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Sunday, August 31, 2014 | 4:00 p.m.

Holy Barefoot Vulnerability
(Or What to Do with a Burning Bush)

Layton Williams
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 33
Romans 12:9–21
Exodus 3:1–15

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A number of years ago, a tired, dusty group of Christians from Atlanta, Georgia, found themselves sitting in a circle at twilight, in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn in Piedras Negras, Mexico. They were halfway through a weeklong mission trip, and they were gathered on this warm July night for an evening devotional. After prayers were said, the devotion leader instructed the group to get into pairs and wash each other’s feet.

I was there. I was thirteen years old, and it was my first mission trip, and this foot-washing devotional caught me totally off guard. Of course I knew the story of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, but I had never seen it done by modern Christians.

I was not a fan of feet even on a good day, but this discomfort multiplied exponentially at the thought of dozens of pairs of dirty, sweaty, mission-trip feet. I didn’t want to show mine or see anyone else’s—let alone touch them. And on top of all of that, I was paired with my youth pastor, Shannon. I was struck by our inequality. I was just a kid—up to no good by myself in a foreign country. She was a grown-up—and a pastor, no less. How could I let her see and touch and clean my dirty, kid feet? And how could I dare to hold and clean hers? The whole thing just felt so . . . vulnerable.

But we did it, and as we did, I felt something powerful shift inside of me. Something that made me wonder if my discomfort—my vulnerability—might just have been the point. I have rarely felt more seen and connected to another person, and to God, by such a simple act. Memories of this moment came flooding back to me as I read and sat with this story of Moses and the burning bush.

If you had to name the weirdest thing about this story from Exodus, the obvious answer would have to be the fully inflamed shrubbery from whence the voice of God speaks. But honestly, as I read and reread this text, that’s not the part that tripped me up. Over and over again, I found my mind drifting back to this line instead: “Moses, come no closer. Remove the sandals from your feet for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

And even now, all these years after that foot-washing in Mexico, I found myself thinking “Why does it have to be feet?” And why does it? Why does God require Moses to remove his sandals to approach the bush? To stand on holy ground? Maybe it’s just a matter of respect or tradition or obedience. But I don’t think so.

Because it must have felt weird for Moses to stop in the face of this burning bush and toss off his sandals. To draw closer to it and the voice of God, feeling the grains of sand and rocky pebbles and brush poking into the sensitive skin of his bare feet, to feel the heat from this fiery bush gently licking the tips of his toes. It must have felt disconcerting. It must have felt, at least a little bit . . . vulnerable.

And I am left wondering, once again in this story, if maybe that vulnerability is the whole point. Without his sandals on, Moses can’t just be a bystander, an unaffected onlooker to this bizarre, revelatory scene. He has to feel it—feel the ground beneath him. And without his sandals, he can’t make a quick escape either, if things get too weird or too uncomfortable. Barefoot and vulnerable, standing on holy ground, Moses is all in. He is fully bound up in the message and call that God has for him. He’s in it.

Moses isn’t alone either, in his exposed, vulnerable position. God is there. And God, remarkably, gets vulnerable too. Just a few verses after the command for Moses to remove his sandals, Moses drums up the courage to ask God’s name. This was no small request. In his context, to have someone’s true name was to have immense power over them. It is hard to imagine the omnipotent God of all creation giving a plucky sheepherder such power. And yet, God does. “ehyah asher ehyah” God reveals as God’s name: “I am who I am.”

And so God comes to the place where God has also called Moses—into shared vulnerability. Only then can God compel Moses to lead the Israelites to liberation. Only then can Moses fully see God as one to be trusted—one who really “knows the suffering of God’s people.”Only then can Moses fully see the trouble his people are in and fully see his part in that story. Only in vulnerability, open and at risk, can Moses feel the full weight of his faith and what it calls upon him to do.

I am wondering if it is not so much that Moses must remove his shoes and become vulnerable because he is on holy ground, but rather that the vulnerability shared between him and God is what makes the ground holy.

This is, of course, a fairly radical idea. The notion that vulnerability, willingly shared, is an essential virtue is, frankly, countercultural for today’s world. We are taught that vulnerability is weakness. That weakness is brokenness, and that brokenness is bad. And we are taught to value a strength embodied in invincibility and unaffectedness.

But this story of Moses and the burning bush says otherwise, and it is hardly the only time in the Bible that God suggests another—even opposite—way. Look at the divine human footwasher himself. Jesus is the very embodiment of God making Godself vulnerable to be in relationship with us. Jesus is God entering into the vulnerability of a crying, homeless baby born into oppression and danger. Of a rabbi risking his life to call out injustice and stand with those in the margins. Of a teacher washing the dirty, cracked, world-weary feet of his followers. Of the Son of God, trembling on the cross, bearing his pain and his doubt for all the world to see. Of the One risen up, who returns in body to his friends and lets them touch his still-open wounds. This is the one we look to as the way, the truth, and the life. And his way, countercultural and uncomfortable as it is, is one of vulnerability.

So Moses and Jesus are called to vulnerability. Holy barefoot vulnerability. But what does that mean for us?

When I came up to Fourth Church last spring to interview for this position, most of what I knew about this city came from the show E.R. and a popular book and movie called Divergent. Set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago, Divergent shows a society that has been divided into five factions of people based on the virtue that each group believes will best solve the world’s problems. At the beginning of the story, teenager Tris Prior makes the controversial choice to leave behind her selfless home community, Abnegation, and joins Dauntless, which values courage. In Dauntless, Tris and her friends go through physical and mental training to purge themselves of all weakness, fear, and vulnerability.

In a climactic scene, Tris finds herself face-to-face with the person she loves, who has been brainwashed into thinking she is the enemy. Everything she’s been taught tells her to block out her feelings, her empathy, her love, her fear, and just kill him to survive. But she doesn’t. Instead, she risks everything to let him really see her. She compels him to call her by name and remember that he knows who she is. In the end, it is not Tris’s detached strength but the shared vulnerability between them that breaks the spell and saves them both.

Here’s the thing: Just like in Tris’s world, we are learning that our typical culture of invincibility and disconnectedness isn’t working. It doesn’t make for a better or safer—let alone holier—world. Instead we see gunned-down black teens and children and angry, heartbroken communities. We see abuses of power in our own neighborhoods and escalating violence in Ukraine and the Middle East and the world over. We see those who are struggling beg for help from neighbors whose eyes are averted and hearts closed. We see families torn by conflict and loved ones lost to mental illness and addiction. Violence, pain, isolation, hopelessness. Inequality, oppression, exploitation, and indifference. I am confident that we cannot strong-arm our way out of this mess. I am confident that God doesn’t want us to.

In the wake of Robin Williams’ suicide, the shooting of Mike Brown, and unrest in Ferguson, Brene Brown—a research professor who has extensively studied and written about vulnerability, posted the following on her blog:

When confronted with news of a stranger’s unimaginable pain—a suicide, an overdose, a protest for justice and basic dignity—we have two choices: We can choose to respond from fear or we can choose courage.

We can choose to believe that we are somehow insulated from the realities of these traumas and that our willpower or our strength of character makes us better than these displays of desperation and woundedness. When we seek shelter in the better-than, safer-than, different-than thinking, we are actually choosing fear, and that requires us to self-protect and arm ourselves with judgment and self-righteousness.

Our only other option is to choose courage. Rather than deny our vulnerability, we lean into both the beauty and agony of our shared humanity. Choosing courage does not mean that we’re unafraid; it means that we are brave enough to love despite the fear and uncertainty.

These days, it feels like the whole world is on fire. Like it is one great big burning bush. And we—you and I—are like Moses, tiptoeing closer, unable to tear our eyes away from the strange, disturbing sight. We cannot turn away and ignore it. We cannot shut our eyes and unmake it, and we cannot simply walk up, feet and heart safely wrapped in an insulated sole, unaffected by the heat and the rocky ground of this wilderness.

God is speaking to us from these flames. God is calling on us to remove the sandals from our feet. Calling us to holy, barefoot vulnerability. This calling does not ask us to embrace the vulnerability forced upon people by oppression, abuse, and the brokenness of this world. We are called, rather, to a vulnerability that is willing and mutual. That asks us to cast off our chance at easy escape and the comfort of insulated, unaffected curiosity and privilege. We are being called to be seen—in all our weak and broken and beautiful humanity—and to see others in their brokenness, to see the way the world is breaking them and us and the way we are participating in it. To cry out and ask why and how long? Why are the children dying? Why is peace so impossible? Why are the claws of oppression and prejudice and injustice so deeply sunk into the fabric of our society? Why is the world burning, and how long must it go on? We must ask the questions and feel the pain of their lament on the sensitive, weary, dirty skin of our feet and know in the depths of our souls that their answers matter—not just for other people somewhere else, but for us, for all of us. And then we must get really, really quiet and listen. Then go where we are called.

It is a scary thing—you know—taking off one’s sandals in a world like this. It is a scary thing to let ourselves be truly vulnerable—to go all in. But this much we know: we are not alone. God is there to meet us. To be seen and known and named. To be vulnerable with us. And there in that vulnerable place, with the heat of a broken world singeing our toes and God with and for us all, only there can we really know what it is to be standing on holy ground.

Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church