Proper 15 A

August 17, 2008 

Genesis 45:1-15

Psalm 124:1-8

Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

Matthew 15:10-28

Our kids never outgrew a pair of shoes before the shoes wore out. It wasn’t that the shoes I bought for them were shoddily made.  It was that I refused to buy shoes with growing room. Shoes that are too big will a rub a blister on your foot as quick as shoes that are too small. I knew that first hand.  My parents always bought our shoes at least a half size too big so we wouldn’t outgrow them as fast. I guess band-aids were cheap because all three of us wore them to cover the blisters on our heels and pinky toes until we were eighteen.

Sometimes we take up on the same traditions and ways of doing things as our parents, whether we want to or not, as though we were clones.  In some ways I did too.  But not when it came to buying shoes for my children. I would have liked my parents to be more considerate of the feet in my shoes, rather than being so determined to stick to their rule of buying no more than two pairs of shoes a year per kid. Despite all the jokes and cartoons, I know three little Arkansas kids who had to go barefoot some of the time just to air out the blisters.  My Grandpa and his buddies used to tease me about that. They told me if I didn’t wear shoes my feet would grow as big as theirs. I never did really believe that until I got to the fourth grade. 

My fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Wilson, was four feet tall. She might have weighed ninety pounds but I doubt it.  She was a tiny little woman with glasses and salt and pepper hair cut short, AND she wore a nine and a half shoe! I never will forget the day, at the beginning of the school year, she dragged a chair out in front of the class and stood up in it so we could all get a good look at her shoes.  Those little bitty legs tucked down in those long black shoes looked like someone standing in the back end of a canoe. I remember that like it was yesterday.  I remember the story she told too. She said for ten years or more she was a miserable person, walked around mad all the time. She didn’t like her job or her colleagues, didn’t like her church, didn’t like her friends. Everyone she knew was either lazy or incompetent or both. Even the strangers she had to deal with around town were ill-mannered and poorly groomed. She never felt good and nothing ever went right for her. One day she ran up against a persistent shoe salesman who refused to bring her a seven and a half shoe to stuff her nine and a half foot into. She said that very day her life changed for the better. She let the man talk her into buying a shoe that actually fit her foot. She had corns and bunions, and callouses on top of callouses. Her toe nails were messed up from curling her toes under all those years. She said she was always ashamed to be such a small woman and have such big feet. Her sisters and her mother all wore five and a half and sixes so for years she tried to hide the fact that her feet were so big. She made herself miserable. She judged everyone as harshly as she judged her own feet. After a time of wearing the proper size shoe she quit being so ashamed of her feet. When she started to care more about the feet inside her shoes she started to look at people differently. That’s how her life changed for the better.

Rules and traditions are meant to serve people. Not the other way around. Jesus once said, "The Sabbath was made for man.  Man was not made for the Sabbath." In today’s Gospel, the scribes and Pharisees have it backwards again. They always do. Neither Jesus nor his disciples followed the tradition of the elders in the ritual of washing their hands before a meal. Now the ritual had nothing to do with hygiene.  It was to symbolize inner purity.  To be fit to present yourself in worship to God one had to be clean as opposed to unclean.  But that also referred to the condition of one’s spiritual heart. 

The most common way people became unclean was through their hands, by touching a bleeding or diseased person, or a corpse.  Of course Jesus deliberately did all those things in his earthly ministry for the sake of love. Over and over again Jesus said love and mercy supercede rules and tradition. The condition of our spiritual hearts has to be more important to us than holding steadfast to philosophies, traditions and rules, or doing good deeds and supporting good deed doers, so we appear to be godly and righteous when our hearts are far from it and we’re quick to judge others whether they are worthy of mercy and compassion.

A young father of three came in last week needing money for gasoline. He used all the money he had to buy food for his family. He didn’t have enough gas in his car to get it home to them. He had a medical disability that could well have been the result of past drug use. Was he worthy of mercy? Jesus would say he was.

My father died of emphysema because he smoked cigarettes for forty years. I still think he deserved mercy when he was suffering. The Jesus I know from the Gospels would agree.

There is a young deaf woman I have helped over the years. She brought a friend to me the other day because she said she wanted her friend to know which churches she could go to when she needed help. I asked the woman who has been here before, if she has a church that she attends in this area. She told me she did and which one it was.  (A large church in Mountain Home.) She quickly defended her church saying, “They can’t afford to help people the way you can because they have a big new building that they have to pay for.”  Hmm. Isn’t that interesting? That sounds like being more concerned about the shoes you buy than the feet inside them to me.

Whatever it takes to soften our hearts so that we’re less quick to judge, less quick to impose our rules traditions, and expectations of others and more quick to show love and mercy every chance we get; whatever it takes to soften our hearts so love and acceptance comes more easily, is what we need to do. That was the point of Ms. Wilson’s story to her fourth grade class. That is also what our Lord modeled for us in his earthly ministry.  And he is counting on us to keep it up for his sake.