Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Romans 10:14-17
14 But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? 15 And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" 16 But not all have obeyed the good news; for Isaiah says, "Lord, who has believed our message?" 17So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.
To begin with, I would like everyone in here who can to take a moment and remove his or her shoes. Go ahead and take them off.
I will remove mine as well.
And I promise, I won’t do this every Sunday.
Ok, on with the sermon.
In the movie ‘Die Hard’, Bruce Willis’ character, a New York policeman flying across the country to meet with his estranged wife to reconcile, is a little anxious about the trip. One of his fellow passengers tells him that the best way to relax after a cross-country trip is to take off your shoes and socks and walk around barefoot for a few hours, getting used to the feel of the carpet between your toes. Willis’ character takes the advice, and removes his shoes and socks on arrival in the office/apartment tower that becomes the setting for the rest of the movie, he spends the next couple of hours shooting bad guys and blowing up helicopters and incidentally running through fields of broken glass barefoot. It’s been several years since I saw the movie, but if memory serves, he only complains a couple of times about his feet. If I haven’t retold the details correctly, I suspect I’ll be corrected next Sunday night at the pizza and movie night over at the parsonage.
In J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’, we’re introduced to Bilbo Baggins, a resident of The Shire. Hobbits are known to be very settled creatures. They love nothing better than to stay home, live quiet lives, and eat good meals. They also have unusually large feet for creatures their size, and they are especially hairy. Their feet are also very … hardy. Hobbits wear no shoes.
In The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Rings, there is a scene where the 9 members of the fellowship are trying to get to the land of Mordor, and at one point, they attempt to get to it through the most direct path they know, which is over a mountain pass. Here they are, trudging through snow and ice, thousands of feet up in the mountains, and Sam, Pippin, Mery, and Frodo are all barefoot, and yet seem unaffected, other than being chilled.
Though it is a minor point in the movies, I’d like to focus on feet for a few minutes this morning.
Mine, for example, have what I think are called bunions at the base of each of my big toes. The right one points to about two o’clock, and the other points to about ten o’clock. I have to be careful what kind of shoes I buy. I remember standing around the pool at the place where we had mission meeting in Spain with Bruce Reeder, Steve D’Amico, and Eric Thompson, other Journeymen and a Volunteer with whom I served while there. Bruce was from Missouri, and he was good about coming out and saying exactly what he was thinking. He took one look at my feet and said, “Well, Kenny, your toes are going all to Jones’!” I’d never heard the expression before, but I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. I knew exactly what it meant.
I’ve been remembering and noticing feet over the past few days.
There is a woman whose feet no longer form a pair. She lost one of her legs to an amputation several years ago and is now unable to walk. She spends her time in bed or in the chair next to her bed. Her remaining foot tells the story of a life spent raising 11 children on next to nothing. Her face tells more of the story, and her eyes are clouded by the years. But she still finds it in her to speak of ‘the good Lord’, and of an almost instinctive trust in his will having been carried out in the course of her life.
I remember the feet of hermana (sister) Elena de Alarcon, who taught me 4th and 5th grade Sunday school. She suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and, though I never saw her feet out of her orthopedic shoes, her hands were gnarled like the branches of a twisting oak tree. I can only imagine what her feet may have looked like. She must have been in her late 70’s back IN the 70’s. I remember her voice being so strong, so sure of what she was saying. I remember one of her favorite illustrations was to compare us to the Andes Mountains, before and after a fresh winter snowfall, and explain that that was how clean the blood of Christ washed us all of our sins.
I remember one of the games we played at family night during mission meeting growing up was to have 5 or 6 of the men step into a back room and take off their shoes and socks and roll up their pants, and then step out behind a sheet, to where only their lower legs were visible, and the wives of each of them had to figure out which were who’s.
Last Saturday I watched a woman who’d suffered a stroke a couple of years ago and whose right side is paralyzed slowly, painstakingly make her way across the street and the graveyard to the sight where her friend of over 30 years was being laid to rest after a final battle with cancer. Her husband had the prayer of committal. She was the last one to arrive at the graveside, and the sun was hot, but nobody complained, or even said a word. Everyone waited respectfully and silently until she could be seated with the family under the awning.
I remember watching the feet of Robert Lindley, the former organist at Thalia Lynn, as he played the postlude after Sunday morning services. Watching them move as nimbly across those pedals as his hands did across the keys and listening to the resulting sounds coming from the pipes on more than one occasion elicited a resounding ‘AMEN’.
Another pair of feet comes to mind. Attached to knees that have been causing pain and discomfort for some time, making it difficult if not impossible to manage the stairs in this building, the woman has still faithfully carried out duties as the director of Sunday school, and teacher, and choir member.
Other feet that come to mind:
Feet that spend their day teaching children acrobatics, stretching not only their muscles but their minds, their wills, exercising them all to reach for new goals, new heights. Yesterday, those feet took her to Kirkland Grove, where their owner spent the afternoon getting to know people who do not speak the same language she does, except when it comes to what David Wilcox calls ‘the language of the heart’ - where it’s more than just words that get spoken.
Feet that spend 6 days a week working for their employer, encased in work boots, heaving, hauling, directing, and moving, but that on Sunday morning sit under a table downstairs and share the word of God with other young adults, bringing to mind ideas that might otherwise go unthought. Finding new ways to think of old words, making them new all over again in the process.
Feet that come to the activities committee meetings, hurrying to bring to the folks gathered around the table ways in which we as a church can engage not only each other, but the community of which we are a part as well. Those same feet walked into church with their owner’s daughters just a couple of weeks ago to celebrate with them their baptism.
There are the feet that got uncomfortably warm this week in the wake of the storm that came through, knocking down several trees and knocking out power to the house, and thus the air conditioning. It took … 2 or 3 days to get power back, and in that time, those feet walked or drove their owner to all the places she needed to go to take care of getting everything back in order, but were still faithfully here yesterday checking on the flowers being ready to grace our sanctuary this morning.
In scripture, there are the feet of Adam and Eve, which walked with God in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day.
There are the feet of Noah, which worked for years to build the ark, alongside his sons, following God’s command.
There are the feet of Jacob, struggling the find a foothold in the 32nd chapter of Genesis, wrestling with a man all night, and prevailing. The next morning, he demands that the man bless him. As we find out, the man was God, who in blessing Jacob gives him a new name, the name “Israel” “for you have striven with God and with Humans.”
We find feet in the book of Isaiah, chapter 52, where our text this morning is itself drawn from:
6 Therefore my people shall know my name; therefore, in that day they shall know that it is I who speak; here am I. 7 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."
In the New Testament, we come, of course, to the feet of Christ.
There was a youth musical that I remember singing, “What’s It All About’, sometime in the mid to late 70’s … one of the songs was ‘Sandals’ – and the words to the chorus went something like this:
Sandals, sandals on his feet, dusty roads where people meet,
sandals, sandals came to me, steps that lead past Calvary.
There was, as we know, no public transportation in 1st century Palestine. The primary mode of transportation was walking. Except for the ride into Jerusalem the week before his death, I’m not sure the Bible mentions Jesus ever having done anything besides walk. Imagine what 30-plus years of walking barefoot or with open sandals would do to your feet. They must have been rugged feet. Mostly hardened to the elements, and calloused. Those same feet stepped into the Jordan to be baptized by John, climbed into a boat to teach from the water to the shore, curled up in sleep in the middle of a storm on the sea of Galilee, stood in front of Lazarus’ grave as Jesus wept, and carried him into the temple, bracing him as he overturned the money changers’ tables and cleared them out.
Those same feet were pierced by a long heavy nail at Calvary, and were hastily wrapped in a burial shroud on Friday afternoon and laid in the tomb.
Then we start reading of other feet again…
The feet of the women on Sunday morning, as they ran from the tomb to be the first missionaries, proclaiming the risen Lord.
The feet of the disciples, who at first did not believe, but who, after witnessing the risen Christ, could do nothing else but proclaim to the world that Christ has risen.
The feet of Paul and Silas, bound, in prison, while they sang hymns of praise to God. Feet that did not take their owners running from the prison after the walls came down in the earthquake, but stayed, and witnessed to the jailer, and introducing him to a powerful, risen Lord.
There is one major player in the Old Testament I haven’t mentioned until now. Can you tell me who it was? Scripture actually makes reference to his feet: Moses.
Exodus Chapter 3: most of us know the story: Moses tending his father in law’s sheep, Moses sees the burning bush, Moses hears the voice of God. The event galvanizes him, and God sends him back to Egypt and to Pharaoh and ultimately to be the liberator of Israel. But at the beginning, what does God ask him to do?
“Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground."
It is not the physical location, as it is the fact that he was in the presence of God that made the ground Holy.
We are, here today, in the presence of God. We are on Holy Ground. It is altogether proper that we remove our sandals. What we are about is carrying God’s kingdom to the world around us. And it is within these walls that the Kingdom must be seen, and felt, and heard, and spoken.
Seminary started back this week. I’m taking a class with Randel Everett, president of the Seminary and now also Pastor at First Baptist Church, Newport News, which is where the Hampton Roads Campus is now located. I got a Jewel in class on Thursday night. It is a quote from Leslie Newbigin, who served for nearly 40 years as a missionary, a scholar and a theologian in India:
“The greatest hermeneutic of the Gospel is a community that lives by it”
Hermeneutic is a fancy word for Preaching.
We are all Moses, hearing God say “I have observed the misery of my people, I have heard their cry, and I know their suffering”. We are all called to do nothing less than bring in the Kingdom of God to this world.
Lets pray.
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