Take Off Your Shoes

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost, August 30, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty.

One of my favorite paintings of the Annunciation is by Botticelli. It depicts Mary climbing a staircase and casting a surprised glance over her shoulder at the Archangel Gabriel who has made a sudden appearance at the foot of the stairs. There is no shortage of versions of the Annunciation and most of them portray Mary looking straight on at Gabriel as if she’s been expecting him all along. The element of surprise, of sacred interruption, is downplayed. But in Botticelli’s version, the surprise and interruption carry the day. Mary is in the midst of an ordinary, everyday activity--climbing a staircase--and yet she has the wherewithal, the flexibility, the responsive adaptiveness to drop what she is doing and make room for this strange other whose message turns her world and her idea of herself upside down. 

If we start reading scripture with an eye towards sacred interruptions, it’s as if we start seeing them everywhere. Just last week, for example, we had that beautiful story of Pharaoh’s unnamed daughter who was going down to the river to bathe when softly, over the sound of the purling waters, she hears an infant mewling. She, too, stops what she is doing and bends down into the reeds to discover a baby in a basket. She knows her Father’s edict is that all the Israelites’ first-born sons were to be killed. But she does something different. She goes against the grain of worldly power that operates on the basis of sacrificial violence heaped on the backs of innocent victims and goes with the grain of the universe: love. She stoops not to murder, but to offer the milk of mercy and love. She suckles instead of scapegoats.

In our reading from Exodus, we encounter another one of these sacred interruptions: Moses at the Burning Bush. In Rembrandt’s on-the-fly, pen-and-ink sketch of the encounter included in your bulletin there is a distinctly narrative feel to the scene. Moses is moping along after his father-in-law’s sheep, minding his own business, lost, perhaps, in a daydream, when something catches his attention. Out of the corner of his eye he catches a fleeting glimpse of something that pulls him up short, and stops him dead in his tracks. In the loose, looping swirls of pen and ink you can almost feel Moses turning aside and drawing back. The bush is blazing but not consumed, and Moses says, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” Again, we see that part of what characterizes people like Mary, Pharaoh’s unnamed daughter, and Moses, is their capacity for surprise, their receptivity to the unknown, their willingness to have their best-laid plans overturned and to give themselves wholeheartedly to an unexpected, unplanned-for, and unimaginable experience with a degree of curiosity, wonder, and openness.

It would have been easy, perhaps even expected, for any of these three people to just carry on with their lives. Mary has a staircase to climb, Pharaoh’s daughter has her bath waiting for her, and Moses is supposed to be looking after Jethro’s sheep. Each one has duties they are meant to accomplish. Things on the to-do list. And in the eyes of a productivity-minded beaurocrat, they might even have been considered idlers, wooly-minded dreamers who can’t focus on the task at hand. Each of them, in a certain way, has taken off their figurative sandals and realized that the place where they are standing is indeed Holy Ground.

Concerning this phrase, “remove your sandals,” Metropolitan Kallistos Ware notes in a lecture on the practice of the Jesus Prayer, 

Now, on the interpretation of the Greek Fathers, for example, St. Gregory of Nyssa, shoes, made from the skins of dead animals, signify the deadness of repetition, boredom, inattentiveness. “Take off your shoes,” then, means, symbolically: “Free yourself from what is lifeless, from enslavement to the trivial, the mechanical, the repetitive. Shake off the deadness of boredom. Wake up. Come to yourself. Open your spiritual eyes. Cleanse the doors of your perception. Look and see! Listen!”

There is also a social justice dimension to taking off your shoes as well, of course. For too long the structural inequality and systemic racism of our country have operated in a mechanical, unconscious, and brutally repetitive fashion. Learning to take off these shoes, to wake up to and confront a system where not everyone is treated equally or fairly is the burning bush of our time. That’s the prophetic voice calling to us right here and right now if we can turn aside and listen. God wants God’s children to be free, to be liberated from social, political, economic, racial oppression in every age. Leading the people out from under the yoke of slavery under Pharaoh is a project to which God’s children are still called.

Bishop Kallistos continues,

…What do we experience when we take off our shoes and begin to walk barefoot? We suddenly become sensitive, in a good way. Vulnerable, in a positive manner. The earth under our feet comes alive. We feel grains of dust between our soles. We feel the texture of the grass. So it is spiritually. Removing our shoes, freeing ourselves from inner deadness, we begin to realize that God is very close. The world around us is holy. We renew our sense of awe and wonder before each thing. Each thing, each person, becomes a sacrament of the Divine Presence, a means of communion with God.

That, I think, is one way to hear Jesus’ injunction to “lose your life.” He is really saying, “Lose your life of mechanical, repetitive, bored, inattentiveness. Let that so-called life go, and come alive. Awaken to your God and awaken to your neighbor. Be present to the presence that is always here and overflowing. Stop setting your mind on things that distract and open yourself to milk and honey of the present moment.”

I’m reminded by a book of poetry by Ron Silliman called Skies in which he tasked himself with writing a single sentence each day for a year in a notebook about how the sky looked at that moment (he wrote another book called Jones in which he looked only at the ground for a year and employed the same procedure). At the time, Silliman was living in San Francisco, so he had lots of opportunities to chart the various changes of Northern California’s shape-shifting skies. Here’s a little sampling.

A sooty haze reduces the hills to planes, one over another (in spite of the cold, the roofer wears a t-shirt), the colorless light of an average sun, a flock of small birds over the valley abruptly changes direction…. One ray of muted light (very white) angles thru the thickening clouds (only the inmost branches of the plum tree still bear leaves) (the cat is sneezing) (today’s traffic very loud).... The glare in the warm haze bleaches garden’s colors (buzz of a small plane), shimmer of a spider’s thread in the plum tree light.

Now that may not sound like the kind of poetry we’re used to hearing, but the intention behind it is just as radical as Kallistos Ware’s exhortation that we, “Shake off the deadness of boredom… Look and see! Listen.” Silliman takes something that we ordinarily give only passing attention to and invests it with loving, careful attention. Instead of seeing a generic “sky,” we see it in its minute particularity and vivid, unrepeatable uniqueness. And when we invest something with our full attention, it’s true nature, its sacramental nature starts to eke its way into awareness. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her poem “Aurora Leigh” written about a century and a half before Silliman puts it this way:

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,
And daub their natural faces unaware        
More and more from the first similitude.

Only she who takes off her shoes is able to perceive that “earth’s crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.” The rest, rather comically, just stuff their faces with blackberries unawares. Perhaps, these days it’s not so much blackberries, but the 24 hour news cycle, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, mindless television, video games: all features of our contemporary culture of distraction. 

Attention, giving ourselves and our beloved attending to people, to things, is the doorway to presence. And in case you’re wondering, attention, is just another word for prayer, which is just another for love. As Simone Weil reminds us, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Whether it’s giving our attention to a friend while we’re talking on the phone and resisting the temptation to “be productive” during that time and clean the dishes in the sink, or feeling our feet on the ground as we move from one room to the next, or actually taking the time to taste the food we put in our mouth--whenever we give our full attention to any task, no matter how small, no matter how seemingly insignificant or trivial, it becomes a doorway to presence, it becomes prayer. That’s how every moment of our lives, lived with wholehearted attention, can become prayer. That’s what it means, as Paul says in 1 Thessalonians, “to pray without ceasing” (5: 16-18).

During the pandemic, it’s easy for a certain dull drabness to take hold of our days. One day blends into the next and we can’t tell a Monday from a Thursday. But if we take a cue from Mary, Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses, Silliman, and Browning, we have the precious opportunity to realize the gift of this time. We’re in a wilderness, a desert time, just like where Moses finds himself. The usual supports, the usual sources of entertainment have been stripped away and we’re left with shockingly little. But remember God’s promise to Moses--that God will lead the Israelites to the land of milk and honey, that God will bring them up out of Egypt, that God will walk with and ahead of them each step of the way. Perhaps that is the gift of this strange, lonely, and admittedly grim time. That we realize all that we’ve taken for granted while we walked around with those skins on our feet. Perhaps there is an invitation to take off our shoes, to become vulnerable, to look and see, and listen, to come alive and live with attention. Perhaps then we will come to see each moment as a sacrament, an opportunity for communion with Divine--in shifting clouds, in Jackson Pollockesque chewing gum splotches on the sidewalk, in the sacred interruption that scuttles our plans, in each other, and in ourselves. Perhaps then we will see more clearly those who labor under the yoke of oppression, and do the work God has given us to do--the building up of the Kingdom of God where the dignity of each person is celebrated and cherished, and where no one is cast aside.