttering murderous interloper among his own people, you may recall—he will be part of how God does this. Unshod, unprotected, sand between his toes, in contact with reality itself, responsive to its call. That’s repentance. 

I am that I am, God declares as God’s own name. And, God might add, I am that you are. God’s faithful and constant pattern is to pour God’s self out in love, and we are invited to live from that same other-centered love. I am that you are. God wants us to exist, remember, and does not hate anything God has made! Moses isn’t called to root up the Moses tree, admittedly unfruitful thus far, but to go be Moses, become the person God made him to be, fully alive and flourishing, who even with shaking voice can tell Pharoah to let my people go!

Repentance, in the end, is not really about you. God is faithful, and repentance is a gift, worked in us by grace. Our part is to be open to it. To be open to being “distracted” from our work and turning aside to see the blazing fire. To take off our shoes, all the constricting judgements and expectations that hem in our perception and keep us from direct contact with the living God. It’s not about cultivating virtues and pruning vices, though this happens naturally when you aren’t inspecting the vineyard of your life for fruit but spend your time turning to God, spending time in the presence of God who is, and who made us to be, who knows and loves you with tenderness and patience.

So this Lent, put the pruning shears away. No clipboards, no chainsaws. The Spirit’s work in us is often imperceptible, under the surface. It’s not something we can measure or put a time limit on. Let yourself alone, and instead practice turning daily toward mystery, passing time graciously in God’s presence, slipping out of our too-tight expectations, and letting God cherish us on holy ground. After all, all ground is holy ground! That’s the pilgrim’s lesson, that each step of the journey is the destination itself. Holy ground right underfoot. And each person we meet bears the image of the immortal God blazing in fire. What is that flickering on the corner of your sight? Turn and see, follow your nose. God is there. God is here, right here, no really! Lavishing loving-kindness onto us if we’ll only allow it, receive it, make space to feel it. Take off your shoes!