Walking the Way

Psalm 119:98-105
Luke 24:28-32


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

July 8, 2007

Nancy and I are reading a series of quaint and inspiring detective novels set in Botswana. Perhaps you know it. It’s about a traditionally built, wise and capable, woman, Madame Ramotswe and her be-speckled aspiring, assistant Madame Makutsi. Together they run the “No. One Ladies’ Detective Agency” in Botswana. It is also the only lady’s detective agency in Botswana!

Madame Makutsi, behind her extra large glasses, within her aspiring spirit, struggles to make something of herself over and against her modest origins and her many challenges and tragedies in life, like many of us here. In her own shy way she will from time to time talk-out her doubts and fears and hopes, not so much with her friend, benefactor, and boss, Madame Romotswe, but with her shinny blue shoes. Because she is shy she looks down a lot. But her downcast eyes are more often than not greeted by a voice of admonition, even confrontation, from her shoes. Her shoes are almost parental in what they say back to her. They guide and direct her, they encourage and console her. They are a lamp unto her feet.

As God in prayer knows our inward being and our thoughts before they are formed on our lips, so Madame Makutsi’s shoes know her, read her, and answer her. And they will tell her things that only a best friend, or God, might say.

We should be so lucky! Although I think she is often taken a-back by what her shoes, her shinny shoes, say to her. At least they take her seriously and at least they have something to offer to say. The creator of Madame Makutsi and all the other lively and real characters in the series of the “No. One Ladies Detective Agency” is Alexander McCall Smith, who is a professor of ethics in Edinburgh, Scotland. He recently spoke at George Mason University. No doubt, as an ethicist,
he sees her shoes as a kind of voiced-conscience. Without being moralistic or didactic, all these books of his focus on the moral complexities of life and how they are resolved, or can be, within the human heart. His books are both uplifting and down to earth. And we, ourselves so much need that combination: words that uplift our downcast faces and enlighten our earth-way path.

Our Bible tells us that God’s biblical word is such a lamp and light. Now, as someone who likes the philosophy of religion, who likes the psychology of the soul, who likes the prophetic voice of truth, I’m also aware of how down to earth the Bible really is. Inspiring, but down to earth. The Bible is not an academic book and that is good for us. At Barnes and Noble it might be found as “An Idiot’s Guide To Walking in the Way.”

‘Walking the way” is the guiding image from scripture today. In the Hebrew bible, “Walking the way” of righteousness; in the Christian testament, “Walking the way” with Jesus, after disappointment, into new life.

I have a young friend who recently emailed his parents after walking 11 kilometers on the Great Wall of China. His trek, and his future journey in life, focused me on feet and walking, on long journeys and needed faith.

In biblical times feet obviously figured in the language and the lives of people in a way less known to us. Our feet, not unlike our soul and spirit, are not something we think about much, or even see. However, recently I had dinner in one of your homes and I was greatly encouraged to take off my shoes! To set my feet free, which I gladly did. And I often join Jim Levy in the walk-in-socks mode.

There is a film I’ve heard about where the dinner time gathering is all filmed under the table, recording the feet, as we hear the people talk.

But in the imaginal world of the Bible, feet are not so concealed, and they have ethical, emotional, spiritual, poetic, significance. Needless to say, one of my favorite Bible stories is the one where the weeping-for-freedom woman washes Jesus’ feet with oils and tears and dries them with her hair! And one of my most meaningful experiences as a minister was in a funeral service where I ended up preaching the sermon bare footed.

A young father of two teenage girls, who was an avid, nearly professional, bicyclist, was struck by a car on one of Chester’s
country roads. The packed church was colorfully filled with his fellow cyclists in their bright cycle-sport gear and shoes. His wife gave me a pair of his red rubber clogs to wear. Half-way through the service I took them off as a way of honoring both that I stood in his shoes and could not stand in his shoes, that now his shoes stood empty. I just put them on the floor for all to see, like those leather boots reversed in the stirrups of the riderless horse in Kennedy’s funeral procession.

Someone in the Chester Church video taped the funeral of the young father and husband, I’m told the camera zooms in on my bare feet as they emerge from my robe as I walked and talked of him and God. That’s not an unbiblical image. In fact, when you start sorting for feet in the Bible a whole new angle on the world is revealed, one that the Bible seemed to assume. My first church secretary gave me a coffee mug at Christmas with a Bible pictured on one side and this from Romans 10:15 on the other, “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things.” I wondered how she knew!

We heard from that long, long, Psalm 119 this morning. It is full of body parts; God’s hands; our hearts; our eyes; and that mystery place, our soul; and our feet. In Psalm 119, the earth stands firm in God’s word, which holds back our feet from every evil way. God’s word is a lamp to our feet, a light to our path.

So, I say to you: not only is God’s word a different angle on the world it is an enduring guide for our lives. It is not a word heard everywhere. Not unlike Madame Makutsi’s shiny blue shoes, words of conscience, challenge, insight and direction. God’s word speaks to us from a wholly different point of view than does the world’s word. The point of my imaginal reverie on feet is that God’s word is as unusual to us now as is the Bible’s familiarity with feet unusual to us. We are as far from living in God’s word as we are removed from being aware of our feet. That lost, that ungrounded.

Our gospel passage is the walk down the road to Emmaus of the disappointed, despairing, disheartened, disoriented, disciples, Cheopas and his friend.
They remind me so much of us. They say, to the unknown walking companion who turns out to be Jesus, how disappointed they are, “We had thought he, the now crucified Jesus, was to be the salvation, the redemption of Israel.” How many times have we thought we had it right, the fix, the answer, the solution if not the salvation? “But we had thought the mid-term congressional elections would be the end of the war.” But we had thought that the Supreme Court’s Brown vs Topeka Board of Education would be the end of racial segregation in our public schools. “But we had thought that the Woman’s Revolution would bring about equality between the genders.”

We are not the first to learn the difference between God’s will and our hopes, or just the gap between the ideal and the real. Recall the astonishing history told here by Wiley Prugh and written up by Don Maccallum, 1959. The Presbyterian Church will build a 1500 member new church on the required 5 acres of land, in Rockville, Maryland. 1966. The United Church of Christ will expand its new church start in Rockville into 1500 member suburban Christian mecca. But, in 1967, two 200 plus member churches merge to make a 400 member United Church dedicated to changing suburbia, ministry, and mission, in a time of violent change.

How many must have been saying, “But we had thought....” We have thought, and hoped, that because we saw God on the side of a lot of things we call good, then God’s will would be done.

Recently, I was a part of a very intense discussion within a small group here at church. As we each shared our anger or our heart-break over a variety of injustices that touch our lives, I felt we dug ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole of our own political disappointments and psychological despairs. And our sense of personal powerlessness was palpable. That does not mean that we have not known what God wants. But we have also thought we knew when God wanted it – now; and how God wanted to do it – through us; and where God wanted it done, frankly in America. And a lot of us just cannot believe that we and God have not really brought in the new age! So it’s pretty easy to scapegoat onto our political opponents or our religious foes. Few of us question whether the state of our own virtue is a part of the problem. So it must be our opponents that have kept the kingdom from coming. Or maybe there just is not a God after all, only good causes struggling to prevail.

What I felt was missing for all of us in that good discussion was God: a belief in God; a feeling of God’s presence; a trust in God’s way. I believe most of us do not have a spiritual life, a practice of the presence of God, to support us when our belief in God seems to be contradicted by the evidence of a godless-looking world. In the biblical world your feet were your wheels. If we were to practice care for our spirits and our neighbor’s spirit, like they cared for their feet we would have better spirits. If we invested and cared for our spiritual life like we do our real wheels, our cars, we would have a way to travel through the valley of dark things that are around us, and strewn across our paths.

I saw a lamp unto my feet the other day. You’ve seen it too. All along the boundaries of the Metro are circles of light laid in the floor. They are to keep our feet away from danger and disaster. It’s something one needs down underground in cavernous shadows.

There was also, a led dot light sign for my uplifted eyes. The printout told me what was coming, and how long I would have to be patient and wait.

I looked down towards my feet. That link of circle lights kept me from evil, each light became a lamp to my soul, it was a prayer chain of silent light blessing me and guiding my way. And with my soul so grounded in the presence of the Holy Spirit, I looked up and my inspired eyes saw the message lights of what to expect and when. There was such wisdom and guidance I wrote them down for you. The led-light sign announced this: “Nothing worth doing is completed in our life time...” (Reinhold Niebuhr). It had a little infinity sign after it so I knew how many minutes I had left to be saved by hope, an infinity of minutes. Then it said: “Everything true, beautiful and good is both here and on its way.” Instead of minutes to wait, since the true and the beautiful and the good are already partly here, it just said, “known by faith.”

Then it flashed up, “You are not as virtuous as you want to be, therefore love.” So walking with others in the way of love was my good news. And then it said “Shady Grove 6 minutes,” and I knew I’d be home soon.

May it be with you, as well, in your walking the way on this earth. Amen.