{"id":2325,"date":"2019-09-22T11:00:04","date_gmt":"2019-09-22T15:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=2325"},"modified":"2019-12-03T11:51:35","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T16:51:35","slug":"remembering-howard-thurman-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2019\/09\/22\/remembering-howard-thurman-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Howard Thurman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service<\/a><\/p>\n

Luke 16:1-13<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear just the sermon<\/a><\/p>\n

Luke<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Before us today stands Jesus Christ, robed in mystery and announced in a strange parable.\u00a0 There is no easy interpretation for this parable.\u00a0 Why is its hero, my favorite accountant, commended for dishonesty which is a breach of the ninth commandment? We do not know.\u00a0 Why is his master happy to be cheated?\u00a0 We cannot say.\u00a0 Why is an accountant\u2019s swindle upheld, in this parable here attributed to Jesus, as a preparation, somehow, for heaven? No one can tell.\u00a0 What, please, does verse 9, as tangled in the Greek as it is in your bulletin, intend (\u201cMake friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations\u201d? ) <\/em>We do not see.\u00a0 What possible connection is there between the story, and the four trailing proverbs?\u00a0 Little at all, except that they all deal with money.\u00a0 How did this story make it into Luke\u2019s travel narrative?\u00a0 It is not clear.\u00a0 Is this dishonest manager our role model, in the church, as we try to \u201cmanage wealth in the direction of justice?\u201d (Ringe)\u00a0 Perhaps!\u00a0 And, most of all, where is Jesus, The Divine Mystery Incarnate (Spirit and Presence Both) to be found in our reading today? The parable of the dishonest steward has really just one meaning, and it is very good news: \u00a0Faith gives spiritual health in the midst of change, including the transition into college life, in the voice of Presence Spirit, Spirit Presence.<\/p>\n

Let us recall the mystery of Christ, the Stranger in our midst.\u00a0 Spirit.\u00a0 Presence. We can announce his spirited presence today, again today.\u00a0 He is among us:\u00a0 dealing with issues we dismiss\u2026speaking with people whom we dislike\u2026considering options we disdain\u2026selecting vocations that do not yet fully exist\u2026expanding spaces that we constrict\u2026accepting lifestyles that we reject\u2026attending to possibilities that we ignore\u2026approaching horizons that we avoid\u2026healing wounds that we disguise\u2026questioning assumptions that we enjoy\u2026protecting persons whom we mistreat\u2026making allowances that we distrust.\u00a0 So, strangely, is He among us.<\/p>\n

For the mystery of Jesus Christ falls upon us, approaches us, and enchants us, when and where we least expect Him.\u00a0 In the strange world of the Bible.\u00a0 In the midst of the community of strangers that is the Church.\u00a0 Hidden in the brutal estrangement of our personal life.\u00a0 Here, behold, the Lord Christ Jesus, \u201cL\u2019Etranger\u201d, \u201cThe Stranger\u201d.<\/p>\n

His spirited presence is neither simple, nor surface, nor easy, nor fundamental, nor shallow, nor ideological, nor one dimensional, nor ahistorical, nor primarily political.\u00a0 He draws us, lures us, and enchants us.\u00a0 So he sets us free.<\/p>\n

For St. Luke in chapters 9 to 19 has captured a collage of portraits of Jesus, \u201cOn the Road\u201d.\u00a0 We are on a journey, as Luke reminds the church.\u00a0 We are making a trip to the promised land.\u00a0 We are headed in a certain direction.\u00a0 With our spiritual forebears, we are traveling, on a journey.\u00a0 Israel left Canaan to go to Egypt to find bread.\u00a0 There they became the slaves of Pharaoh.\u00a0 But Moses led them out, parted the Red Sea, and guided them through the wilderness.\u00a0 He brought them the ten commandments.\u00a0 At last, he sent them forth, with Joshua, to inhabit the land flowing with milk and honey.\u00a0 In such a glorious land, they hunted and farmed.\u00a0 They even built a temple, and chose a King.\u00a0 Samuel, Saul, David, and Solomon reigned, but were followed by others less wise and less strong.\u00a0 Although the prophets did warn them, listen to Jeremiah today, the children of Israel left their covenant and their covenant God, and at last suffered the greatest of defeats, the destruction of Jerusalem and the return to slavery in Babylon, 587bc.\u00a0 On these hundreds of years of history depends the cry of Jeremiah, \u201cO that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep, night and day, for the slain of my poor people.\u201d (9:1). Like Israel marching in chains to Babylon, and then trudging home again two generations later, we people of faith are on a journey, from slavery to freedom.\u00a0 Faith heals, manages, handles the hardest of change.<\/p>\n

Luke\u2019s mysterious Christ meets us today, hidden in the maelstrom of wild, unexpected change and economic crisis.\u00a0 On the road, the journey of faith, the Gospel of Luke has most to say, and Jesus most regularly addresses, the issue of money.\u00a0 Remember how Luke traces the Gospel.\u00a0 Mary in the Magnificat honors the poor.\u00a0 John the Baptist preaches justice, in the great, unique tradition of the Hebrew prophets, from Amos forward.\u00a0 Isaiah\u2019s words and hopes are affirmed.\u00a0 Jesus blesses the poor, not just the poor in spirit, in his \u2018sermon on the plain\u2019.\u00a0 Remember the parable of the \u2018rich fool\u2019, \u201ctonight is your soul required of you, and these riches, whose shall they be?\u201d\u00a0 Luke sets Christian discipleship at odds with, in contest with, anxiety about possessions.\u00a0 And, by the way, get ready in conclusion, to meet Lazarus and Dives.\u00a0 Jesus Christ calls us to manage our possessions toward justice, both as a community and as a community of faith and as individuals.<\/p>\n

Two Christological Perils<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Our son Ben said once of his grandfather, \u2018I love to hear his voice\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 One year, his grandfather survived a nearly mortal illness.\u00a0 There are not words to convey the joy, the gratitude, that we his family experienced in his escape.\u00a0 Those who have been on the brink of death can appreciate the gospel promise, \u2018I give them eternal life and they shall never perish and no one shall snatch them out of my hand\u2019(John 10:28).\u00a0 Not all such deliverance has an earthly horizon.\u00a0 Some freedom and some grace must await us across the river.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t mean Harvard.\u00a0 But some comes to us here.\u00a0\u00a0 He and my mother lived here in Boston 1950-1953.\u00a0 In 1975, he wrote the following sentences in the back of a book.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The temptation for the people of the church in every age is to believe: a) Jesus is only human; b) Jesus only appeared to be human.\u00a0 For those who settle on \u2018a\u2019 there is no power, no mystery, no pull to pry them out of much of life.\u00a0 For those who choose \u2018b\u2019 there is no hope because mankind cannot ascend the heights of divinity.\u00a0 Both are heresies.\u00a0 The pious wise men of 325ad\u00a0 saw, though they could not explain it, that he was fully human and fully divine.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My parents departed from Boston in 1953 just as Howard Thurman came to town.\u00a0 Rev. Peter Gomes recalled, one year, as he and I exchanged pulpits, that George Buttrick and Howard Thurman used to do the same.\u00a0 Thurman\u2019s voice carries us into two dimensions, two realms of reality.\u00a0 He was 100 years ahead of his time, 50 years ago, so he is still 50 years ahead of you (and me).\u00a0 He evoked the Christ of Common Ground, transcendent, universal, shared, unconfined, free.\u00a0 He evoked the Christ of the Disinherited, immanent, particular, grasped, embodied, back against the wall.\u00a0 Two Christs.\u00a0 Spirit and Presence.\u00a0 Calling out to you to know the grain of your own wood, not to cut against the grain of your own wood\u2026<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We turn for support to Howard Thurman.\u00a0 To his book, THE SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND.\u00a0 To his book, JESUS AND THE DISINHERITED.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Thurman and Transcendence:\u00a0 The Search for Common Ground (Hillary)<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

    Spirit.\u00a0 Hillary, what does Howard Thurman say about Spirit?<\/p>\n

    As Thurman wrote in the Search for Common Ground, \u201cThe Hopi Indian myth carries still, in its thematic emphasis on \u201cthe memory of a lost harmony\u201d\u201d.\u00a0 (CG, 40)<\/em><\/p>\n

    There is a unity of living structures…that includes rocks, plants, animals, and humans.\u00a0 Antibodies and antigens.\u00a0 And the arrangement of a cell in a human child (CG, 40).<\/em><\/p>\n

    Thurman cites Plato: \u2018Until philosophers are kings\u2026and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside\u2026cities will never have rest from their evils\u2019.\u00a0 (CG, 53)<\/em><\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

    In the voice of Howard Thurman, 100 years ahead of his time 50 years ago, there is a regard for mystery, silence, presence, the transcendent.\u00a0 One in kinship with all of creation. One in kinship with every human being, so that nothing human is foreign to us.\u00a0 One in transformative engagement with our natural world, our home, our condition, our circumstance.\u00a0 One in openness to the great differences and diversities of personal, that is to say religious, expression, including myth from long ago and far away.<\/p>\n

    The Spirit.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Thurman and Immanence:\u00a0 Jesus and the Disinherited (Mahalia)<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

      Mahalia, what did Howard Thurman say about Presence?<\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u2018Jesus rejected hatred.\u00a0 It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength.\u00a0 It was not because he lacked the incentive.\u00a0 Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father.\u00a0 He affirmed life, and hatred was the great denial\u2019 (JATD, 88)<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u2018There is something more to be said about the inner equipment growing out of the great affirmation of Jesus that a man is a child of God.\u00a0 If a man\u2019s ego has been stabilized, resulting in a sure grounding of his sense of personal worth and dignity, then he is in a position to appraise his own intrinsic powers, gifts, talents and abilities.\u00a0 He no longer views his equipment through the darkened lenses of those who are largely responsible for his social position\u2019 (JATD, 53).<\/em><\/p>\n

      The basic fact is that Christianity, as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker, appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed\u2026In him was life, and the life was the light of all people\u2026Wherever this spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

      The Presence, as well.<\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

      An Invitation <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

      How will you live out the deep river truths, spirit and presence?\u00a0 How will you live down its opposition, however you understand it?\u00a0 Have you truly intuited the brevity of life?\u00a0 Have you really absorbed the capacity we have as humans to harm others?\u00a0 Have you faced the dualism of decision that is the marrow of every Sunday, every prayer, every sermon, every service?\u00a0 Are you ready to make a break for it?\u00a0 Are you ready to discover freedom in disappointment and grace in dislocation?\u00a0 Are you set to place one hand in that of The Spirit and the other in that of the Presence?<\/p>\n

      As Director Katherine Kennedy once said, “The beauty of Thurman is that he wasn’t trying to convert people to Christianity. Rather, he wanted people to see that there is a common ground we can reach by respecting one another’s differences, while still holding onto those beliefs that are uniquely ours.”<\/p>\n

      Coda<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

      Jan and I came over here to Boston fourteen years ago, in order to invest the last quarter of our ministry in the next generation of preachers, teachers, ministers of the gospel.\u00a0 You hear today voices that will change the world for the better.\u00a0 A few years ago, I asked in Thurman fashion a half dozen undergraduates to say something about Jesus.<\/p>\n

      Tom, what did they say?<\/p>\n

      Jesus<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      is all the world to me\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      loves me\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      is perpetually ripe\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\n

      means freedom\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      shows us that self giving love is the way to life\u2026is my transforming friend\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      has got my back\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      is the consoler of the poor\u2026the lamp of the poor \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      is unconditional love\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      is the constant companion on life\u2019s journey\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      My greatest gift\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      Patient pursuer\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\n

      In love with us\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\n

      the Hound of Heaven\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      Friend on the Journey\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\n

      challenges us because he loves us\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      brings out our best self\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      He is\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

      Known in the promise of this season<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      Reflected in the joys of autumn<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      Overheard in the words and vows of commitment<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      Expanded into the lengthening evening daylight<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      Enjoyed in the gatherings of families and friends<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      Celebrated in the ceremonies of completion<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      And carried forward from this hour of worship and day of remembrance<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

      In the words of Emily Dickinson:<\/em><\/p>\n


      \nI stepped from plank to plank
      \nA slow and cautious way;
      \nthe stars above my head I felt,
      \nAbout my feet the sea.<\/em><\/p>\n

      I knew not but the next
      \nwould be my final inch.
      \nThis gave me that precarious Gait
      \nSome call experience.<\/p>\n

      –The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Click here to hear the full service Luke 16:1-13 Click here to hear just the sermon Luke Before us today stands Jesus Christ, robed in mystery and announced in a strange parable.\u00a0 There is no easy interpretation for this parable.\u00a0 Why is its hero, my favorite accountant, commended for dishonesty which is a breach of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2325"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2530,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325\/revisions\/2530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}