Beautiful Feet
a sermon based on Romans 10:5-15
by Rev. Thomas Hall

Did you notice how the internet is shaping perceptions about God? Listen to the words that recently came across my computer. As I read these words to you, think about what they suggest to you about God’s disposition toward us.

If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it.
If God had a wallet, your photo would be in it.
God sends you flowers every spring.
. . . sends you a sunrise every morning.
Whenever you want to talk, God listens.
Though God could live anywhere in the universe,
God desires your heart for his home. [1]

Setting aside our first literary impressions (Eeeee-yuk! Gag! Saccharin!, etc.), what kind of God do those words paint? Apparently somebody in cyberspace believes that God has feelings toward humanity much like we might have toward our own children. But is that how God feels about us? About me?

A God that keeps our picture in his wallet (or in her purse), is just not the kind of God that most Christians know. My internet friend envisions a God who highly values humanity. Reduced to a proposition: people matter to God. Of course we do give homage to the idea of human worth when we sing Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, and affirm:

Thou our Father, Christ our brother,
all who live in love are thine,
teach us how to love each other,
lift us to the joy divine.

Gospel song lyrics from What a Friend We Have in Jesus suggest the same. And perhaps in those unguarded moments, we might even slip into one of those off-the-wall songs (via PowerPoint) that remind us how much we matter to God. But it’s one thing to sing words about our value to God but quite another to act as if they were true. As we think about the lesson in Romans 10, let me ask you: how passionately do you believe that people matter to God?

In his book, Building a Contagious Church, Mark Mittelberg suggests a simple test to determine how deeply we own this simple truth. He says that when we really, really believe deep down that people matter to God, it will dramatically affect our checkbooks and calendars. He says, "We should be able to open up our checkbook ledgers and say, ‘Here’s where I’ve invested my resources"-by taking a non-churched, pre-Christian friend out to breakfast or lunch, or inviting someone over to our home. [2]

Seems that Paul is saying something like that in today’s lesson. Of his own countrymen, he says, "my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved." And of both gentiles and Jewish people Paul writes, " . . . the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ " In other words, salvation proves beyond any reasonable doubt that people matter to God.

But we certainly can’t sit around mumbling the mantra, "people matter to God oooommmm" without doing something about it. Nor can we sit around our summer camp fires singing, "People Need the Lord," and then turn in for the night. Paul the pragmatist is not satisfied with the truth that we matter to God. So what? So Paul probes his listening community: "How are they ever going to know?" he asks. And "How can they call on the name of the Lord if they don’t even know who the Lord is?" "So who’s going to break the news to them?"

So this lesson could end with an invitation to reclaim the vision of that axiom, people matter to God. But I think Paul has an even larger vision here. Seems that some of us are actually invited to leave our places of origin, comforts of home, and to follow those words to the ends of the earth. Because right after this discussion about how human beings need to hear about the saving acts of God, he quotes Isaiah where it reads, "how beautiful are the feet of them that share Good News."

I grew up among Christians who deeply believed that people matter to God. So much was my exposure to this truth, that some from my own church traveled the globe with the good news. So early on, my collection of heroes included Roy Rodgers and Dale Evans, Superman, GI Joe-and Orville Carlson. This last guy was a farmer in Paynesville, Minnesota who left the tractor one day to head for Africa where he spent the rest of his life to serve others who were definitely not from Paynesville.

In our little parsonage we welcomed these people with the beautiful feet. I reveled in their stories of narrow escapes from hostile tribes, from twenty-foot pythons and ferocious crocs that surfed the Amazon on the prowl for bathing missionaries. And even after all these years, I can still see their show and tell souvenirs balanced on the narrow altar rail that formed a U-shape around the pulpit area. The baskets and stretched skin drums, the witch doctor headdress, and the rattles, cobra skins, and metal tipped spears. The best part of their visit was when big Verle Lohse would shut all the lights off and the missionaries would shuffle their colored slides through the projector. Sometimes we would see the sky and trees upside down, but once uprighted, we Scandinavian-types would be transported to another world of strange-looking cows and dirt paths, bicycles and those pictures of brown skinned women grinding wheat topless in front of their huts which would make us ten year olds sit up and squint bug-eyed.

When I read of "beautiful feet" I think of people like Ray and Beth. I was eight years old when skinny, bean pole Ray Trask first came to our church in Monticello, Minnesota. Just out of college and just married, Ray and Beth were preparing to go to Indonesia. I had never heard of the place; they probably hadn’t either until a couple of months before when a missionary spoke at their church and urged others to pray about serving God in Indonesia. Somehow Ray and Beth knew deep inside that God had called them to be those missionaries. And so they had come to our church with maps and colored slides to share with our little congregation of 40 some folks about their vision for the lost in Indonesia. Their vision never dimmed when I saw Ray over twenty years later in Pennsylvania. Ray Trask had come home to care for Beth who had succumbed to a life-threatening virus in Indonesia. Beth’s been gone for five years now. Just recently I got an email from Nepal-from another missionary. "I’m working with someone who says he knows you; his name is Ray Trask." So old Ray’s back at it; the skinny, bean pole kid who came to my church thirty years ago with what he described as "a call."

I was all of nineteen when one night, I came to hear a Christian band. But this group had a new twist-they saw themselves as Christian rock missionaries. They sought to share their faith in the language of youth culture. So they had two tons of music equipment to back up their vocalists. I had never heard the gospel come bellowing through speakers sitting atop scaffolding, trap sets, electric flutes, and guitars. But that night God spoke to me through this strange medium and my feet changed-carried me to South Africa and Zimbabwe for intense rock n roll n Jesus. We played our loud music to the Bantus working in squalid mining camps, separated for six months at a time from their wives and children. Ended up traveling for six years within hundreds of cultures to share Good News.

This lesson reminds me of a memorable statement that I once heard Oswald J. Smith, founder of the People’s Church of Toronto utter. Oswald Smith tried unsuccessfully eight or nine times to become one of the beautiful feet people and travel to distant lands with the gospel. His health was tenuous and he was never able to realize his dreams of becoming a missionary. "Well, if I can’t go myself, then I’ll send someone in my place." So he did. Founded a church that has over 5,000 show up for worship each week. And the week that I was in attendance, they had just raised over $1,000, 000 for missions. It was on that occasion that I heard his words that I will never, ever forget. He looked out over this vast crowd of Christians and challenged, "No one has the right to hear the gospel twice, until everyone has heard it once." That’s the spirit that drove Paul to don beautiful feet and face the dangers of lengthy trips throughout the Roman Empire.

Times have changed in our post-modern world. But it is not unreasonable to believe that in a congregation of five hundred, perhaps two or three members have been given beautiful feet-people who have been called to go beyond the normal boundaries of Christian service. That call could come in the form of a skilled modern medical missionary, a Peace Corps volunteer, a missionary pilot, a seminary or elementary school educator or a nurse or an agricultural consultant or a pastor. Maybe we pastors need to hold up this vision of beautiful feet and challenge our congregations to extraordinary service in God’s name to those who have yet to hear or benefit from Good News.

Shane Claiborne, a social-activist and missionary friend of mine who serves the poor and marginalized of Philadelphia has an interesting story about beautiful feet. Just graduating from Eastern University, Shane sought ministry opportunities. So, on a whim, he tried to reach Mother Teresa in Calcutta.

"I want to speak to Mother Teresa," Shane said over the phone. "Yes," a tired voice over the crackling line, "what do you want?" For twenty minutes Shane spoke personally with Mother Teresa and it ended with an invitation for Shane to join her in Calcutta. So Shane spent a year with the diminutive Yugoslav sister.

At lunch one day, a sister spoke to Shane. "Have you noticed her feet?"

"Yeah. Her feet are all gnarled and deformed," Shane noted. "Why?" he asked.

"You see, every time a shipment of shoes arrives at the orphanage, she gives all the shoes away and keeps whatever is left. They’re usually ill-fitting, not even a matching pair. So she wears whatever isn’t used. After doing that for years, her feet have become bent and deformed."

Deformed feet . . . or . . . beautiful feet? I guess it all depends. Calloused feet, bent feet, deformed feet are suddenly extraordinarily beautiful feet when we believe deep down that people matter to God so much that if God had a refrigerator, our name would be on it . . .and if God had a wallet, our photo would be in it. Amen.

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[1] From an email I received, though original source unknown.
[2] Mark Mittelberg, Building a Contagious Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publ. House, 2000), page 35.