In this week’s sermon on the meaning of Gaudete (rejoice) Sunday, Pam encouraged us to eschew despair in times when our hearts are understandably heavy. As we enter into the week before Christmas, she suggested that we look for small instances of joy, in which we find evidence love’s power to redeem.
Howard Thurman, author, minister, civil-rights leader, and educator, inspired many civil-rights advocates in his time and ours. It is said that his well-known work Jesus and the Disinherited was deeply influential on Martin Luther King’s thought and preaching, and that MLK carried a well-worn copy of it during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas invokes Thurman when she speaks about going beyond charity to engage in changing the conditions that allow inequality and injustice to prevail.
A staunch believer in the power of interfaith community. Thurman co-founded he the first integrated, multicultural church in the U.S., the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (San Francisco, CA., 1944). He spent his later years at Boston University as the first black Dean of Marsh Chapel (1953-1965). His legacy and archives are enshrined at BU in the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground. Thurman’s meditations come to mind as we consider Pam’s assignment to us because, for him, joy was a “precious ingredient of life.”
Let’s listen to his words from The Inward Journey (1961).
Joy is of many kinds. Sometimes joy comes silently, opening all closed doors and making itself at home in the desolate heart. It has no forerunner, save itself. It brings its own welcome and its own salutation. Sometimes, joy is compounded of many elements– a touch of sadness, a whimper of pain, a harsh word tenderly held until all its arrogance dies… a murmur of tenderness where no word is spoken, the distilled moment of remembrance of a day or a night, an hour lived beyond the sweep of the daily round…. [The joyful are] “the heavenly troubadours, earth-bound, who spread their music all around and who sing their song without words and without sounds.
Merry Christmas!
Mary Beth Clack, Cindy Coldren & Pat Krol
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church Dec. 27, 2023