Howard Thurman, mentor to leaders in the Freedom Movement including Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr, has a word for this moment. A word birthed in the stillness of prayer while his people walked through the valley of death. A word that cuts through the chaos of condemnation that has been sown in the wind and is reaping a cyclone of rivalrous dehumanisation and scapegoating of the most vulnerable. A word where social analysis starts with removing the painful, blinding log from our own eye, knowing full well that dissociating from the communities of captivity is not the same as deliverance into new ways of seeing. A word that takes seriously 1 Peter 4:17, “For it is time for judgement to begin at the household of God”. As I quoted with Jonathan Martin and then as Drew Hart and I interviewed Lisa Sharon Harper and David Gushee , Howard Thurman’s 1946 essay “The Fascist Masquerade” contains this line that we need to sit with together in the ashes,
“The bitter truth is that the Church has permitted the various hate-inspired groups in our common life to establish squatter’s rights in the minds of believers because there has been no adequate teaching of the meaning of the faith in terms of human dignity and human worth.”
Please Lord, may InVerse continue to be a space where we learn from one another the meaning of faith in terms of human dignity and human worth. Amen.
Please listen to our dear friend, Rev Dr Otis Moss III, message from Sunday: https://www.youtube.com/live/YZAuExjlqv0?si=rGZSPQNCV4yxXMUa