Welcome friends near and far to the Friday, May 29, 2020 podcast from Peachtree Baptist Church, my name is Paul Capps, pastor. For the past month or so I’ve been reading Howard Thurman’s short book titled “Jesus and the Disinherited.” Thurman was a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr. Published in 1949, the book grew out of an essay he wrote in 1935, and for me it has been both important history and inspiration even as this nation continues to fight against human unity. I can’t recommend it enough. Using the overarching concepts of Fear, Deception and Hate as weapons used to maintain division, he bookends these with the first chapter, Jesus, and the last chapter, Love.

If you were able to read between the lines of yesterday’s post, you’d know that I was responding to the ways we have seen people not treating people the way they would want to be treated these past several weeks, but using fear, deception and hatred as weapons to maintain all kinds of division. In the midst of this kind of rebellion against God, Christians must be willing to speak the gospel of God’s desire for perfect well being through Jesus in the language that will be heard by all people. What we know is true is that the rich speak a different language from the poor, the documented speak a different language from the undocumented, the privileged speak a different language than the underprivileged. It is hard work, but if we submit to the Spirit, we can express a future hope that as Thurman writes, Jesus projected with his very life, where “There would be room for all, and no man would be a threat to his brother.”

I offer these two excerpts from the first chapter without further comment.

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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. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his 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.

Living in a climate of deep insecurity, Jesus, faced with so narrow a margin of civil guarantees, had to find some other basis upon which to establish a sense of well-being. He knew that the goals of religion as he understood them could never be worked out within the then-established order. Deep from within that order he projected a dream, the logic of which would give to all the needful security. There would be room for all, and no man would be a threat to his brother. “The kingdom of God is within.” “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.” 

The basic principles of his way of life cut straight through to the despair of his fellows and found it groundless. By inference he says, “You must abandon your fear of each other and fear only God. You must not indulge in any deception and dishonesty, even to save your lives. Your words must be Yea—Nay; anything else is evil. Hatred is destructive to hated and hater alike. Love your enemy, that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven.”

Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Beacon Press.

Howard Thurman in 1963. Photo by Boston University.