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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.”
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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,
to bring peace among the brothers,
to make music in the heart.[STLT # 615]
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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 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 “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.
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, 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:
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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].
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And Thurman began his response:
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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].
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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 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 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.
Bell
Silence