Jesus and the Disinherited, Part 1: Jesus--an Interpretation
Service of Worship
Eastern Parkway United Methodist
Church
May 2, 2021
Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor
Let us
pray:
Risen Lord,
you came as a sacrifice for our sin. Give us faith to accept this act of love,
so that we turn from all human efforts and drink in the atoning righteousness
of your death and resurrection.
Lord, in
your mercy . . . hear our prayer.
Risen Lord,
you are the true vine and we are the branches. By your Spirit, produce the
fruit of love, joy, peace, and patience in us for others to taste and enjoy.
Keep us from hanging on to love for ourselves. Prune all selfishness from us
and fill us with your love.
Lord, in
your mercy . . . hear our prayer.
Risen Lord,
have mercy on your earth and supply its needs. Where people are hungry, give food.
Where people are in distress, comfort them. Where people are in trouble, bring
order and peace. And turn the whole world to you in faith, repentance and
praise.
Lord, in
your mercy . . . hear our prayer.
Lord Jesus
Christ, focus our love on people we know with special needs. Heal those who are
unwell and others in need whom we now name silently in our hearts.
Lord, in
your mercy . . . hear our prayer.
Thank you,
Lord Jesus, for hearing us and caring for us in all our needs. Constantly
intercede for us before our God and open our eyes that we may see him through
you. We ask all this in your holy name, for you live and reign with the Creator
and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
John 15:
1-8
The Vine
and the Branches
15 “I am the true vine, and my
Father is the gardener. 2 He cuts off every branch
in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he
prunes[a] so that it will be even more fruitful. 3 You
are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. 4 Remain
in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it
must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.
5 “I am the vine; you are the branches.
If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me
you can do nothing. 6 If you do not remain in me,
you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked
up, thrown into the fire and burned. 7 If you
remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it
will be done for you. 8 This is to my Father’s
glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
A Message
“Jesus
and the Disinherited, Part 1: Jesus—an Interpretation”
Friends,
today I’m beginning a new sermon series, which will continue through the whole
month of May, that I’m very excited about. It’s another book-based series, and
that book is perhaps the best work of liberation theology to ever be penned: Jesus
and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. I’m going to assure you right from
the start—you don’t need to read the book in order to follow along with these
sermons, I’ll be sure to tell you lots about the heart of the content so you’re
not missing anything. However, like I told you when I preached on Searching
for Sunday, if you read this book I promise it will be a good use of your
time. Also, if you do choose to read the book, I invite you to join us in
Fellowship Hall at 11am for our book study, where we’ll take a closer look at
the chapter that I just preached about. A fun time will be had by all.
But before I
get any deeper into the content of the book itself, let’s talk about the
author. Howard Washington Thurman, minister, educator, civil rights activist, theologian,
and author, was born on November 18, 1899 in a neighborhood called Waycross, one
of the three all-black communities in the Daytona Beach, Florida metro. His
father Saul passed away from a bout of pneumonia when young Howard was only
seven years old. Thurman spent the majority of his formative years raised by
two very strong women of deep Christian faith: his mother Alice, and his
maternal grandmother Nancy. Alice and Nancy made the Church the backbone of
Thurman’s life, and raised him in the Mount Bethel Baptist Church in Waycross. In
addition to being one of his primary caregivers, his grandma Nancy was also a
deep source of lifelong strength and inspiration. Nancy had grown up enslaved
on a plantation in Madison County, Florida. Nancy’s stories of liberation,
determination, and salvation fueled Thurman’s lifelong passions in academia and
the ministry.
As a young
man, only three high schools in the entire state of Florida accepted black
students. So at the tender age of fourteen, Thurman had to venture one hundred
miles from his home to Jacksonville so that he could receive a high school
diploma. A man with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, Thurman went straight
on to Morehouse College, and graduated valedictorian in 1923. From there he
relocated again to Rochester, New York, so that he could study to become a
minister at the Rochester Theological Seminary, from which he graduated as
valedictorian in 1926. This is where Thurman’s path crosses with my own;
Rochester Theological Seminary later merged with Colgate Divinity School and
Crozer Theological Seminary and became Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity
School, which is where I attended seminary. Thurman and I walked the same
halls!
From there
Thurman moved on to his first pastoral work at the Mount Zion Baptist Church in
Oberlin, Ohio. In 1932 Thurman moved into academia, and became the dean of the
Rankin Chapel at Howard University, while teaching courses at Howard Divinity
School. In 1944, Thurman briefly left teaching in order to move to San
Francisco and co-establish the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, a
church which devoted itself to anti-racism work and that helped establish strong
black communities in the Bay area. In 1953 Thurman moved to Boston, and became
Dean of the Marsh Chapel at Boston University, becoming the very first black
dean at the predominantly white institution.
Thurman
retired from paid work in 1965, and spent the rest of his life devoted to the
civil rights movement, and the mentoring of young black students, ministers,
and community activists. Among the young people that Thurman took the closest
under his wing was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Thurman had gone to
college with King’s father, and he joyously strengthened the son of his former
classmate in the theology of nonviolent resistance.
Never inactive
a day in his life, Thurman published over twenty books, the most famous of
which is this one, which he published in 1949. He traveled extensively for
mission work, even meeting Mahatma Gandhi, who further charged him with teaching
people in the United States about nonviolence in a way that perhaps only Thurman
could.
Thurman’s
theology is rich with mysticism and inward searching. You’ll see more and more
of this as we talk about Jesus and the Disinherited, but Thurman held
very dear an ethos that the Kingdom of God isn’t some “afterlife” concept that we
mortals can never understand, but rather that it starts from within the heart.
He further believed and taught that quieting your soul to all sounds but the
voice of Christ and yearning to know him more and more was primary in achieving
salvation. Thurman was blessed with a very long and full life, and passed away
in San Francisco on April 10, 1981.
As you can
hear from the way I talk about him and his work, I admire Thurman very much,
and he’s had an immense impact on the development of my own personal theology, second
really only to Jesus himself. Since he was such a prolific author there’s no
shortage whatsoever of excellent Thurman literature, but I had some goals in mind
when I picked this particular book for us to look at together. Primary among my
responsibilities to this congregation is the challenge of helping all of you
deepen in your discipleship to Jesus, and helping all of you learn how to cast
your nets and make more disciples. But I think our global Church is also in a
difficult, conflicted position right now. The United Methodist Church
desperately wants to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of
the world (it’s our mission statement after all). And there’s lots of reasons
we could point out to explain why the Church, despite such a noble mission, is
shrinking instead of growing—the world is changing, our cultures are changing,
belonging to a church doesn’t mean what it did in eras past, we’re alienating
younger generations from our congregations and our churches are withering
because of a lack of new energy. But I really believe if there’s one thing the
United Methodist Church must do to turn round this trend, and not only survive
in the modern world but matter and make a difference, it’s that we’ve got to
start teaching a better message than we have about who we’re following in the
first place. Who is this man that we’re hoping to be disciples of? Who is Jesus?
What matters to him? What does he want to see in this world? Who does he love? What
grieves him? I don’t think a person who has ever walked the globe answers those
questions better than Thurman does in this very book.
In the first
chapter of this book, titled “Jesus—an interpretation”, Thurman starts off by talking
about a troubling conversation he had with a friend of his, who practiced
Hinduism. Thurman’s friend, also a man of color, asked Thurman to answer a very
deep and pressing question: How could he justify being a Christian after all the
horrors Christianity had wrought upon people of African descent? Christian
missionaries took ships to Africa and captured people whom they sold into
slavery. Thurman points out that one of the most infamous slave ships was
called, of all things, “Jesus”. Christians robbed enslaved Africans of their
families, homes, cultures, names, and religions, and cherry-picked verses out
of the Bible that supported slavery in order to keep the enslaved in line. How
could Thurman worship at the Church that did so much to oppress his ancestors?
In short, Thurman’s answer was that the oppressors don’t own the Church. Jesus
does. And I add that if evil people can so co-opt and pollute the Gospel that they
can name their slave ship after our Savior, then it’s that much more urgent
that good people reclaim the Gospel and preach it loudly. As Thurman comes back
to repeatedly in this book, the Gospel meets us when life has put our back
against the wall and delivers us to hope. And that hope grows from within.
This week’s
lectionary-appointed Gospel reading pairs with Thurman’s writing perfectly. Jesus
uses another gardening metaphor, and likens himself to a vine cultivated by our
Creator. We can’t do anything without Jesus. We’d be like grapes cut off of a
vine; we’d dry up and turn into raisins in no time. We need Jesus to grow and
live. Jesus gives us everything we need to thrive. Jesus plants a seed within
us that gives us all we need to live with dignity even in a very broken world:
we matter. We’re loved. We’re beautiful, and treasured. With all the people
walking around on this earth God decided the planet also needed you. No matter
what weeds spring up around you and tell you otherwise, that you’re somehow
unworthy of love and respect because you’re too dark, too female, too foreign,
too poor, too disabled, too old, too young, too gay—God decides what grows
around here, and that garbage that doesn’t help you grow gets cut right off and
tossed out.
Now,
obviously, that’s a great place to start, but it’s really just a start. It’s
all well and good to teach ourselves and one another that we have infinite
worth in Christ so the opinions of others don’t matter. But that attitude, in
and of itself, doesn’t get us a living wage, decent housing, access to
healthcare, citizenship, voting rights, etc, etc. But this is the thing that
Thurman wanted us all to understand first, the very foundation of his
nonviolent theology: the primary tool of the oppressor is to know how to get to
you. If someone who wants to hurt you knows exactly what garbage words will get
the better of you, what will undermine your confidence and shake you, then that
person knows how to control you, and they will. The beginning of liberation is
radically deciding within yourself that Jesus holds the keys to your destiny,
and no one else. When somebody can’t control your mind and heart anymore, your
body and life start to follow. And if someone can’t get you to buy into their
agenda by convincing you to see yourself the way they see you, then you stop
working to build the wall the pin you against, and you start building the
Kingdom of God instead. The Kingdom isn’t “out there” somewhere, if it will
ever come to be, it will start from within. God is the gardener of our souls,
and what God wants to see flourish will only grow.
Amen.
I invite
you to receive the benediction:
Go now, and
love one another,
because love is from God.
Proclaim God’s salvation to every generation.
Remain in Jesus Christ,
and like branches of a vine, draw your life from him.
And may God
the vine grower tend you and make you fruitful;
May Christ Jesus abide in you and give you life;
And may the Holy Spirit cast out all fear and fill you with God’s love.
We go in
peace to love and serve the Lord,
. . . In the name of Christ. Amen.
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