a reflection on the life of Howard Thurman for the threshold of a new era
We have been spending time this Epiphany season with some of the mentors and guides who are lighting the way for us: showing us how to bring God’s healing presence into a world that is desperately in need of healing, and justice, and truth. As the season of Epiphany draws to a close, and as Black History Month begins, I want to spend a bit of time with the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman. I feel that it’s important to remember the life of Howard Thurman at least once every year because, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think we spend enough time in church talking about this particular mentor and guide. Which I think is a great loss, because Dr.Thurman’s own work for social justice–and his commitment to spiritual practice in the midst of that work–had a powerful influence on the Rev. Martin Luther King. And I believe that Dr. Thurman’s example might offer guidance and inspiration for us today.
So this morning, I’d like to remember together the life of Howard Thurman, an African-American man who was born just before the turn of the 20th century and who embodied a very particular type of social activism and spiritual activism that is rooted in faith, and very intentionally open to the guidance of God.
Howard Thurman was born in Daytona, Florida and raised by his grandmother, who was a former slave. He was ordained a baptist minister in 1925 and shortly thereafter became a professor and director of religious life at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges in Atlanta. In 1929, he spent a semester studying with Rufus Jones, the Quaker mystic who led the interracial Fellowship of Reconciliation. In 1939, Thurman led what he called a “Negro Delegation of Friendship” to South Asia, where he met with Mohandas Gandhi. In 1944, he moved to San Francisco to co-found the first fully integrated, multicultural church in the United States: The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. And in 1949, he wrote his deeply influential book, “Jesus and the Disinherited.” It was this very book that the younger Martin Luther King was reading during the tumultuous days of the Montgomery bus boycott.
Howard Thurman was a man who certainly understood the need to take creative and courageous action in the world. A man who knew something about how a person who longs to respond to the world’s pain can easily feel overwhelmed and pulled in a thousand different directions. He was a man who understood that no one person, no matter how gifted or committed, can answer every need that comes our way. A man who at least once advised Martin Luther King himself to take more time to rest, to reflect, and to pray about what God was calling him to do.
So I think it’s worth asking what advice the Reverend Thurman offers to those of us who would seek to heal this broken world? You’ll find his words quoted as our prayer of confession this morning: “Don’t ask what the world needs,” he writes. “Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
I wonder if this advice might surprise you. Does it surprise you to hear an African-American man, one of the most effective social activists our nation has ever known, saying, “Don’t ask what the world needs”?
I don’t believe that he is saying that we should never ask what the world needs. What he means is, don’t start there. Don’t start by asking what the world needs. Instead, start with the inner work of discerning who God created you to be, and what unique gift God created you — and only you — to offer the world. What is it that makes you come alive?
Do this thing, the Reverend Thurman says, and you will learn what gift God is calling you to offer to an aching world. A particular gift of healing that only you can bring. Once you know this gift — for organizing, or letter writing, or protesting, or community building — once you know your particular gift, then you are ready to look at the headlines and decide where you will put that gift to best use. Reversing climate change? Teaching meditation and anger management in prisons? Convincing the city council to build more very-low income housing? Strengthening laws to protect vulnerable rivers and streams from industrial pollution?
Friends, I know the headlines are screaming at you as they are screaming at me. I know it can feel strange to be asking, at a time like this, what makes us come alive. But this is urgent work. You were born with a gift — a particular flavor of God’s love that the world desperately needs. If we fail to discern and bring forth the gift that is within us, the world never receives that gift. And that, surely, breaks the heart of the One who created you to bring that particular, shining gift to the world.
Here’s the good news. Whoever you are, whatever pain of the world is breaking your heart open this day, it is never too late to listen for the particular gift you were made to bring. It is never too late to discover, or rediscover, what it is that makes you come alive. And there are countless ways to do this inner work of discovery and discernment. Today, I want to propose that we undertake together a particular spiritual practice for discovering our most alive selves, as a gift to the world. In just ten days, we will step into the season of Lent. It’s a season in which we are invited to follow Jesus into the wilderness and listen for who God is calling us to be. So that when our 40-day sojourn is over, we will be ready to bring that true self, and our unique gifts, to a world that desperately needs our care. Are you with me? Will you commit to this experiment to listen for the gift that you are called to bring? The gift that God is longing to offer the world through you?
Friends, we know that the world is in great, great need. And from the looks of it, our old, familiar ways of responding to that need are not working very well, to put it mildly. I believe that what the world really needs is a Church, a people, so alive, so attuned to the leadings of the Holy Spirit, that through us, God can bring forth gifts of healing, justice, and restoration that have never been seen before. And it’s going to take every one of us, fully alive, fully committed to bringing forth our gifts–it’s going to take all of us to make it happen.
May we listen well in the season ahead. May we have the courage to bring forth the gifts that will heal this world that God so loves. Amen.
A River of Joy 