Keep Your Feet

A Homily for Christmas Day 2025

My feet are ugly! How’s that for the beginning of a Christmas Day homily? But it’s true. My feet are ugly. I have my mother’s bunions and my father’s spindly toes. And the older I get the more my mother’s bunions push my father’s spindly toes into an awkward and crooked disposition. But, strangely enough, what makes my feet ugly is that which also makes them beautiful.

My parents are in my feet. Their parents were in their feet. And their parents in theirs and so on and so on. My feet therefore become, strangely enough, the “refulgence of God’s glory,” they represent in a very real way “the imprint of God’s being.” So, therefore, I think I will keep my feet; as my feet have always kept me grounded in something much deeper than the soil on which I stand.

Flannery O’Connor once pointedly described the Incarnation as a sort of arabesque. She described it as “a simple intricate design of brilliant color.” Strangely enough, what she was describing was a tattooed man in a leopard skin loin cloth, flexing his muscles at a county fair. A secular, maybe to some even a vulgar, image yet undeniably beautiful, as the plants, flowers, and animals inked on the man’s skin seemed to move, dance, and even breathe with life with every tightening and loosening of muscle and flesh.

When we celebrate a birthday, we are always also celebrating all the lives-lived that, by God’s grace, brought that particular birth about. It is no different for Jesus. As we celebrate his nativity, we celebrate the beaten and battered feet of Mary and Joseph who made the journey to Bethlehem, who, in their own feet, carried the imprint of all those ancestors whose lives all led up to the Incarnation. We’ve heard the genealogy of Jesus, given both in Luke and Matthew, once more this season. That “intricate design” of the deeply intertwined and mysterious workings of grace and sin across the centuries laboring to bring about the salvation of all.

We too are part of that on-going revelation of that “simple intricate design of brilliant color” found most often in the profane, the vulgar, and the ugly places of life. Just as O’Connor envisioned the beauty of the Incarnation in the body of a tattooed circus performer, that same beauty is found in the indistinguishable tightly-woven design of sin and grace in the lives of our ancestors leading to us and still being worked out in the mystery of sin and grace in our own hearts.

And, of course, Christmas points to Easter! And what do we do every year to prepare ourselves for the Resurrection? Well, we once again have to face our feet. We allow them to be washed. We let them be held and bathed in all their vulnerability, all their dis-ability, and all their fragility. The feet born out of the intricate design of sin and grace in our own histories and in our own hearts then become the same feet, beautiful upon the mountains, as they proclaim: Christ is Risen! Not in spite of the vulgar, the ugly, and the profane but somehow strangely enough, because of it!

Our feet carry us on a journey and if they are beaten up, a little crooked and weary, that’s because we’ve taken the journey seriously (that is to say, by not taking it too seriously). We’ve walked a life. We’ve stubbed our toes, broken an ankle, maybe lost a toe, or even the physical use of our feet… but our feet are our own. They represent that intricate design of brilliant color in their deformity… as they reveal the beautiful interplay of sin and grace across many lives leading to this place, this birth, this life. They’ve carried us on the first journey where home was behind and the world was ahead. And they will carry us on that final journey where the world is behind and home is ahead (Tolkien).

This Christmas my message to you is simple: “Keep your feet because they have always kept you, you; kept you grounded in something much deeper than the soil you stand on.” They carry more than a body across a surface. They remind us of how the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. They remind us of how beautiful are the feet of those who walk, run, crawl, or wheel their way to bring glad tidings, announce peace, bear good news, announce salvation. The journey of a lifetime which, by its nature, takes a toll on a pair of feet is a journey well worth the cost.

My feet are so ugly they are beautiful. As my mother’s bunions push my father’s spindly toes… I hear their voices and the voices that shaped them and the feet that bore those voices before them. No matter the indistinguishable and incomprehensible intricate design of sin and grace in any life: God is with us! And in that truth the ugly is beautiful, the secular, sacred, and the profane profoundly precious. And even a pair of rather ugly feet can reveal the power and the truth of the Incarnation.