3 L C Take off your shoes and stay a while

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

What situations make you take your shoes off? For most people, it’s the end of  a work day, arriving at home and finally being relaxed. I listen to a podcast by a guy who thinks shoes are protection from dirt and disease, so he wears them whenever he’s outside of his house but immediately takes them off when he gets home and insists on his family and friends doing the same. I’ve never associated shoes with dirt and disease so I tend to wear them in my house and I’m not always cognizant when I visit other people’s homes of this norm. My guess is that, if the host of that podcast came to my house, he would be horrified and never take his shoes off. 

In the first reading, when Moses approached the burning bush, the first thing he heard was the order to take off his shoes. Moses wasn’t worried about germs or dirt, however. He was in the desert so sand would already be everywhere. He was curious as to how a bush that’s on fire doesn’t just quickly burn up. Apparently, in the heat of the desert, spontaneous combustion is fairly common. It gets hot and the heat of the sun gets magnified somewhere causing a dry plant to just start on fire. So, the first image of this theophony, this experience of God revealing himself to a human being, is with the powerful symbol of fire. It’s powerful because it can be used for good or evil. Jesus called the abode of the evil one Gehenna, which was the name of a garbage dump on the outskirts of Jerusalem that was always on fire. I think burning garbage is a pretty good scent to describe a place I never want to visit. But fire can be good too, as in the tongues of fire that come to rest on the disciples at Pentecost. This image from our first reading, a bush on fire but not consumed, has been used to illustrate how the Holy Spirit wants us to empower us to energetically use the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love in a way that will not exhaust us. That was also a clue to Moses that something divine is happening. As I said before, Moses approached the Burning Bush and heard a voice ordering him to take off his shoes. Imagine being in a place where things are spontaneously starting on fire and being asked to remove your shoes. You can’t run away. It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s like someone is asking you to walk on hot coals. It takes a lot of trust. God revealed to Moses that he needed him to return to Egypt in order to save all the Israelites from slavery. Remember that Egypt was a place Moses had recently left because he killed someone who was mistreating a fellow Israelite. God was telling Moses to go back to Egypt and do, on a grander scale, what had just caused him to flee from the country; to stand up against, not some unknown Egyptian, but the leader of the Egyptians to defend, not one beat-up Israelite, but all God’s enslaved people. 

In my mind, that’s what makes Moses’ trust so remarkable. He merely asked for God’s name. Of course, that’s not as simple as it sounds. Part of this has to do with control. If you know a deity’s name, you can summon him. However, the other really tragic thing is what needing to know God’s name implies. Moses has lived among God’s people and he knows them. They have been living for four hundred years in Egypt because Joseph brought them there to escape a drought. For four hundred years, they’ve been living among people who have multiple “gods” with names and Moses feels like they have forgotten their own God. So, he needs to know his name to tell it to them. God’s response is really a non-response because he won’t be categorized as one God among many. It’s like when people say they don’t believe in God because they can’t see him. I think to myself, “Do you not believe in the author of your favorite book because you can’t find her anywhere in it? Do you not believe a building has a designer because you can’t find him anywhere in it? God isn’t just another thing that exists in this world, he is existence itself. His essence is existence, to use philosophical language. Still, God sort of gives Moses an out because also said that he was the God of their Fathers, the patriarchs. 

I would describe God as being frighteningly gentle in this encounter. In other words, a bush on fire that isn’t being consumed could be a scare tactic, but it becomes an object that draws Moses into conversation. Asking Moses to take off his shoes could seem like God’s cornering you, putting you into a situation that you can’t leave. But instead he’s asking you to relax around him and put your trust in him. He was, in both ways, inviting Moses to show his vulnerability by showing that he trusted God was merciful and that God doesn't delight in punishment or dirty tricks. Most religions with multiple gods believe they could play tricks on human beings. In contrast, the one true God is all powerful but also all trustworthy and all merciful for those who seek his mercy. 

That’s how the gospel intersects with the first reading. In it, we hear about people delighting in other people’s suffering. Most scholars believe that the blood Pilate mingled with the Temple sacrifices would have been his political rival's blood and that he probably dropped a tower on a group of other dissidents. It’s easy to celebrate other people’s suffering. On the internet, they call it instant karma. If God operated this way, he would wipe us all out and create a world made up entirely of golden retrievers. But, instead, using the fig tree as symbolic of God’s people, Jesus recommends giving some extra time. Perhaps, with fertilizer, the tree of humanity will produce good fruit. 

The good fruit God wants from us is repentance. He knows we make mistakes and, while he doesn’t delight in our mistakes, he does delight when we seek to be forgiven. God loves us most when we recognize our own imperfections and ask for forgiveness. It can be frightening to do this, to take off our shoes metaphorically and come into the confessional to admit our imperfections. But remember that God is frighteningly gentle. We may think he should yell at us or slap us around but that’s not how God works and that’s certainly not how he wants me to work either. Instead, he wants to reveal himself when we are vulnerable. I hope you will experience the frighteningly gentleness of God in the sacrament of reconciliation this Lenten season.