Peace & Prosperity

Preached August 29, 2021 at St. Martins-in-the-Field, Biddeford Pool & St. Philip’s-by-the-Sea, Fortunes Rocks in Maine.

I love seeing grandparents up here in Maine spending time with their grandchildren - sailing, building sand castles, playing cards, going for walks. And I imagine some of you spent many summers with your grandparents, perhaps not far from this spot where I preach, and have fond stories that return to you when you pause to remember them.

I am very fond of a story from the life of Howard Thurman’s grandmother. If you are not yet acquainted with Howard Thurman, I’ll take care of that in a moment. 

Howard and his widowed mother lived with his grandmother for much of his childhood in Daytona, Florida in the early 1900s. Grandmother lived on the edge of the black section of town, right next to a white lady who was none-too-pleased to live at the edge of the white section. In fact, this white-lady neighbor was mean to several neighbors, including the white ones. She was, apparently, an-equal-opportunity-mean-old-lady neighbor.

The neighbor had a chicken coop and one night after she had cleaned it out, she dumped a big mound of chicken mess over the fence into Grandmother’s yard- right on top of her garden!

The next morning when she went out to the garden, Grandmother looked at that pile of chicken mess and understood what her neighbor thought of her and her proximity. The neighbor intended harm for Grandmother’s garden - harm for her flowers, harm for her vegetables.

Grandmother went to the tool shed,

looked around in there,

pulled out her hoe,

and worked that chicken mess into the soil.

Some time later, the neighbor fell ill.  Because she was mean to them, neighbors did not want to visit her. 

Grandmother noticed this and understood that her neighbor was sick and lonely. Grandmother went out into the garden and cut flowers. Then, she went into her kitchen and poured soup into a jar. Grandmother went next door, flowers in one hand and soup in the other, and visited her sick neighbor. 

Her neighbor was surprised to see her. She remarked on the beauty of the flowers and the good flavor of the soup. 

As her neighbor enjoyed the soup and gazed upon the flowers, Grandmother explained the secret to her beautiful blooms and robust vegetables- local chicken manure that was worked into her garden soil!

As a gardener who has chickens, I can attest to the wisdom of Grandmothers response to the mean neighbor lady’s hateful act. 

It makes for good fertilizer if it is carefully worked into the soil in the right quantities. If left piled about, it will burn the plants and ruin the garden. I can attests to that truth as well.

The reason I share this story about Howard Thurman’s grandmother is because it is a vivid description of what it means to follow Jesus, to take a gentle, systematic approach to expertly respond in love to what is hateful in the world around us.

And now I will introduce Howard Thurman to those who have yet to know this great spiritual leader. Born in 1899, grandson of a former slave, he attended Morehouse College, an historically Black college, and became a minister. In 1944, Thurman co-founded the first integrated interfaith religious congregation in the United States in San Francisco. He studied Quaker teaching and met Mohandas Ghandi in India. In 1953, he became the dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, the first black dean in a predominantly white university. He mentored Martin Luther King, Jr. as he developed his philosophy of nonviolence.

Howard Thurman taught that the way to change external society was to change one’s internal reality. He was gracious, intellectual, humble, well-read and well-traveled.

To know him better, I suggest we all pick up a copy of Jesus and the Disinherited, which changed my view of my responsibility to love like Jesus and my reaction to a variety of issues that seem to press against us all from before and behind. Published in 1949, this book shows that Jesus taught the oppressed people of his time a faith-based unconditional love that would enable them to endure their oppression and have agency in how they responded, in how they lived life more and more like Jesus.

Howard Thurman learned from his grandmother a spiritually mature way to work that spiteful mess a neighbor threw over in meanness into something that fertilized the soil to convert it into beauty and healthy produce.

Jesus urges his followers to eradicate all hatred from our lives - to choose responses to those who would harm us that are gentle, redemptive, productive for bringing about a world where all of God’s people can gather and care for one another. Hatred and evil are out there- we know that in the upsetting news alerts that interrupt our vacations with our families. We know, even as we make sandcastles and memories that will last generations, that there is much to be done to restore what is broken in this world out there. We also know, and thank you, Jesus for reminding us, that as an old saying goes: we have met the enemy and it is us.

There is hatred and evil in here, in us- interrupting our joyful interactions and tarnishing our gatherings with others is this interior piece, this evil that we know can get carried away with us and distract us from how we are called to live. 

Good news: like Grandmother, we have a choice — many choices — to make to live more in the grace and love of Jesus’s teaching. We choose to address the evil and hatred within us and we choose a better way to live. We have the power to choose to be agents of God’s grace pouring out love for a world that is desperately longing to believe that what lies before us is better than what is behind us. 

That is the power of Christian faith and Christian community. The love of God is more powerful than all the hatred, all the meanness, all the evil around us, tossed at us, or simmering within us.

The love of God, when harnessed by regular Jesus followers like us, eradicates the hatred within our hearts, it then emanates so powerfully into the world around us that neighbors no longer vex one another,  and communities no longer scream at each other over who is right, and I pray, 

and I pray for this daily and I hope you will join me, my friends- 

that we will all do everything we can to beat our swords into plowshares and fulfill the dream of God to live together in peace and prosperity. You know the Christian way: Forgive enemies. Love neighbors. Pray for those who harm you. Carefully and wisely work the mess tossed into your midst into something life-giving and productive and even beautiful- something you can share in love. 

Use your agency, use your ability to make choices, 

to glorify God

over the evil temptation to play into petty squabbles

that derail us from that 

peace and prosperity that is truly God’s dream for all people.

(Lectionary texts for this Sunday can be found here.)