Come Alive: Alive to Neighbor

Sermon Delivered at The Local Church
February 2, 2025
Scripture: Matthew 5:1–16, 33–37

It's the third week of our Come Alive sermon series rooted in scripture and inspired by the work and witness of 20th-century theologian, Christian mystic, preacher, and author Howard Thurman. I heard him described this week as a man a hundred years ahead of time—and the person who said that said it a little over fifty years ago—which means he's still about fifty years ahead of us. The more I've dug in, the more I have become convinced that his voice, his work, his witness, are all desperately needed, especially in our current moment.

Though he was born at the turn of the 20th century, Howard Thurman has a way of talking about God—and how we relate to the divine—that still somehow feels fresh. His work provided the theological foundation for the Civil Rights Movement. It was said that the Rev. Dr. King kept an early copy of Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited with him as he traveled—perhaps Thurman's most famous work. We need his voice to ring in our ears, and we'd do well to sit with the central question he poses in that book—one Rajeev shared with us last week—a question intended to critique the American church and call them from a place of complacency and inaction to one of justice and healing and liberation for all of God's people:

What, then, is the word of the religion of Jesus to those who stand with their backs against the wall?

In other words, do those who claim to follow Jesus have anything to say to those who are increasingly marginalized and increasingly vulnerable? What bearing does one's devotion to Jesus—this poor Jewish rabbi living in Roman-occupied Palestine—what bearing does one's devotion to this Jesus have for one's neighbor—persons of color, for immigrants, for transgender persons, for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities? Those and so many others who stand with their backs against the wall.

This is one of the things I love most about Howard Thurman. When we sit with this question, we discover that there can be no sacred action without deep spiritual devotion. They go hand-in-hand. For Howard Thurman, you can't have one without the other. It's a call to a holistic life of faith. It's not just about personal piety because there can be no prayer life, no attunement to the Spirit, no individual faith that doesn't have an eye toward the needs of the world and those whose backs are against the wall. And, in the same way, for Thurman, sacred action in the world apart from spiritual devotion is anemic and lacks the depth necessary to enact meaningful, substantive change.

And in a time when the world can feel so heavy, when hope can feel so elusive, and all we might want to do is bury our heads in the sand or disconnect or disengage, if not burn it all down, Howard Thurman offers a different sort of invitation when he says:

"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

A few weeks ago, as I was researching Howard Thurman, I came across a beautiful print showing his profile with an oak tree—a meaningful place of connection with the divine for Howard Thurman. And there's a storm there in the distance, too. On the perimeter of the image is a quotation:

"Often to be free means the ability to deal with one's situation so as not to be overcome by it."

This is a call to resist that urge to bury our heads in the sand. To hold the line when everything within you wants to run in the opposite direction. Because we can't truly be free, Thurman says, unless we deal with what's in front of us. In many ways, this is our theme for today. It can't be healed if it's not named.

Before Howard Thurman served as the very first Dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University in 1931 or traveled to India to study nonviolence under Mahatma Gandhi in 1934, before he cofounded the intentionally interracial Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco in 1944, before he'd become a friend of Martin Luther King, Sr. and mentor to his son, before he'd authored twenty-one books, Howard Thurman was just a boy surrounded by the storm clouds of the Jim Crow South, where racism was rampant, where he was told in so many ways that he was a second-class citizen, and where he lived in fear that he was the next to be beaten—or that someone close to him would.

Howard Thurman would recount a story in which he was out one day in a forest by himself picking berries and didn't ultimately notice a storm brewing. It came on suddenly, and he tried to run home but was disoriented and ended up lost. The rain came on. The thunder crashed. Flashes of lightning surrounded him. But that's when he remembered the words of his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, who was the most formative person in Young Howard Thurman's life. From somewhere deep within, he could hear her wisdom anew: Stop. Be still. Look. Listen.

And so he did. And when he did, he noticed that every time the lightning flashed, he could see something familiar. A landmark. A waypoint. That night, for Howard, every bolt of lightning in that terrible storm ultimately helped him find his way home. He wasn't overcome by it. The obstacle became the way.

Years earlier, his mother had awoken him in the middle of the night so that Howard could witness Halley's Comet making its once-every-75-year appearance over the Florida skies. And sure enough, Howard was awestruck—but then suddenly afraid. He asked his mom what would happen if the comet were to fall to Earth. Howard would later recount how his mother looked at him peacefully and with such assuredness as she said:

"Nothing will happen to us, Howard; God will take care of us."

God will take care of us. Howard needed these words of truth. This unequivocal yes—that he was cared for. Safe.

There are moments amidst our own disorientation and fear and uncertainty when we, like Howard, need to remember truths that have been spoken to us, over us, about us. Perhaps that's why you're here today.

Perhaps you need to hear again and be reminded again of the truth found in Genesis, that you are created in the image of God, brimming with sacred worth.

Or the one in Psalm 139 that there's nowhere you can go where God is not. That you are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Or the one from Isaiah where God says, "Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine."

Maybe you need the truth we hear in Jesus's baptism, that you are God's beloved, or his words: "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you."

Maybe you need Paul's affirmation to the church in Rome that nothing can separate us from God's love or to the church in Ephesus that you are God's accomplishment.

This is the truth of God's relentless, expansive, fierce love for you. This is the truth—that God has declared a resounding "yes" over you. Yes. And what I need you to remember today is that there is no executive order, no law, no government, no human being walking this earth, who can ever claim otherwise. You can delete it from websites. You can ban it from classrooms. You can legislate it away and pretend it doesn't exist. But the truth is still there. You are God's beloved, made in God's image, filled to the brim with sacred worth.

The voices of Howard Thurman's mother and grandmother instilled in him this same truth—a truth Howard would confirm in his own reading of scripture and his own abiding relationship with God. This truth is what Howard Thurman would come to call the "sound of the genuine."

Shortly before he died, in one of his last public lectures given to students at Spellman College, Howard Thurman offered these words:

"There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and sometimes there is so much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before you were even a thought in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through to you…

The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don't be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don't hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don't have that you don't have a thing."

Howard Thurman is naming this same truth—that there is in every person the spark of the divine, the sound of the genuine—a truth at their core. This is true for you. And it's true for the poor in spirit. And it's true for those who mourn. For the meek. For those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. For the pure in heart. For the peacemakers.

God says yes. We affirm this truth. And when that truth can so easily be distorted, left wondering what timeline we've found ourselves in, it's good to center down on this truth together. To be reminded of it. To return to it. The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. God says yes.

But then, Thurman offers this:

And having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the sound of the genuine in you… There is that in every person that waits, and waits, and listens for the sound of the genuine in other people.

If we're honest, we might feel some tension here. Some resistance. I know I do. Because we can claim it for ourselves and for those we love—those we stand with, those whose backs are against the wall. But it's a lot more difficult to affirm that same truth for those who've put them there, those who've denied that truth in others, those we have a hard time saying yes to, ourselves—those who don't seem to carry a shred of evidence that the sound of the genuine is within them.

And yet.

This is why I love Jesus's instruction from the Sermon on the Mount:

Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

This was a verse Howard Thurman returned to often—one that featured in his Jesus and the Disinherited. Because just as Thurman was asking what the religion of Jesus had to say to those whose backs were against the wall, Jesus himself was speaking to people living under Roman occupation, people whose truth was constantly being dismissed or distorted by those in power. The religious and political leaders of his day had created this elaborate system of oaths and vows that made truth-telling more about power than honesty. Much as we might feel now, truth was obfuscated and distorted in service to the powerful. And into that world, Jesus offers these simple and yet revolutionary words: "Let your yes be yes and your no be no."

It's a radical call to truth-telling that would have resonated deeply with those whose backs were against the wall in Jesus's time, just as it resonated with those in Thurman's time, and just as it resonates with those whose backs are against the wall today. Because when those in power work to distort the voice of God, try to make us question the sound of the genuine within, sometimes the only thing that can be done is to simply tell the truth. Jesus said, "The truth shall set you free." And so, for Jesus, this truth is about clarity and courage and integrity.

If you say yes to the blessings Jesus names—if you claim to believe that blessed are the poor and the peacemakers and that the meek will inherit the earth—then your life must align with that yes. You can't claim "Blessed are the merciful" while clinging to indebtedness and holding grudges. You can't proclaim, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," while perpetuating systems of oppression and injustice. Let your yes be yes and your no, no.

According to Howard Thurman, this is what gives the disinherited—those whose backs are against the wall—this is what gives them their power. Because saying yes to the sound of genuine in oneself and recognizing one's own belovedness requires saying no to any other voice or narrative that threatens to diminish or denigrate or distort that truth. Both things can't be true.

Every yes comes with an inherent no. There is no in-between.

Because to say yes to our sacred worth is to say no to any attempt to strip it away.
To say yes to the poor is to say no to economic systems that exploit or oppress.
To say yes to the immigrant is to say no to dehumanization.
To say yes to the refugee fleeing terror or violence is to say no to the fear of the other.
To say yes to the natural world is to say no to policies that prioritize convenience and capital over sustainability.

And in the same way, this is how we can cling to the truth that the sound of the genuine is there in those we find it hard to love, too. It's there, even when they have perhaps forgotten what it sounds like.

Because we can say yes to their inherent goodness while saying no to that which holds them captive—be it fear, ignorance, or greed.

We can say yes to their sacred worth while saying no to that which keeps them unable to see it in another—be it prejudice or power or pride.

We can say yes to the spark of the divine within them while saying no to the shame that's distorted God's voice, the cynicism that numbs compassion, or the despair that says this is all there is.

Because only in so doing can we live in the fullness of God's yes—a yes that refuses to be diluted by fear, a yes that insists on telling the truth and naming the situation, a yes that does not waver in the face of injustice.

Only then can we bear witness to the radical integrity Jesus calls us to—the kind of yes that is not conditional, the kind of no that does not cower.

Only then can we resist the false neutrality that keeps us complicit, the justifications and equivocations that keep us comfortable, and the temptation to remain silent or bury our heads in the sand, avoiding what needs to be named in order to be healed.

Only then can we truly follow Jesus, who said yes to the cross and no to the forces that sought to deny healing and liberation and justice.

Only then can we become a people who are truly alive—alive to the sound of the genuine in ourselves and alive to that sound in our neighbor, too.

Only when we let our yes be yes and our no be no can we, like Thurman, like Jesus, stand in the storm and not be overcome.

There's a story from Howard Thurman's life that has become the stuff of legend. The story is about Howard Thurman's grandmother, Nancy Ambrose. When Howard was a child, there was a white woman who lived nearby who couldn't stand the fact that she had Black neighbors. And so, each night, the woman would take the chicken manure that she'd cleaned out of her chicken coop and dump it in Grandma Nancy's garden.

Night after night, this happened. And young Howard Thurman was puzzled as to why his grandmother didn't get angry about it. He couldn't fathom why she didn't plot some sort of revenge. But instead, Grandma Nancy would get up each morning and mix the manure into the soil to be used as fertilizer.

Years later, the white woman became sick, and Grandma Nancy decided to visit the woman with some chicken soup and a bouquet of roses. The woman was deeply moved by the gesture and asked Grandma Nancy where she had found such beautiful roses. And that's when Nancy replied that, in fact, they had come from her garden and were made all the more beautiful, certainly, because of the chicken manure that had been dumped there night after night.

Grandma Nancy said yes to the sound of the genuine in her neighbor while saying no to bitterness.
She said yes to the possibility of who her neighbor could become while saying no to acts of retribution.
She said yes to the way of love while saying no to the resignation that things must always be this way.

Beloved of God, I know that for many of us, these days seem heavy and overwhelming and disorienting. But here's the good news: God has already said yes to you. That yes is unwavering. That yes is the sound of the genuine in you. And it's a yes that then says no—to fear, to injustice, to every force that seeks to diminish or distort what God has already declared good.

But that yes also comes with a question: What will you now say yes to?

If you feel lost today, I pray you'll look around and see that you're not alone. You're found here by God and by this community.
If you feel like your sacred worth has been called into question, I pray you'll hear anew the sound of the genuine flowing through you.
If you're tempted to bury your head in the sand, then I pray you find the courage to name what needs healing and let your yes be yes and your no, no.
If you feel overwhelmed, I pray that you'll find your lightning for the journey home or the manure to grow something beautiful.
And if you wonder how to make a difference, then I pray you'll say yes to what makes you come alive—and go do that.

In the name of the God who is the genuine, the Christ who says yes and no, and the Spirit in whom we come alive. Amen.