Isaiah 43:1-2, 18-19
Dr. Howard Thurman was a Black, Baptist, theologian, pastor, educator, mystic, civil rights
leader and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. Listen to this excerpt from his work:
“There is in every person something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in themself. There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. Nobody like you has ever been born and no one like you will ever be born again — you are the only one. And if you miss the sound of the genuine in you, you will be in want for the rest of your life. Because you will never be able to get a scent on who you are.
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 mind, so many different kinds of signals, so many minute fast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations long before you or 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?”
What is your name? I’m not talking about the one that you are called by others, lovely as it may be, I mean the name that you know when you are in the deepest space of belonging, when you are able to truly experience the Divine presence. It will be unique to each of us. Like Dr. Thurman said, we each have a sound of the genuine in each of us.
Now, some of you might be thinking: what a luxury! Spending the time to listen sounds great, but I have a full schedule, commitments I have to keep, people who rely on me. Some of you I know are also thinking: there is so much justice work to be done! There are people suffering in war; there are houseless neighbors living right here in Addison County; Hope, our food shelf, is seeing unprecedented need.
I hear you! And yes, we do have commitments and important work to be done, AND we need the sound of the genuine, the divine spark within each of us to show up in wholeness. Dr. Thurman knew this, and the prophet Isaiah knew this. At this point in the history of the book of Isaiah, the Israelites are a fractured people. A few generations before, they had been conquered by the Babylonian empire and not only did they have to deal with the destruction of the conquest itself, the people were split into some who were forced into exile in Babylon and others who had to stay behind with whatever was left. This is the time when Isaiah prophesied to the Israelites. His message to them was that the God of
their ancestors had not forgotten them, that they were named and known by their God who suffered with them and who was fractured with them. AND yet, their God was already doing a new thing.
Dr. Thurman was born in 1899 in Daytona, Florida, and grew up with his parents and his
grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, who had been enslaved. Knowing what we know about the Jim Crow era, we know that Dr. Thurman suffered under white supremacist systems and attitudes. (The stories do exist if you want to look them up.) He was not speaking sentimentally or idly about the sound of the genuine.
For Thurman, the sound of the genuine was not only personally grounding in the actual realities of life but also crucial to God’s work of love and justice in the world. Same for Isaiah. Neither of them are speaking for empty comfort. In fact, this becomes its own challenge. There’s the challenge of being willing to listen for that name, for that sound of the genuine in us. We might not always want to know that truth, because what if it means we change? Or what if it means how we act in the world changes? And it will! God is constantly doing new things, and the question is can we perceive it?
Dr. Thurman goes on in his speech to say that, while we seek to hear the sound of the genuine, everyone else around us also has their own unique God-given sound, their own name. So while we are perceiving the sound of the genuine in ourselves, we are also invited to hear its resonance, its harmony, with that of others. And in that harmony is something new, something holy, something that we need.
How different would the world be if everyone adopted this way of being? What would happen if everyone listened and acted according to their own, Divine genuine AND treated everyone else as if they had something unique? We would have to start acting like our actions, collectively and individually, show up in the lives of people we may never meet or come close to crossing paths with. Imagine the difference that would make.
To conclude, Dr. Thurman, with the prophet Isaiah, offer us a perfect foundation for our Open and Affirming commitment and actions. In Middlebury, the Teen Center organizes Pride, which means that the youth of our community are central. That is rare, and it’s a special invitation from the youth of our community to practice and celebrate what we preach. It matters that we show up as church to Middlebury Pride because there are still kids, and adults, who don’t know that God loves the sound of their genuine, and we do too. Thanks be to God, amen.
Weybridge Congregational Church 