day 8 / noisy feet
Sunday, December 5, 2021
RCL Readings: Luke 1:68-79 | Baruch 5:1-9 or Malachi 3:1-14 | Philippians 1:3-11 | Luke 3:1-6
When Zoom meetings and audio recordings are going on at my home, I tell my kids to use quiet feet as well as whispered voices to keep noise levels as low as possible. Between wood floors and creaky stairs, footsteps can create a lot of interfering sound, so if someone has to be moving around while a mic is on, we take slower, softer, and sometimes shoeless steps.
Quiet feet encapsulates one way that Christians have thought about what striving for peace means. Quiet feet peace is all about not making waves or disturbing the soundscape. Bodies traversing this way of peace would rather move slowly or not at all if their presence and participation on this path could draw attention and cause discord.
Quiet feet can be a helpful strategy in certain circumstances. When you want to support a loved one who is dealing with grief, they may need softer footsteps from you rather than stomping feet. But in societies structured by inequities, quiet feet is also a way of disempowering people. For people pushed to the margins of society, quiet feet in the social landscape means: Be invisible. Tone down your voice. Make peace with your disempowerment. Don’t disrupt the comfort and peace of the people in power.
In the song of Zechariah in Luke, peace makes a different sound. Zechariah envisions feet that had been quiet and motionless getting up and treading on a road of peace. These feet would move with deliberation, making their presence known. Their steps would clap the ground, raising dust clouds around their ankles or percussive rumbles on stone in their wake. Theirs is a noisy peace because it involves bodies acting and moving, whether on foot or with mobility aids, not only to realize an end of conflict but also to redress harms and reconfigure relationships to build generative peace for all, especially for those who have had to tiptoe in invisibility.
The noisy peace that Zechariah’s song amplifies is the kind of peace that Advent invites us to compose. This season offers us time for taking steps to create peace that rumbles, echoes, and punctuates to build mutually life-giving relationships with ourselves, with other people, within a society, and with all of creation. In this invitation, we hear the good news that this road of peace is made for our bodies to traverse. And every body is needed here. This peace cannot be seen or heard without all bodies being seen and heard.
Where can you bring noisy feet this Advent? What sounds might your feet make on the way of peace?
Notes
Image of “Shoes” is by Dominik Martin on the Unsplash website
