Howard Thurman. Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston: Beacon Press. 1949. 102 pages.
I am a preacher, and I am white. Preachers are at their best when they identify with their congregations. “We” is not a royal we, so much as it is an incarnate we, recognizing the divine spirit among us and trying to express that as the primary voice among a people. Preachers rant, lament, beg, raise hell, console, sing praise, celebrate, and point to the fixations of humanity that continue to undermine the cause of God. White preachers are faithful when we are able to say “we” are the problem.
I preach in and among a multi-racial, multi-situational church. We are intentional about our expansive welcome, and I think we get it right a lot of the time. But, for all the work I’ve done to learn, teach and embrace racial justice, I remain hampered and aware of my hampered-ness, in at least two ways:
First, “we” is more than one thing. I know this, and I adapt or listen as best I can. White is an overwhelming identity, suggestive of very much privilege and power, a system that work for me, for us, a general ability to go along and get along. But how is my “we” heard when I am on the power end of the power divide, when the call to justice is for some a call to repentance and for others an affirmation of place in the human family? I am lesbian, so I am sort of somewhat maybe able to relate to the ones outside the power structure, not in an “oppression olympics” kind of way, but in a way that says the lines are blurred and no one is only one thing. But I find myself often struggling as a preacher to express a call to the white power structure (“we”) but also an invitation to the non-white, non-power folks who are also “we.”
Second, the tendency of Christianity seems so often to praise Jesus and call it a day (to get done with worship and go back to our faulty scales, as Amos accused), and I begin to wonder what Christianity has to offer besides rebuke to power. My own upbringing as a Lutheran seemed so insistent on comforting the afflicted broadly drawn, that I worry the comfort falls short, sounds shallow; with the world so unwilling to change, it is as if “just waiting for heaven” is the most cogent thing the mainline church ever offers. Which is not satisfying.
In other words, how to I relate to “we” as a preacher when “we” is so many things?
This is the context in which I have read for the first time Jesus and the Disinherited. In it, Howard Thurman indicts the church far more eloquently than I:
“To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity has often been sterile and of little avail…. (A) religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless people.”
He goes on: “
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall.”
Hence my problem. I most often choose, as a preacher in a multi-racial setting, to stand with my back against the wall as well, firing at the powers on behalf of the ones with whom I stand or sharing the prophets’ imagination for a new day — and perhaps hoping the white privileged ones (including me) overhear a word of call or conviction. Do marginalized and oppressed people (the disinherited, says Thurman) need nothing more than an ally? Do I fail when I pledge only allegiance and not succor? I long ago rejected the “one of these days” approach to God’s redemption. What is salvation in such a case? What is resurrection?
Thurman’s classic gives a sense of what is possible — the power that the life of Jesus ignites in the life of those beaten down by systems of oppression or by the dysfunction of every day life. In barely 100 pages, he has laid out a schematic for preachers that engages the inner and outer lives of all of us. After a rich re-introduction to Jesus, he reflects in a chapter each on fear, deception and hate, describing the ways folks encounter the world and how these three tools of survival can be debilitating and/or empowering — the inmost need to know that we matter, the dignity that comes from shared humanity.
“Wherever (Jesus’) spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the 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.”
His final chapter is “Love,” the hardest for me to grasp, though we so often say it as if it is the easiest thing in the world. “There cannot be too great insistence on the point that we are here dealing with a discipline, a method, a technique, as over against some form of wishful thinking of simple desiring.” He gets it.
This is not a book you skim; indeed, it is not a work you read just once. Written in 1949, it is as much a challenge to the church as ever. And a challenge to this preacher, still learning to listen.