Mission Ready: The Shoes of Exodus/Ephesians
(#4 in the Paradise to Paradise series)
As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make
you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.
(Ephesians 6:15)
A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 4, 2018
(Volume 1 Number 29)
Christ of the Hills UMC, 700 Balearic Drive, Hot Springs Village, Arkansas 71909
My Epiphany series has taken us on a journey I’ve called Paradise to Paradise, a rainbow trajectory from the Paradise of Eden to Heaven’s Paradise. Along the way we’ve found that clothing is a key feature in the narratives of both Paradises, beginning with the Fig Leaves of Eden we are making our way to the Wedding Gown of heaven. Our journey from Paradise to Paradise is Our Human Quest for the Perfect Fit, a path paved with apparel, suggestive of a deeply philosophical and spiritual quest, “What shall we wear when we stand before God?”
In these five Dressing Room sermons we’re trying on for size different items of biblical clothing, seeking through textures, shapes, colors, and functions to discover metaphors for our human journey. Since no outfit will look great without the right shoes, we come this morning to consider our shoes as a way to help us think about the church’s Mission Readiness.
In our scripture reading today we visited Moses in at the burning bush, an experience prepping him to turn, to go back to Egypt and Pharaoh. “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the ground upon which you stand is Holy Ground.” Along with that Exodus passage I’ve invited you to consider a verse from Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus set in the midst of a longer narrative in which, not unlike this sermon series, Paul invites Christians to put on the “armor of God.” He writes, “Put on the whole armor of God . . . the belt of truth around your waist and the breastplate of righteousness, etc.” No solider is ready for battle without shoes, so Paul continues, “And for shoes, put on whatever will make you ready . . .” That’s why, as we consider shoes we are thinking of the church as Mission Ready!
The October 2016 issue of WIRED was all about clothing. One article on shoes I found particularly fascinating. It began, “Inside the secret lab where Nike built the power-lacing sneaker of our dreams.” It told how exactly 30 years ago, in 1988, a young Nike designer named Mark Parker was invited to a brainstorming session with film director Robert Zemeckis, whose creative team was storyboarding the sequel to his sci-fi hit from three years earlier, Back to the Future. Parker had been tasked with dreaming up some “seriously 21st century” sneakers. The original idea was magnetic levitation, but that seemed a little too “Jetsons.”
“Wait, what about a shoe that would essentially come alive when you put it on? It would sense you. It would become the shape of your foot, and when it came alive it would light up. Wouldn’t it be great if a shoe could do that?” So the storyboard was drawn up, Marty McFly stepping into his shoes and the sneakers coming alive, shaping to his foot and automatically self-lacing.
The article, though, wasn’t about the sequel to Back to the Future, but about making this idea Mission Ready, bringing the idea to the marketplace. “After 28 years of brainstorming and 11 years of R&D, after many false starts, delays, and blown deadlines, after the vanquishing of internal skepticism, after innumerable prototypes and redesigns, Nike’s automatic electronic self-lacing shoe is scheduled to ship to stores this holiday season . . . using Adaptive Fit technology – each shoe has a sensor, battery, motor, and cable system to adjust fit based on an algorithmic pressure equation. When the foot is inserted the shoe tightens automatically until it senses friction points. ‘We’re talking about a project that’s maybe the most difficult in the history of footwear.”
I can think of a very difficult footwear moment in the bible, when Moses is told to remove his sandals as he stood on holy ground. Barefoot, then, better to experience the holy, to feel again the deep down freshness of what is real, to remind him how fragile and vulnerable humanity is, always at one with the dust upon which we walk, the very dust that is our origin and our destiny.
Forrest Gump is a film which begins and ends on a bus bench, the camera focused on Forrest’s shoes, anchored to the ground, and yet touched lightly by a feather which floats from above. The shoe seems the symbol of purpose and providence on life’s journey, of mission and meaning. The feather is the opposite, the symbol of the accidental movements of the wind, of chance.
The film opens with Forrest wearing a pair of muddy Nikes. When a nurse joins him on the bench Forrest notices and compliments her pristine, comfortable-looking shoes, then says, “Momma always said you can tell a lot about a person by the shoes they wear. Where they’re going. Where they’ve been.”
Indeed! Forrest, your worn Nikes, caked with the detritus of your own journey, will tell us a story about where you’ve been on your back and forth journey of life, filled with unexpected twists and turns.
Forrest squints, “If I think real hard, I can remember the shoes I’ve worn.” The film flashes back to Forrest as a child being fitted with heavy, ugly braces. “My momma said they were my magic shoes. She said they’d take me anywhere.” And so they did. But as life is for each of us, his path would not be direct, but a turning, twisting, back and forth movement.
Forrest wears cleats as he runs for Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide, up and down the football field, sometimes the wrong way, but always running. Drafted and sent to Vietnam, Forrest and his friend Bubba report for duty to Lt. Dan, who immediately emphasizes the chief rule, that to be properly equipped as a soldier for mission in this jungle one must maintain their feet. Shod with military issue boots, when his unit is ambushed, Forrest runs back and forth from the ambush point to the extraction point attempting to save his fellow wounded soldiers, though himself wounded.
Recovering from his wounds Forrest takes up ping-pong and becomes a world champion, the back and forth of the ping-pong ball again inviting us into a visual of life. Are we getting the message of the film yet?
Returning home, Forrest receives a pair of jogging shoes from his beloved Jenny, Nikes (Perhaps Nike should pay me for advertising this morning???). Lacing up his shoes, he inexplicably begins to run, crisscrossing the country coast to coast, back and forth, Atlantic to Pacific, for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days, and 16 hours. Wandering, wandering, wandering. “I just felt like running,” Forrest explains.
Time simply won’t allow me to dive deeper into the intricacy to this theme as the film draws it out, how our path is full of serendipitous twists and turns, the back and forth movement between our sense of Providential leading (seen in the shoes), countered by the thought that it could simply be sheer Chance (as seen in the feather). This balance of Providence and Chance are displayed in the film’s soundtrack. One song from the 60s is by The Byrds and written by Pete Seeger, based on Ecclesiastes 3, “To everything -- turn, turn, turn -- there is a season -- turn, turn, turn -- and a time for every purpose under heaven.” Balancing that shoe-like biblical sense of purpose and providence with the feather-like concept of sheer chance, the soundtrack also offers Bob Dylan’s 1962 hit, “The answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.” These two songs, I think, point powerfully to the different messages of the Feather and the Foot. Forrest waxes theological in his beautiful soliloquy over Jenny’s grave, as he considers the apparent contradiction and says, “I think it’s both . . . I think maybe both are happening at the same time.”
Moses, too, knew this back and forth movement of life. Born a Hebrew. Raised an Egyptian. Escaped to the desert as a nomad. Called back to Egypt. Then wandering, wandering, wandering – Turn, turn, turn -- seemingly Blowin’ in the wind for forty years, all in a quest for the Promised Land.
On Jordan's stormy banks I stand,
and cast a wishful eye
to Canaan's fair and happy land,
where my possessions lie.
I am bound for the promised land,
I am bound for the promised land;
Oh, who will come and go with me?
I am bound for the promised land!
Along our Journey there may be moments when we, like Moses, experience life’s epiphanies, an intimation of an Other world, of a Presence holy, mysterious, transcendent. The goal of such moments is not merely to sense ecstasy, but to be prepared for the journey ahead. “Moses, I’ve given you a glimpse of glory. Now put your shoes back on! Lace them tight! I’ve got a job for you, a mission.”
Well, to conclude, and consistent with the Back and Forth - -Turn, turn, turn – theme of this message, let me return to where I began, which was telling you about some self-lacing Super Nikes with Adaptive Fit.
Nike is a Greek word meaning victory. Paul used it in his letter to the Roman Christians. “If God is for us, who can be against us? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No! We are more than conquerors through him that loved us.” When Paul wrote “more than conquerors” the Greek word he used is hupernike or, quite literally, “Super Nike.”
This is a 15th century painting by Sandro Botticelli (1445 -1510) who completed an entire series called Scenes from the Life of Moses, now in the Vatican collection. At first I confess I didn’t much like this image of Moses removing his sandals. Something’s not right, at least not at all the way I have envisioned the Burning Bush experience.
But the more I looked at it the more I liked it for this message. There’s something athletic about this pose of Moses. On this Super Bowl Sunday I can imagine a similar locker room pose as superstars of the game lace up their cleats for the contest.
And honestly, I can’t tell whether Botticelli is showing us Moses removing his shoes or putting them on. Or, may I say with Forrest Gump-like wonder, perhaps both? He seems with both hands to be inspecting carefully the shoes, as a pilot might inspect an aircraft to determine whether it is ready for flight. Is Moses wondering if these shoes will render him Mission Ready?