Every sport seems to come with occupational hazards.

Take baseball. Baseball pitchers tend to end up with gimpy, arthritic elbows.

Take football. Football players can end up with rickety, rocky knees.

Take ballet. Ballet dancers almost always end up with the most gnarled, nobbed, ugly stumpy feet you can imagine. In fact, once you've seen a dancer's unslippered foot, you can never watch the grace and beauty, the fluid movement across the floor and into the air, in the same way. How can they move so seemingly effortlessly on such bandaged, bunioned, blistered feet? The box at the end of a ballerina's toe shoe makes it possible for her to go up on point. But only by crunching and compressing the cartilage, bone, and muscles of the foot. But for the sake of the dance, the ballerina gladly submits to the gradual, torturous deformation of her foot.

There's only one thing you needed to know about Mother Teresa. And that one thing said it all. Her feet.

A few years before Mother Theresa died, our friend Shane Claiborne, an urban monk in Philadelphia's "The Simple Way" movement, had the opportunity to work and worship with the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. In keeping with Eastern tradition, Mother Theresa and all the sisters ritually take their shoes off as they kneel and enter into the hallowed ground of prayer.

Shane was stunned to see that when Mother Theresa's feet were unshod, they were so gnarled and twisted they appeared to be crippled and deformed by some malady. After prayer Shane inquired of one sister, "What disease caused Mother Theresa's feet to look like that?"

"Oh, it's not a disease," the sister replied, "it's just that when the community receives a new donation of shoes, Mother always has everyone else choose first. She only wears whatever shoes are left over." A lifetime of wearing mismatched, undersized, broken-out, crumpled-up shoes had transformed Mother Theresa's own feet into mismatched, undersized, broken and crumpled appendages. Like a ballet dancer, Mother Theresa's feet reflected her dedication, her complete submersion of self in mission, in witness, in love-for-neighbor. The grace-filled dance of her life was carried out on ugly, wounded feet.

When Jesus appeared before his disciples, they were both terrified and overjoyed. Their typical human reactions and expectations led them to rejoice that their master was alive and yet recoil with horror because they knew that Jesus had been killed. (Note: Jesus didn't die. Jesus was killed.)

Since Jesus had been killed, this thing before them must be some sort of ghost, an otherworldly apparition, unpredictable, possibly dangerous. To convince them that he is flesh and bone Jesus gets right down to the nitty-gritty, grubby reality of physical existence. He shows them his hands and his feet.

This might not seem very dramatic to us. But in Eastern culture feet are considered the dirtiest, most uncouth and unclean part of the human body. By showing his hands and feet Jesus demonstrates not only the physical reality of his flesh and blood; not only reveals again the wounds from the nails that had held him on the cross until he died. But Jesus also shows his disciples the shockingly common, grubby and grungy realness of his resurrected self. Jesus' real-life feet are dusty and dirty, pierced and bloody. Like all human feet they're an affront to the Eastern sense of decency and decorum.

Since throughout his ministry their Master had always been doing and saying things that shocked common sensibilities, it may have been this action, more than anything else, that helped convince the doubting disciples that it was in fact Jesus himself standing before them. Who else but Jesus would stick his feet up in the faces of his friends and ask them to take a good look, even to touch them!

When the American troops finally entered Baghdad and the threat of any retaliation from Saddam's troops was obviously gone, a strange scene began to play out across all our television sets. Iraqi citizens from all over the world--from Baghdad to Basran, from Tikrut to Dearborn, Michigan--began attacking statues and paintings of Saddam Hussein with their shoes. They assaulted his face with sandals, rubber flip flops, leather shoes, Nike sneakers--any kind of shoe.

What was up with these shoes? We've seen statues toppled before: in Russia, in Romania, in Poland, in Berlin. But Lenin or Stalin, Hitler or the Berlin Wall, were not attacked with shoes. Why shoes in the Middle East?

Shoes have deep significance in the East, a significance lost on Westerners.

As one commentator raised with the proper Eastern perspective explains it:

The foot occupies the lowest rung in the bodily hierarchy and the shoe, in addition to being something in which the foot is placed, is in constant contact with dirt, soil and worse. The sole of the shoe is the most unclean part of an unclean object. In northern India, where I grew up, the exhortation 'Joote maro!' ('Hit him with shoes!') was invoked when one sought to administer the most demeaning punishment . . . In the Muslim world, according to Hume Horan, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 'To have the sole of the shoe directed toward one is pretty much the equivalent of someone in our culture giving you the finger.' Matthew Gordon, a historian of Islam, says that since one takes one's shoes off before entering a mosque--as a way of maintaining the purity of the place of worship-- 'The use of a shoe as something to hit you with is an inversion, directly impurity and pollution at the object of the beating." (Tunku Varadarajan, "Expressive Soles: Footloose, Tyranny-Free," The Wall Street Journal, 11 April 2003, W13.)

No wonder the Iraqis who had felt the harsh heel of Saddam's brutal boot for so long took joyous advantage of the opportunity to smack him in the face with the soles of their shoes.

The feet were seen as the dirtiest part of the human body. Bar none. When Jesus knelt down to wash his disciples' feet; when the resurrected Jesus invited his disciples to touch his feet, he was teaching all his followers not to lose their footing.

The church wants the world at its feet. But the place for the church is at the feet of Jesus, who sends his people out to work at the feet of the world.

Have you lost your footing? Do you want people sitting at your feet? Or are you willing to get down and dirty and kneel at the feet of the world's need?

Possible endings of sermon:

I've always found foot-washing ceremonies to be clunky and awkward. But the foot-washing ritual is one of the most powerful symbols in the Christian tradition. I've been searching for an ‘Ancient Future’ retrieval of this tradition that would be rich in meaning and metaphor.

A college chaplain answered my prayer. Here is how you can end this sermon, not so much with words as with actions.

Invite forward your Lay Leader, Head Deacon, Mission Chairperson, or someone you wish to pray for that week (e.g. a high school student who should be celebrated). The two of you stand behind the altar, and while you put your arm around them ask them how best you can pray for them. After this exchange, invite everyone to join the two of you in prayer. As soon as you bow your head, drop to the ground, pull out of your pocket a handkerchief, and while you're praying shine their shoes. Keep praying until you've shined both of them, and then conclude your prayer on your knees.

You might also work this ‘Ancient Future’ foot washing into your communion ritual as an alternative ending to the sermon.