Howard Thurman, Black History Month, and Jesus
The following is a sermon preached at the Midland Lutheran College chapel service on Tuesday, February 3, 2009. Quotations from the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman are taken from Jesus and the Disinherited (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1949; cited as JD) and Deep Is the Hunger: Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951; cited as DIH)
Good morning. I’d like to begin today with a story told by the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman:
I watched him for a long time. He was so busily engaged in his task that he did notice my approach until he heard my voice. Then he raised himself erect with all the slow dignity of a man who had exhausted the cup of haste to the very dregs. He was an old man. . . . Further talk between us revealed that he was planting a small grove of pecan trees. The little treelets were not more than two and a half or three feet in height. My curiosity was unbounded.
“Why did you not select larger trees so as to increase the possibility of your living ot see them bear at least one cup of nuts?”
He hixed his eyes directly on my face. . . . Finally he said, “These small trees are cheaper and I have very little money.”
“So you do not expect to live to see the trees reach sufficient maturity to bear fruit?”
“No, but is that important? All my life I have eaten fruit from trees that I did not plant, why should I not plant trees to bear fruit fro those who may enjoy them long after I am gone. Besides, the man who plants because he will reap the harvest has no faith in life. . . .”
The fact is that much of life is made up of reaping where we have not sown and planting where we shall never reap. (DIH, 48–49)
“Much of life is made up of reaping where we have not sown, and planting where we shall never reap.” I’m going to spend the next few minutes talking a bit about what has been sown before us, gathering up a bit of the harvest for you to consider, helping you think about where to plant.
This month—February—is Black History Month. As you know, the church has played and continues to play a central role in the African American experience and in the interplay between white and black people in the United States. Among the many insightful, courageous figures in the Black Church tradition is Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, from whom we just heard. By examining some of his writings, I believe we can learn something about why African American history is worth attending to and something about the Christian tradition more broadly.
Dr. Thurman was born in 1899 and died in 1981. In the 1930s he traveled to India, where he met with Gandhi, and he brought Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance back to the civil rights movement in the United States. He was later dean of the chapels at both Howard University and Boston University—he was at BU while Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was completing his doctorate there, and he served as a spiritual advisor and mentor for Dr. King. Beginning in 1944 he also pastored in San Francisco a racially integrated, multicultural church. The themes of his most noted book, Jesus and the Disinherited, published in 1949, continue to resonate today. He is a central figure in the history of the civil rights movement and in American religious history.
So this man was important more than fifty years ago. Why ought we listen to a message a half-century old, thought and written by someone from a different cultural group facing very different social, cultural, and political circumstances? I think that’s an important question. It’s the kind of question that faces us every day: when we decide whether to talk to someone we think is very different from us, when we engage in course material that challenges our assumptions, when we think about how to organize our life projects.
Too often we don’t listen, we don’t engage those are different from ourselves, and we content ourselves with the knowledge that we hold the right ideals, that we believe in equality and that belief is enough. And thus we live today in a world in which segregation continues at rates nearly the same as when Thurman was writing. Churches remain among the most segregated institutions in the country. And again, this despite assertions of values to the contrary, despite claims within the church that all are equal and part of the same body of Christ. Thurman has something to teach us both about segregation within the church and our failure to act in response. He explains:
This is one very important reason for the insistence that segregation is a complete ethical and moral evil. Whatever it may do for those who dwell on either side of the wall, one thing is certain: it poisons all normal contacts of those persons involved. The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value. This cannot be discovered in a vacuum or in a series of artificial or hypothetical relationships. It has to be in a real situation, natural, free. (JD, 98)
Separation poisons, it destroys connection, it makes normal interaction difficult and strained. And in response to those distorted relationships, Thurman again and again argued for the need to engage, to get to know, to see from another’s perspective.
Many people think that they understand others when they merely maintain a kindly attitude toward them. While it is true that a generous mood toward other people again and again elicits a response of friendliness, this is no substitute for facts, for information and the kind of understanding which comes only from sustained natural exposure to others. This constant exposure is apt to be a sure check and corrective to one’s understanding. . . . This is one of the reasons why conversation and good talk are of such immense value. They provide moments of direct quickening in contact that instructs the emotions and feeds the understanding with revelations of interests, slants and overtones of the other person, without which there can be no deep sure respect for personality. (DIH, 23–24)
Feeling kind toward another is not enough, Thurman explains; what is needed is direct conversation, deep engagement. There needs to be a move from ideas and ideals—for instance, saying that all are equal, saying that human beings are human beings—to action, to enacting those ideals in daily life.
There is a line from an old Hindu poem which says, “Thou hast to churn the milk, O Disciple, if thou desirest the taste of butter.” The line continues by saying, “And it serveth not thy purpose if, sitting in idleness, though sayest, ‘Lo, the butter is in the milk, yea, the butter is in the milk.’”. . . An idea or an ideal can be held only to the extent that it realizes itself. No amount of pretense or formality or parading can substitute for the sheer realization in achievement of the idea, ideal or dream to which one is dedicated. (DIH, 27-28, emphasis added)
Ideals without practice mean nothing. But what were Thurman’s ideals? He was dissatisfied with traditional Christian perspectives that looked only from positions of power, seeking opportunities to help without understanding—the problem of “looking kindly” mentioned earlier, and he sought to develop an understanding of Jesus, a take on Christianity that dealt with “what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall” (JD, 11).
He argues convincingly, and in a way consistent with contemporary New Testament scholarship, that Jesus’s life and ministry is tied to his experience as a poor Jewish person in Roman-occupied Palestine. And in that context, his ministry responds to the question facing people of all times who are marginalized: “What must be the attitude toward the rulers, the controllers of political, social, and economic life?” (JD, 23) And here he draws on Jesus’s ministry to call for loving nonviolent resistance—resistance that creates a sense of belonging and imparts the knowledge that those who society had excluded were children of God. Thurman explained: “The religion of Jesus says to the disinherited: ‘Love your enemy. Take the initiative in seeking ways by which you can have the experience of a common sharing of mutual worth and value. It may be hazardous, but you must do it’” (JD, 100). That was the thrust of his message, that Jesus’s loving resistance disarms those in power by connecting people in a relationship of mutuality and equality: “In the presence of an overwhelming sincerity on the part of the disinherited, the dominant themselves are caught with no defense. . . . Instead of relation between the weak and the strong there is merely a relationship between human beings. . . . The awareness of this fact marks the supreme moment of human dignity” (JD, 73).
Yet enacting one’s ideals, whether of nonviolent resistance or otherwise, does not mean that change will be immediate, as the earlier story of the man and the pecan trees reminds us. And perseverance in the face of slow change requires strength. Thurman was both a prophet and a mystic, concerned both about the implications of Jesus’s teachings for society and about how people can encounter God directly. He emphasized the need for a dialectical movement—a movement back and forth—between religious encounter and social activism in order to replenish one’s strength and reengage the struggle. He saw the need both to struggle for justice and to reflect on God’s presence. And so I’d like to end today with a passage on God’s presence from a collection of Thurman’s daily meditations.
Whenever the mind of [humanity] has been uplifted; whenever I have frustrated the temptation to deny the truth within me, or to betray a value which to me is significant; whenever I have found the despair of my own heart and life groundless; . . . whenever I have been able to bring my life under some high and holy purpose that gives to it a greater wholeness and a greater unity; whenever I have stood in the presence of innocence, purity, love and beauty and found my own mind chastened and my whole self somehow challenged and cleansed; . . . whenever these experiences or others like them have been mine, I have seen God, and felt [God’s] presence winging near. (DIH, 145)
May these reflections enable you to see something of another’s perspective, to seek to realize your own ideals, and to see something of God’s presence.
The following is a sermon preached at the Midland Lutheran College chapel service on Tuesday, February 3, 2009. Quotations from the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman are taken from Jesus and the Disinherited (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1949; cited as JD) and Deep Is the Hunger: Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951; cited as DIH)
Good morning. I’d like to begin today with a story told by the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman:
I watched him for a long time. He was so busily engaged in his task that he did notice my approach until he heard my voice. Then he raised himself erect with all the slow dignity of a man who had exhausted the cup of haste to the very dregs. He was an old man. . . . Further talk between us revealed that he was planting a small grove of pecan trees. The little treelets were not more than two and a half or three feet in height. My curiosity was unbounded.
“Why did you not select larger trees so as to increase the possibility of your living ot see them bear at least one cup of nuts?”
He hixed his eyes directly on my face. . . . Finally he said, “These small trees are cheaper and I have very little money.”
“So you do not expect to live to see the trees reach sufficient maturity to bear fruit?”
“No, but is that important? All my life I have eaten fruit from trees that I did not plant, why should I not plant trees to bear fruit fro those who may enjoy them long after I am gone. Besides, the man who plants because he will reap the harvest has no faith in life. . . .”
The fact is that much of life is made up of reaping where we have not sown and planting where we shall never reap. (DIH, 48–49)
“Much of life is made up of reaping where we have not sown, and planting where we shall never reap.” I’m going to spend the next few minutes talking a bit about what has been sown before us, gathering up a bit of the harvest for you to consider, helping you think about where to plant.
This month—February—is Black History Month. As you know, the church has played and continues to play a central role in the African American experience and in the interplay between white and black people in the United States. Among the many insightful, courageous figures in the Black Church tradition is Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, from whom we just heard. By examining some of his writings, I believe we can learn something about why African American history is worth attending to and something about the Christian tradition more broadly.
Dr. Thurman was born in 1899 and died in 1981. In the 1930s he traveled to India, where he met with Gandhi, and he brought Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance back to the civil rights movement in the United States. He was later dean of the chapels at both Howard University and Boston University—he was at BU while Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was completing his doctorate there, and he served as a spiritual advisor and mentor for Dr. King. Beginning in 1944 he also pastored in San Francisco a racially integrated, multicultural church. The themes of his most noted book, Jesus and the Disinherited, published in 1949, continue to resonate today. He is a central figure in the history of the civil rights movement and in American religious history.
So this man was important more than fifty years ago. Why ought we listen to a message a half-century old, thought and written by someone from a different cultural group facing very different social, cultural, and political circumstances? I think that’s an important question. It’s the kind of question that faces us every day: when we decide whether to talk to someone we think is very different from us, when we engage in course material that challenges our assumptions, when we think about how to organize our life projects.
Too often we don’t listen, we don’t engage those are different from ourselves, and we content ourselves with the knowledge that we hold the right ideals, that we believe in equality and that belief is enough. And thus we live today in a world in which segregation continues at rates nearly the same as when Thurman was writing. Churches remain among the most segregated institutions in the country. And again, this despite assertions of values to the contrary, despite claims within the church that all are equal and part of the same body of Christ. Thurman has something to teach us both about segregation within the church and our failure to act in response. He explains:
This is one very important reason for the insistence that segregation is a complete ethical and moral evil. Whatever it may do for those who dwell on either side of the wall, one thing is certain: it poisons all normal contacts of those persons involved. The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value. This cannot be discovered in a vacuum or in a series of artificial or hypothetical relationships. It has to be in a real situation, natural, free. (JD, 98)
Separation poisons, it destroys connection, it makes normal interaction difficult and strained. And in response to those distorted relationships, Thurman again and again argued for the need to engage, to get to know, to see from another’s perspective.
Many people think that they understand others when they merely maintain a kindly attitude toward them. While it is true that a generous mood toward other people again and again elicits a response of friendliness, this is no substitute for facts, for information and the kind of understanding which comes only from sustained natural exposure to others. This constant exposure is apt to be a sure check and corrective to one’s understanding. . . . This is one of the reasons why conversation and good talk are of such immense value. They provide moments of direct quickening in contact that instructs the emotions and feeds the understanding with revelations of interests, slants and overtones of the other person, without which there can be no deep sure respect for personality. (DIH, 23–24)
Feeling kind toward another is not enough, Thurman explains; what is needed is direct conversation, deep engagement. There needs to be a move from ideas and ideals—for instance, saying that all are equal, saying that human beings are human beings—to action, to enacting those ideals in daily life.
There is a line from an old Hindu poem which says, “Thou hast to churn the milk, O Disciple, if thou desirest the taste of butter.” The line continues by saying, “And it serveth not thy purpose if, sitting in idleness, though sayest, ‘Lo, the butter is in the milk, yea, the butter is in the milk.’”. . . An idea or an ideal can be held only to the extent that it realizes itself. No amount of pretense or formality or parading can substitute for the sheer realization in achievement of the idea, ideal or dream to which one is dedicated. (DIH, 27-28, emphasis added)
Ideals without practice mean nothing. But what were Thurman’s ideals? He was dissatisfied with traditional Christian perspectives that looked only from positions of power, seeking opportunities to help without understanding—the problem of “looking kindly” mentioned earlier, and he sought to develop an understanding of Jesus, a take on Christianity that dealt with “what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall” (JD, 11).
He argues convincingly, and in a way consistent with contemporary New Testament scholarship, that Jesus’s life and ministry is tied to his experience as a poor Jewish person in Roman-occupied Palestine. And in that context, his ministry responds to the question facing people of all times who are marginalized: “What must be the attitude toward the rulers, the controllers of political, social, and economic life?” (JD, 23) And here he draws on Jesus’s ministry to call for loving nonviolent resistance—resistance that creates a sense of belonging and imparts the knowledge that those who society had excluded were children of God. Thurman explained: “The religion of Jesus says to the disinherited: ‘Love your enemy. Take the initiative in seeking ways by which you can have the experience of a common sharing of mutual worth and value. It may be hazardous, but you must do it’” (JD, 100). That was the thrust of his message, that Jesus’s loving resistance disarms those in power by connecting people in a relationship of mutuality and equality: “In the presence of an overwhelming sincerity on the part of the disinherited, the dominant themselves are caught with no defense. . . . Instead of relation between the weak and the strong there is merely a relationship between human beings. . . . The awareness of this fact marks the supreme moment of human dignity” (JD, 73).
Yet enacting one’s ideals, whether of nonviolent resistance or otherwise, does not mean that change will be immediate, as the earlier story of the man and the pecan trees reminds us. And perseverance in the face of slow change requires strength. Thurman was both a prophet and a mystic, concerned both about the implications of Jesus’s teachings for society and about how people can encounter God directly. He emphasized the need for a dialectical movement—a movement back and forth—between religious encounter and social activism in order to replenish one’s strength and reengage the struggle. He saw the need both to struggle for justice and to reflect on God’s presence. And so I’d like to end today with a passage on God’s presence from a collection of Thurman’s daily meditations.
Whenever the mind of [humanity] has been uplifted; whenever I have frustrated the temptation to deny the truth within me, or to betray a value which to me is significant; whenever I have found the despair of my own heart and life groundless; . . . whenever I have been able to bring my life under some high and holy purpose that gives to it a greater wholeness and a greater unity; whenever I have stood in the presence of innocence, purity, love and beauty and found my own mind chastened and my whole self somehow challenged and cleansed; . . . whenever these experiences or others like them have been mine, I have seen God, and felt [God’s] presence winging near. (DIH, 145)
May these reflections enable you to see something of another’s perspective, to seek to realize your own ideals, and to see something of God’s presence.
Jeremy Rehwald-Alexander
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