Homily for 24 Mar 2019

24 Mar 2019

3^rd Sunday of Lent, Year C

It’s been a long winter: record low wind chills, snow, snow, and more snow, ice, blustery winds.  Our coats and our boots have been used quite a bit these past three months.  But with Spring very much upon us, I imagine some of us have already put our boots away, and are looking forward to going outside barefoot again.  And that’s an experience to enjoy, especially following months of having to keep our feet covered.

There’s something innocent and free, something real and honest about our bare feet touching the grass, or the dirt, or the sand.  And maybe that’s why God told Moses to remove his sandals, there by the burning bush.  God didn’t call the mountain there a “holy place;” he called it “holy ground.”  Moses was standing on holy ground.  And so it makes sense that God would say to him, “Take off your sandals and be in touch with the holy.” 

Our shoes are good, of course.  They protect our feet.  But if we don’t them off every now and then and go barefoot, we might forget what it’s like to be “innocent and free, real and honest” between our bodies and the earth.  But our shoes can also be a metaphor, they can be a symbol for our life with God, too.

Just think of the “shoes” we wear on our minds and on our souls.  If we’ve ever been hurt by someone, especially repeatedly, we might wear the shoe of mistrust toward that person.  And that can be a good thing, because it protects us.  Or maybe we have a shaky sense of ourselves, and so we might wear the shoe of self-defeating humor.  And, of course, these are just things we know as “defense mechanisms.”  Shoes are a defense mechanism, and we wear them on anything that might be vulnerable: our feet, our souls, our minds.

But if we wear those “shoes” over our soul and mind when it comes to God, well, it’s going to be a rather sterile relationship with him.  It’s why, whenever we come to God—in prayer, here at Mass, or whenever we encounter him in life—we have to take off our spiritual shoes, so we can be planted in him; so we can be in the most direct relationship possible with the life of our God.

You know, the first thing we do when come into church is we genuflect (or bow) before we sit down.  And that shouldn’t just be an automatic thing.  We do it because we’re coming into the presence of God, into the house of God—where he is God, not us.  And so, we take off any spiritual shoe we’re wearing that prevents us from acknowledging God as God.  That shoe might be pride, or arrogance, or a spirit of superiority over others.  It might even be an excessive piety where “what I do makes me holy.”  There are all sorts of spiritual shoes we can take off even before Mass starts, even before we step into the pew.

But we don’t that because God wants to “lord it over us” that he’s God and we’re not.  God wants us to take off our spiritual shoes because he wants us to play bare foot in the grass, to feel the joy of knowing him in our souls, to be free and unafraid to live in real faith, hope, and love. 

But, unlike the shoes we wear on our feet, it isn’t always easy to tell when we’ve taken off the shoes we wear on our mind and on our soul.  We don’t kick them off and see them lying on the floor.  But Jesus does mention a way we can tell if we’re at least beginning to walk barefoot on God’s holy ground.  And that’s through a spirit of repentance.

When you plant something in the ground, hopefully, something grows from it.  Well, when we take off our spiritual shoes and get more direct and honest with God, some good fruits begin to grow from within us.  And one of those fruits is a spirit of repentance.

Now, when we hear about “repentance” what enters the heart?  Maybe feelings of sorrow, guilt, heaviness.  Maybe an image of God’s finger pointing at you comes to mind.  Feelings of accusation, maybe unworthiness; maybe fear.  It certainly sounds bad when Jesus says, “If you do not repent, you will all perish.”  And fear is certainly a motivation for people to change their ways (in the Catholic world we call that “imperfect contrition”).

But, really, “repentance” refers to a change of mind or a change of heart.  It’s a much happier and more freeing experience than we might think.  For example, let’s say someone treated you badly twenty years ago.  And for twenty years you’ve been hanging on to that; it’s a dark mark in your personal history, and you hold a lot of resentment over what happened.  But then you realize it’s been twenty years—twenty years—and you want to let go of that anchor; you need to let go of it.  And so, you find it in your heart to forgive—not to excuse, but to forgive—and to move on.  Well, that’s repentance.  It’s a change of heart.  You step out from under the weight of it, and you feel a hundred times lighter.  The ability (or, at least, the desire) to do that is a fruit of being planted in God; of walking barefoot with God.

Another example might be just the opposite.  You find yourself walked all over by somebody.  He or she just tries to tear you down, to invalidate you as a person.  And you accept it...for a while.  But then God pokes at your conscience and he says, “You are worth more than that!”  And you agree with God.  And God compels you to stand up for yourself.  And so you put the bullies in their place—not in vengeance, but for the cause of your own God-given dignity and worth.  That’s another example of repentance.  It’s a change of heart.  It’s turning away from the sin of not respecting yourself.  You step out from under the oppression of others, and you feel alive again.

What God desires from us is repentance—not excessive guilt, not unending sorrowing and shame, and certainly not self-annihilation.  He desires repentance.  He wants us to take off our shoes—to take off anything that gets in between our souls and his grace and goodness, and he wants us to have a good and healthy “change of heart” with regard to everything.  A change of heart toward him.  A change of heart toward our friends, our neighbors, our “enemies.”  A change of heart toward our faith, toward the world.  A change of heart toward ourselves and who each of us in God’s eyes.

And that spirit of repentance is a good measure of how much we’ve followed the example of Moses, there at the burning bush, on that holy ground.  It’s a good measure of how much we’ve grown as sons and daughters of God.  From the Song of Songs [2:11], God says to each of us: “Arise, my friend, my beautiful one, and come!  For see, the winter is past, the rains are over and gone.  The flowers appear on the earth, the time of pruning the vines has come.”  And so has the time come to take off our shoes, to feel the dirt and grass of God’s holy ground between our spiritual toes, and to see what grows.