Howard Thurman
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
January 6, 2013
© Rev. Sally B. White
Howard Thurman: A black man born in 1899 and raised in the segregated
South, Howard Thurman dedicated his life to exploring and expanding the
ways in which religious experience can transcend and overcome the barriers
and the distances that separate one person – or one group of people – from
another. He visited with Mohandas Gandhi, served as spiritual advisor to
Martin Luther King, Jr., and was a founding leader of the Church for the
Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco. This morning’s is another in an
occasional series of sermons examining moral and spiritual exemplars from
a variety of religious traditions.
Reading:
Each year we leave our Christmas Eve service with words of Howard
Thurman echoing in our ears. On this twelfth day of Christmas, it seems
fitting to begin with these same words, and their message of challenge and
of possibility. The reading, found in our hymnal, is called “The Work of
Christmas.”
When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
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to bring peace among the brothers,
to make music in the heart.
[STLT # 615]
Message:
“My father was a good man,” Howard Thurman wrote in his autobiography,
“but the church was not for him.” When that good man died, Howard
Thurman was only seven years old. He vividly remembered what happened
next.
Because “the church was not for him,” the black Baptist church that his wife
and children attended considered Saul Solomon Thurman to have died “out
of Christ.” In the eyes of the church, he was a sinner, and the pastor refused
to conduct the funeral service. A traveling evangelist agreed to preach the
funeral, and young Howard sat in the front pew and listened with mounting
rage as the minister used the funeral as a chance to illustrate what would
happen to sinners who died “out of Christ.” In the buggy on the way home,
Howard Thurman vowed, “when I grow up and become a man, I will never
have anything to do with the church.” [With Head and Heart, pp. 4-6].
Growing up in segregated Daytona, Florida, Howard was drawn to the
fellowship of nature: the quiet aliveness of the woods; the depth and the
living presence of the night that, in Thurman’s words, “seemed to cover my
spirit like a gentle blanket.” He was drawn to the ocean, its timeless ebb
and flow giving the boy [in his words] “a sense of timelessness, of existing
beyond the reach of the ebb and flow of circumstances.” There was a
particular oak tree in the backyard where he could sit with his back against
the trunk and [again in his won words] “reach down into the quiet places of
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my spirit, take out my bruises and my joys, unfold them, and talk about
them” – talk aloud to the oak tree and know that he was understood. [With
Head and Heart, pp. 7-9].
But his grandmother, who had been a slave, went to church every Sunday.
And his mother loved her church, and if there came a Sunday when she was
not working, she took Howard and his two sisters to the Bethel Baptist
Church. There, despite his childhood vow, Howard found primary
community. As a part of the church you were part of a human community:
“the fellowship of believers,” and as such, you were part of a neighborhood,
a network, and this gave you what Thurman called “a sense of worth that
could not be destroyed by any of life’s outrages.” [With Head and Heart, p. 18].
And, as part of the church you were part of the larger community of God’s
people, and that identity transcended anything you might encounter in your
dealings with mere human beings – disrespect, temptation, rejection, abuse,
or outrage. When he was twelve, Thurman joined the church.
Howard Thurman completed high school. He went to Morehouse College in
Atlanta, Georgia, which had been established after the Civil War by the
Baptist Missionary Society for the education of freed slaves. One summer,
he traveled to New York City to take two courses in philosophy, and each
Sunday he attended services at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian church. By
the time Thurman graduated from Morehouse with a degree in economics,
his vocation was clear: he wanted to go to seminary. He applied to Newton
Theological Seminary in Newton, Massachusetts, and received a “very
cordial” letter from the president regretting that the school did not admit
Negroes and referring him to Virginia Union college in Virginia, where he
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“would be able to secure the kind of training [he] would need to provide
religious leadership for [his] people.” [With Head and Heart, p. 45]. Three
years later, in 1926, Thurman was admitted to Rochester Theological
Seminary in Rochester, New York, which enrolled no more than two black
students in any given year. For the first time in his life, he was immersed in
a white world. He held his own academically and gradually gained
confidence in his abilities. He was a guest preacher in many churches in
western New York; because the black population of that area was small,
these were, for the most part, white churches, and they frequently asked him
to discuss “the race question.” Members of the Ku Klux Klan monitored
these services, and often attended. And gradually, Thurman made friends –
lifelong friends – and came to understand that the distances and the barriers
that separated people of different races and different cultures were
artificially constructed, and artificially maintained, and could, in fact, be
overcome.
Thurman graduated from Rochester and was called to the pulpit of Mount
Zion [African American] Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio. Here he learned
to lead others in worship by listening first to his own questing spirit, by
speaking from the depths of his own soul. One afternoon a Chinese
gentleman who had been attending his services came and spoke to Thurman.
“When I close my eyes and listen with my spirit I am in my Buddhist temple
experiencing the renewing of my own spirit,” the man told him. “I knew
then what I had only sensed before,” Thurman wrote. “The barriers were
crumbling. I was breaking new ground.” [end of quote]. [With Head and Heart,
p. 73]. Religious experience transcended race and culture, and spoke to the
essentially human soul.
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Thurman left Oberlin in 1928. He spent a year studying philosophy with
Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones, and then he entered academia himself. He
was hired to teach philosophy and religion at Morehouse, and at Spelman,
Morehouse’s sister college for women, he taught the Bible as living
literature, served as religious adviser to students and faculty, and frequently
led chapel services. In 1932, he joined the faculty of Howard University in
Washington, DC, the premier university in the country for the education of
black students, and one of most prestigious of American institutions of
higher education. Thurman taught in the School of Religion, and was later
appointed Dean of the University’s Rankin Chapel, where he continued to
broaden and deepen his practice of designing and leading moving and
meaningful worship.
But after three years at Howard, Thurman had a life-changing experience.
He and his wife Sue were invited to lead a delegation of four Afro-American
Christians on a yearlong pilgrimage of friendship to India, Burma, and
Ceylon, guests of the Student Christian Movement of India. The invitation
itself presented a moral and ethical dilemma for the Thurmans. Christianity
was the religion of the British Empire; Indians, historically Hindus and
Muslims and Buddhists, were colonial subjects of the Christian British. The
world over, Christians had been – largely still were – the conquerors, the
oppressors. Howard was not at all sure he could undertake the trip in good
conscience. He wrote, “I did not want to go to India as an apologist for a
segregated American Christianity.” And yet he did not want to abort a
pilgrimage that had the potential to make “a tremendous contribution to
creative human relations transcending boundaries – national, international,
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racial, cultural, and religious.” [With Head and Heart, p. 104]. Howard and Sue
discussed it at great length, and then discussed it with a member of the
committee proposing the trip. She listened carefully to the Thurmans, and
then told them that it was precisely because of his objections to the distortion
of Christianity by segregation in America that the Thurmans had been
chosen to lead the delegation. They agreed to go.
The very first engagement of the trip was a lecture at the Law College in
Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Howard Thurman spoke to the
students, and after the lecture, was invited to have coffee with the chairman
of the Law Club. Their conversation lasted for more than five hours. Let
me read you what Thurman later wrote about this conversation. The Law
Club chairman began by saying:
What are you doing here? Your forbears were taken from the
west coast of Africa as slaves, by Christians. They were sold in
America, a Christian country, to Christians. They were held in
slavery for some two hundred years by Christians. They were freed
as a result of economic forces, rather than Christian idealism, by a
man who was not himself a professing Christian.
Since that time you have been brutalized, lynched, burned, and
denied your civil rights by Christians, and Christianity is unable to
have any effect on your terrible plight. …
I think that an intelligent young Negro such as yourself, here
in our country on behalf of a Christian enterprise, is a traitor to all of
the darker peoples of the earth. How can you account for yourself
being in this unfortunate and humiliating position? [With Head and
Heart, pp. 113-114].
And Thurman began his response:
I make a careful distinction between Christianity and the
religion of Jesus. My judgment about slavery and racial prejudice
relative to Christianity is far more devastating that yours could ever
be. From my investigation and study, the religion of Jesus projected
a creative solution to the pressing problem of survival for the
minority of which he was a part in the Greco-Roman world. When
Christianity became an imperial and world religion, it marched under
banners other than that of the teacher and prophet of Galilee.
Finally, the minority in my country that is concerned about and
dedicated to experiencing that spirit that was in Jesus Christ is on the
side of freedom, liberty, and justice for all people, black, white, red,
yellow, saint, sinner, rich, or poor. They, too, are a fact to be
reckoned with in my country.” [With Head and Heart, p. 114].
This was in 1935. Later that year, Thurman gave a lecture on preaching at
Harvard University, deepening his engagement with the significance of the
religion of Jesus to the powerless and disadvantaged. The lecture was
published the following summer under the title “Good News for the
Disinherited.” Fourteen years later, in 1949, Thurman published a book,
called Jesus and the Disinherited. What, he asked, do “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?” [Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 1]. Jesus
himself was such a one, he argues – a Jew, a poor Jew, in an occupied
country, without political or economic influence. Disempowered.
Disinherited. Jesus projected a dream, Thurman writes. “The basic
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principles of his way of life cut straight through to the despair of his fellows
and found it groundless. By inference he says, ‘You must abandon your fear
of each other and fear only God. You must not indulge in any deception and
dishonesty, even to save your lives. … Hatred is destructive to hated and
hater alike. Love your enemy, that you may be children of your Father who
is in heaven.” [Jesus and the Disinherited, pp. 24-25]. “What [Jesus] did, all men
may do. Thus interpreted, he belongs to no age, no race, no creed. When
[people] look into his face, they see etched the glory of their own
possibilities.” [Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 102].
It has been written that Martin Luther King, Jr. carried a copy of Jesus and
the Disinherited in his briefcase as he traveled. [With Head and Heart, p. 255].
In 1944, Thurman left Howard University and Washington, DC to take a
half-time position as founding co-minister of The Church for the Fellowship
of All Peoples in San Francisco. His colleague, the Rev. Alfred Fisk, was
white. Together they built an intentionally multiracial, multicultural church
that offered worship, study, celebration, and service; art, music, and dance;
community and caring; silence and speech. The Thurmans’ lives and work
had taught them two things: “meaningful and creative experiences between
people can be more compelling than all the ideas, concepts, faiths, fears,
ideologies, and prejudices that divide them; and …if such experiences can
be multiplied and sustained over …time…any barrier that separates one
person from another can be undermined and eliminated.” [With Head and
Heart, p. 148]. The church thrived and grew. Thurman’s ministry grew to
full-time and more. The church continues its ministry today, describing
itself on its website as “an interfaith, interracial, intercultural community of
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seekers dedicated to personal empowerment and social transformation
through an ever deepening relationship with the Spirit of God in All Life.”
In 1953, after much soul-searching, Thurman left San Francisco and moved
to Boston to become Dean of Marsh Chapel, and professor in the Graduate
School of Theology at Boston University. The first black man to serve as
Dean of Chapel at a majority-white university, he held that position until his
retirement in 1965. In 1962, he established the Howard Thurman
Educational Trust, dedicated to the education of black youth. He died in San
Francisco in 1981.
Deeply thoughtful, Thurman spent his life in ministry, though the venues
were several and varied. Near the end of his autobiography, a book he titled
“With Head and Heart,” Thurman wrote, “At long last it seems to me that
the customary distinction between religion and life is a specious one. In
all…things there is a secret door which leads into the central place, where
the Creator of life and the God of the human heart are one and the same.
…The Head and the Heart at last inseparable; they are lost in wonder in the
One.”
In the quietness of this place, surrounded by the all-pervading presence of
the Holy, take a moment now in silence to touch into your head, your heart,
your wonder.
The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.
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Bell
Silence
Music
Amen.