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In Part 3 of this series on the Divine Encounter, Thurman remarks that "life is more than any experience of life." No single event, circumstance, or experience is capable of totally defining our lives. Any event that convinces us otherwise becomes God in our lives, which is why worry and anxiety are so despairing. For Thurman, remaining connected to the inexhaustible quality of our personalities gives our lives meaning and resilience. With this connection maintained, even death becomes nothing…

In Part 2 of this series on the Divine Encounter, Thurman continues to claim that all of life is supported by God's order, including life's crises. Thurman asserts that it is better to experience crisis than to have no crisis at all, for it is crisis that summons up the depth of the human spirit. For Thurman, all the universe shares the rationality of God with the human mind, and thus the mind is capable of finding revelation and understanding in any circumstance. By this connection, Thurman…

In the first lecture of this series, Thurman discusses the Divine Encounter in the context of crisis. All living beings experience crisis in some form. These crises force us out of familiarity and comfort. Thurman suggests that, in the face of crisis, we have the option to retreat or move towards this challenge.  Using examples ranging from biblical Jacob to Beethoven, Thurman offers that, even in seeming chaos and disorder, there is an "orderliness of rationality of God." Ultimately, Thurman…

Do you “believe in democracy?” Thurman poignantly begins his sermon by asking the congregation to give serious thought to their commitments to the democratic process. Democracy, he claims, rests on a fundamentally metaphysical presupposition that the world is “grounded in creativity.” Human thought experiments with the raw material of life and of living that exist all around us, which is “shaped and reshaped” in accordance with “great aspiring and great hoping and great dreaming.” Human…

In the fifth sermon of this series, Thurman invites us into a reexamination of what it means to be human beings. "What am I? What are you?" he asks. Thurman suggests three answers to the question: 1.) We are dreamers, and our vitality is sustained by our dreaming. 2.) We are builders of worlds, and though our building never fulfills its blueprint, the greatness of our plans feed our dreams and hopes, and 3.) We are children of God, beings of infinite worth. Thurman ends saying that a culture,…

In the first of two sermons entitled “Man,” Thurman considers what it means for the human to be a spirit-possessing being. The spirit is fundamental to understanding all things that a person thinks and feels. It is what enables the human to respond to one's experiences. Thurman imagines spiritual consciousness as an elevated level of awareness, whereby a person resists being imprisoned within moments and events so that possibilities beyond immediate experience become visible. Here, one can speak…

In the third sermon of this series, Thurman offers commentary on Jesus as a resource for faithful living into the fact of God. Thurman says that Jesus offered to his disciples a vision of God – not a metaphysic, not a theology, not a dogma – but an embodied vision of God. This vision revealed that God is near, and God is love, two principles that cannot be separated. No degradation, no waywardness can rub out God's signature on us. We are redeemed, not by our own individual character, but by…

In the second sermon of this series, Thurman extends his commentary on God as a centering force in human experience. For Thurman, the awareness of God always arises out of some present stirring, passion, concern, or, anxiety. The religious spirit, he says, emerges to “focus on the ultimate destiny” of the human race whenever there is “moral confusion” in the world. In these instances, God is the reference point enabling creative and dynamic faith. One must turn to the altar of the divine to…

In this seventh sermon on the prophets, Thurman highlights two points found in the prophet Jeremiah. Firstly, Jeremiah presents us with the problem of history and responsibility. Often we think our actions as our own, set into motion by our own agency, but in truth we act as a result of processes unfathomable to us. What then is the place of responsibility when it seems we have no control? Thurman does not answer this question, but simply ponders. Secondly, Thurman says that Jeremiah…

In this sixth sermon on the prophets, Thurman turns to Jeremiah and the topic of mysticism. Some see mysticism as retreat from the world, whereas ethics and morality seeks to make a way in the traffic of life. Thurman rejects this binary. The life of ethics has to be supported by something. Thurman suggests that outer battles are not won in the events, but deep in the transformations of human spirit. Our ethical struggles and moral difficulties will overwhelm us if we do not find a way to keep…