Covenant Presbyterian Church of Athens, GA

06/21/2026

The Courage Born in Silence (Summer Saints: Howard Thurman)
A sermon preached by the Rev. J. Thomas Buchanan on June 21, 2026
Covenant Presbyterian Church

At that place [Elisha] came to a cave and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” Then the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel, and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill, and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill. Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”
(I Kings 19:9-18, NRSVue)

I do love this story we just read from the Old Testament! Elijah doesn’t sit in this cave as a serene spiritual master. That’s one of its gifts. The scripture doesn’t place him at Mount Horeb glowing with quiet confidence, ready to receive a timeless lesson about prayer. Elijah comes to the mountain exhausted. He comes afraid.

In one moment, he’s living in a season of high drama and real danger, of seeming triumph, after confronting the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, after seeing fire fall from heaven, after what might have appeared as the great vindication of his prophetic ministry. And then, almost immediately, everything changes. Queen Jezebel threatens his life, and Elijah runs. He goes into the wilderness and sits beneath a broom tree. He asks that his life might be over. By the time he reaches the cave, his body is depleted, his spirit is frayed, and his imagination has narrowed around one terrible, apparent truth: “I alone am left.”

That’s how exhaustion often speaks. It convinces us that everything depends on us. It tells us that no one else understands. It shrinks the world until the future seems no larger than our own depleted strength. Elijah has been faithful, bold, and brave, and yet he now finds himself in the wilderness, undone by his own fear.

I find it so tender in this story the way God cares for him before God questions him. Before the voice at the cave, there is food. Before the commission, there is sleep. Before God sends him back into the work, God lets him rest. His fear is taken seriously, and his weariness is met with mercy. And only after all that, does the question come: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” What are you doing here, in this cave, in this fear, in this loneliness, in this place where your courage has run dry?

Many of us know something about the cave, even if our lives don’t look much like Elijah’s. We know what it is to become tired from caring. We know the drain of trying to remain faithful in a world that seems to produce fresh reasons for grief every morning. We know the exhaustion of outrage, the weight of bad news, the fatigue that comes when justice feels slow and cruelty feels relentless.

In such a world, faith might feel like a constant summons to respond: to speak, to act, to resist, to remain vigilant. And much of the time, that summons is real. But a life lived only at that pitch will eventually exhaust the soul. Elijah has spent himself in public struggle. Now, in the cave, he must learn again how to listen.

Which brings us this morning to Howard Thurman, our second figure in this summer’s series. Last week, Dolly Parton helped us think about joy, generosity, dignity, and the grace of turning one’s gifts outward for others. Howard Thurman brings us into a quieter room. His voice is less familiar to many, but it is one we need deeply. Thurman was one of the great spiritual teachers of the twentieth century, and he understood with unusual clarity that the work of justice must be rooted in a rich inward life with God.

Howard Washington Thurman was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1899, in the world of Jim Crow segregation. His father died when he was young, and he was raised in large part by his mother and grandmother. His grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, had been enslaved. She couldn’t read or write, but she carried within her the memory of slavery and the deep wisdom of a faith that had survived it.

Thurman later wrote about how formative she was for him. She had listened to preachers read from Scripture in antebellum days, and she remembered that enslavers especially liked to quote Ephesians’ words about slaves obeying their masters. She wanted nothing to do with that text. But she cherished the songs of Israel, the prophets, the stories of Jesus, the promises of deliverance, the God who stood with the lowly and made a way where there seemed to be no way.

So, from the beginning, Thurman learned that Christian tradition could be used to wound, but that it could also become a source of life. He learned that religion always carries power. The deeper question is what kind of power it carries, and whom it serves.

He went on to Morehouse College and then to Rochester Theological Seminary. He became a Baptist minister, professor, dean, preacher, writer, and spiritual guide. In the 1930s, he traveled with a small delegation of Black Americans to India, where he met Mahatma Gandhi. That meeting profoundly shaped him. Gandhi pressed the delegation with hard questions about Christianity in America, and Thurman came home with a deepened sense of nonviolence as a demanding spiritual discipline. It required far more than “strategy.” It required the transformation of the inner life.

In 1944, Thurman and Alfred Fisk founded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, one of the first intentionally in*******al and intercultural churches in the United States. Imagine that in 1944: a worshiping community formed around the conviction that the divisions America treated as natural had already been overcome in the deepest truth of God.

Later, Thurman became dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, the first Black dean of a chapel at a predominantly white American university. And there, in Boston, he became an important influence on a certain young doctoral student named Martin Luther King Jr.

When we think of King and the Civil Rights Movement, we rightly remember Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and the March on Washington, and the jail cells, the bridges, the dogs and firehoses. But beneath all that, ran deep underground streams of spiritual formation: the Black church, the teachings of Jesus, hymn-singing, the discipline of prayer, the strength of ordinary people. And among those streams was the thought and witness of Howard Thurman.

King knew Thurman personally. He read him. He drew strength from him. And one of Thurman’s books, Jesus and the Disinherited, became a spiritual classic of the movement. Published in 1949, it revolves around a question as direct as it is devastating: What does the religion of Jesus have to say to people whose backs are against the wall?

For Thurman, that was no abstract question. Jesus himself was a poor Jew living under Roman occupation. Jesus belonged to a people constrained by forces greater than themselves. He knew the pressure of empire, the vulnerability of the poor, the suspicion directed toward those without power. Thurman wanted Christians to see Jesus from that underside of history, from the place where the disinherited know in their bodies that the world is not arranged for their flourishing.

This past Friday, our nation observed Juneteenth, recalling June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally received the news that they were free, more than two years after emancipation had been proclaimed. The day carries both celebration and ache: freedom declared, freedom delayed, freedom still awaiting its fuller embodiment. Thurman’s life unfolded within that difficult space. He asked what freedom means when the law may have changed, but fear still governs the body; when chains have been struck off, but the soul still bears the pressure of a world organized against its dignity.

It’s from within that struggle that Thurman names three great dangers pressing upon the souls of the oppressed: fear, deception, and hatred. These are spiritual dangers, not just emotional ones. Fear teaches the body to contract and the spirit to hide. Deception can become a survival strategy when truth-telling carries too much risk. Hatred may feel like strength for a while, especially when dignity has been denied, but it gradually gives the oppressor too much power over the inner life.

Thurman was asking what kind of soul could resist evil without being remade in evil’s image. What kind of inward life could sustain truth when lies are rewarded? What kind of communion with God could make courage possible when fear seems entirely reasonable?

That brings us back to Elijah at the mouth of the cave. The story says there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces. Then there was an earthquake. Then fire. These are the sorts of signs we might expect at the mountain of God. They belong to the landscape of Sinai and revelation, to the memory of divine majesty.

But Elijah doesn’t meet God in any of these. For him, in that moment, God comes in what many of us learned to call “a still small voice.” The Hebrew here is beautifully elusive. Some scholars have rendered it “a thin silence,” others “a gentle whisper,” but I still remember the phrase my Hebrew professor offered in seminary: “the sound of silence inexpressible.” However we name it, the story leads us to the edge of a great mystery. The exhausted prophet is met by a presence that reaches beneath his fear, beneath his weariness, and into the deepest place where courage might be born anew.

There is a kind of noise that keeps us from hearing our own souls. There is the noise of the world: breaking news, urgent alerts, endless argument, the steady churn of anxiety. There is also religious noise — the pressure always to be useful, the need to prove our concern, the temptation to mistake agitation for faithfulness. We might even begin to imagine that quiet itself is a betrayal of the world’s urgency.

Howard Thurman helps us resist that confusion. He teaches that silence can be a form of courage. The silence he commends is a listening so deep that the soul remembers God, before returning to the world that God loves. For Thurman, the inward life was the necessary ground for public faithfulness, because if it’s fear that rules the soul, our work for justice becomes frantic and reactive. If hatred rules the soul, our resistance begins to resemble exactly what it opposes. If despair rules the soul, we may keep doing good things while inwardly surrendering any possibility of good news.

The struggle for justice needs people with deep roots. Think of the Civil Rights Movement at its best. It certainly required strategy, organization, legal brilliance, and political pressure. It required people willing to march, sit in, register voters, and place their bodies in harm’s way. But it also required songs sung in the dark. It required prayer meetings, and Scripture, and wise elders who knew how to say, “Child, keep going.” It required an inward discipline to face hatred without becoming hate, to face violence without surrendering dignity, to face delay without losing sight of the promised land. That’s the gift Thurman offers us, reminding us that it is in the spiritual life where the work of justice finds its strength to endure.

This is especially important for a congregation such as ours, for we do care deeply about the shape of the world: about hunger and violence, inclusion and democracy, creation and peace. We come to worship carrying real concerns and a genuine desire to live faithfully within them. Yet we also have to ask how we can keep caring without being consumed, how we can remain engaged without becoming brittle, how we can seek justice from a place deeper than outrage.

Elijah goes into the cave convinced that he’s alone, but in the silence, God tells him the truth: There is still work to do, but there are companions he has not yet seen. There are seven thousand who have not bowed to Baal. There is Elisha, who will come alongside him and after him. The silence does not mark the end Elijah’s calling. It returns him to his calling with a wider horizon. God’s quiet voice frees Elijah from the lie that everything depends on him. It gives him back to the world with the severe mercy of knowing he is neither abandoned nor indispensable.

There is freedom in that. We are called, and we are responsible for the work given to us. But the work is God’s before it is ours. God has companions we do not yet know about, reserves of grace we have not yet imagined, and voices still speaking in places we have not thought to listen.

Thurman helps us hear this gospel afresh because Jesus stands at the center of his vision: Jesus among those whose backs are against the wall; Jesus among the poor, the threatened, the weary, and the forgotten. He of all people knows the power of empire, the loneliness of betrayal, and the violence human beings inflict upon one another. But through it all, he remains rooted in the love of God. He tells the truth. He loves to the end. And God raises him up.

This is the solid ground beneath Christian courage: Christ is risen. Death does not speak the final word. The world’s noise is not the deepest truth. Love has gone down into the grave and returned – bearing life.

Thurman wrote of finding within oneself a place of quiet rest, a center that the tumult could not finally overcome. That place takes practice. It takes prayer. It takes Sabbath. It takes worship. It takes walking away from the noise long enough to discover that God has not stopped speaking. For some of us, that may mean literal silence, a few minutes each day when no device is asking for our allegiance. For some, it may come through music, through walking, through gardening, or even through simply attending to the steady rhythm of breath. For some, it may come here, in worship, when a hymn carries us deeper than our own thoughts. For some, it may come in the sacrament, in the quiet receiving of bread and cup.

But we all need places where the loudest voices of the world lose their authority over us, where fear is met by love, and where we remember who and whose we are. From that depth, we can return to the world with steadier courage and a more durable hope.

Friends, Howard Thurman’s witness is a gift for days like ours. He teaches us that the work of love needs depth, that justice needs prayer, and that courage is born in the quiet places where the soul meets God. Elijah came to the cave emptied out and afraid. God met him there in the sound of silence inexpressible, and sent him back fed, steadied, accompanied, and called.

May it be so for us. May we listen beneath the noise. May we find again that quiet mercy at the center of our lives. And from that deep place, may we rise again with courage to do the work of love—to the glory of God. Amen.

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06/14/2026

A warm welcome to Covenant’s newest members - Charles & Linda Jean Jay, Ela Nichols, Marge Striggow, and John Knox!

06/14/2026

A Coat of Many Colors
A sermon preached by the Rev. J. Thomas Buchanan on June 14, 2026
Covenant Presbyterian Church

We want you to know, brothers and sisters, about the grace of God that has been granted to the churches of Macedonia, 2 for during a severe ordeal of affliction their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. 3 For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means and even beyond their means, 4 begging us earnestly for the favor of partnering in this ministry to the saints, 5 and not as we expected. Instead, they gave themselves first to the Lord and, by the will of God, to us, 6 so that we might urge Titus that, as he had already made a beginning, so he should also complete this generous undertaking[b] among you. 7 Now as you excel in everything — in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you — so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.

8 I do not say this as a command, but I am, by mentioning the eagerness of others, testing the genuineness of your love. 9 For you know the generous act[e] of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. 10 And in this matter I am giving my opinion: it is beneficial for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something. 11 Now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means. 12 For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have. 13 For I do not mean that there should be relief for others and hardship for you, but it is a question of equality between 14 your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may also supply your need, in order that there may be equality. 15 As it is written,
“The one who had much did not have too much,
and the one who had little did not have too little.”
(II Corinthians 8:1–15, NRSVue)

As you all know, this summer we are spending time with the lives of some people who help us speak about the gospel in fresh ways. We are calling them “summer saints,” but not because they’re flawless, or because the church has somehow placed halos over their heads. That would be missing the point. The question is much more human and much more interesting than that. How might a particular life — gifted, complicated, limited, generous, unfinished — help us see something of the grace of God?

And today, we start things off right – with Dolly Parton! Now there are many reasons Dolly is beloved. There is her voice, of course – unmistakable from the first note! There’s the humor, too, sharp and self-aware. There are the rhinestones and wigs and high heels, all worn with such confidence that they become less costume than a kind of proclamation. And of course, there are the songs, so many of them, full of heartache and tenderness and wit.

But for our purposes this morning, what matters most is not celebrity. What matters is the shape of a life in which humble beginnings have been remembered without shame, in which faith has taken the form of a wide and loving welcome, in which gifts have again and again become generosity.

Dolly Parton was born in 1946, the fourth of twelve children, and grew up in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains. Her own official biography describes her life as a “rags-to-rhinestones” story, which may be as perfect a phrase as anyone could invent for her. We know the rhinestones. They sparkle. They announce themselves. But the rags matter too. In fact, the rags may carry the deeper gospel.

That’s where one of her signature songs, “Coat of Many Colors,” begins. As you’ll see, we will hear that song after the sermon today, and it’s worth letting it become more than only a musical offering. It can become an image through which to hear Paul’s words to the Corinthians.

The story behind the song is simple and powerful. When Dolly was a child, her mother, Avie Lee, made her a coat out of fabric scraps because the family could afford little else. As she sewed, she told Dolly the biblical story of Joseph and his “coat of many colors.” Dolly went to school proud of what her mother had made, only to be laughed at by children who saw the coat as a sign of poverty. But Dolly saw something else. She saw love. She saw beauty. She saw a gift. What others called rags, her mother’s hands had turned into something beyond any price.

That’s a good place to stand when we come to Paul. In II Corinthians, Paul is writing about money, which means he is also writing about far more than money. He is encouraging the church in Corinth to participate in a collection for the struggling believers in Jerusalem. This offering is not merely a charitable project. It’s a sign of communion across distance and difference. Gentile Christians are being asked to share materially with Jewish Christians. People who might otherwise have remained strangers are being woven together into one body.

And so, to encourage the Corinthians, Paul points them to the churches of Macedonia. He says that during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty overflowed in a wealth of generosity. It’s one of those strange gospel equations that refuses to balance on the world’s terms: affliction and poverty, plus joy, equals generosity.

Now, we should be careful here. Paul is not romanticizing poverty. Poverty in itself is not holy. Poverty can wound the body and narrow the future. It can humiliate and exhaust. It can deprive people of choices God surely intends them to have. Paul is not telling the poor to be content with injustice, nor is he using their hardship to shame the Corinthians into opening their wallets and pocketbooks.

Paul is talking about grace. It runs all though this chapter: The grace of God given to the Macedonians … the gracious work of sharing in the ministry to the saints … the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who though he was rich, yet for our sake became poor, so that by his poverty we might become rich. For Paul, generosity is not first a strategy, or an obligation, or a fundraising technique. Generosity is what happens when grace runs loose in human lives!

Grace changes our sense of what we have. Grace changes our sense of what we need. Grace changes our sense of who belongs to us. The Macedonians don’t give because they’ve calculated that they have plenty to spare. They give because joy has opened them outward. They know need from the inside, and perhaps that’s precisely why they can recognize the need of others. Their generosity is not the generosity of those looking down from above. It is the generosity of kinship, of family.

That’s a big part of what makes Dolly’s life such an interesting conversation partner for this passage. She has never seemed embarrassed by where she came from. She has not hidden Locust Ridge behind the bright lights. She has carried it with her. Again and again, she has taken the scraps of memory — poverty, family, faith, mountain music, and creativity — and made something life-changingly generous from them.

I think of the Imagination Library that she launched in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she was born and raised. It was inspired by her father, whom she loved deeply, and who could not read or write. What could have remained only a private ache became a public gift. Month by month, books began arriving in the homes of children, from birth to age five. The program has since spread far beyond that one county, sending free books to children in multiple countries.

That’s not generosity as performance. That’s memory turned into mercy. She remembered a father who could not read, and imagined children whose lives might open differently if books arrived with their names on them. She remembered what it was to be poor and made a gift that doesn’t ask whether a child or a family “deserves” it. The book comes because the child matters, and because imagination is sacred, and because a whole new future can be opened by something as ordinary and miraculous as pages in the mail.

This is so very close to Paul’s own vision. Christian generosity is not simply the transfer of resources from those who have to those who lack. It’s the creation of a community in which gifts circulate for the sake of life. Paul says he does not mean for there to be relief for others, and pressure on the Corinthians, but “a fair balance.” Then he reaches back to the story of manna in the wilderness: “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

That is one of the Bible’s most beautiful descriptions of enough. In the wilderness, manna could not be hoarded. Each gathered what was needed. Some gathered more, some gathered less, but when all was measured, by the grace of God, everyone had enough. The miracle was not only that bread appeared in the wilderness, but that God formed a people around enough. Enough for today. Enough for each household. Enough that one person’s abundance did not become another person’s going without.

That’s the gospel economy Paul is inviting the Corinthians to inhabit. And it’s still a hard economy for us to trust, because all of lives we have been trained by a different one. We are trained only to ask what we can protect, what we can store up, what we can secure against an uncertain future. Of course, in themselves, those are not foolish concerns. Prudence is not faithlessness. But fear can so easily become the architect of our lives. Fear tells us that there will never be enough, and that generosity is dangerous, and that if someone else receives more – more help, more attention, more welcome – then, somehow, we will have less.

But grace tells another story. Grace says that life is not diminished by being shared. Grace says that gifts become more truly themselves when they are given away. Grace says that the scraps we might have dismissed — the memory, the wound, the skill, the story, the song, the quiet capacity to care — may become part of something beautiful when love gets hold of them.

That’s why the coat is such a powerful image. The children at school saw rags. Dolly saw her mother’s love. They saw lack. She saw a story that gave her dignity. Now, the gospel doesn’t ask us to pretend that rags are the same as riches. It doesn’t ask us to spiritualize poverty until we no longer feel the urgency of hunger, housing, wages, medical care, literacy, and all the material conditions that shape human life. Paul’s whole project in this passage assumes that material need is real and that faithful people should respond to it materially.

Still, the gospel does tell us that shame is a liar. The world doesn’t get to measure the worth of a child by the cost of her coat. The world doesn’t get to decide that a person’s value rises and falls with income, polish, education, status, beauty, accent, paperwork, or productivity. The world doesn’t get to call a life poor because it arrives in scraps.

That may be the greatest gift Dolly’s story gives us. She stands as someone who has been extravagantly herself — rooted in a particular place, shaped by a particular family, carrying a particular voice — and has turned that particularity outward in blessing. She has not had to become generic in order to be generous. She has not had to escape her story in order for her story to become gift.

There is a word for us here, as the church, for we too are something like a coat of many colors. A community is not made from one perfect bolt of cloth, but from many pieces: different histories, different griefs, different gifts, different questions, different capacities for hope on any given day. Some pieces are bright and obvious. Some are worn soft by years of use. Some carry stories of being overlooked or laughed at. Some have been patched more than once. Yet in the hands of God, these pieces can become more than a pile of scraps. They can become a covering of grace.

Our life together is meant to be that kind of witness. Worship and care, learning and service, welcome and justice — these are not separate scraps competing for space. They are pieces of one garment. They are ways the love of Christ takes shape among us. When food is shared, when children are taught, when the grieving are accompanied, when the lonely are remembered, when neighbors are treated with dignity, when the church refuses to shame the people the world has already wounded, the coat is being sewn – and the thread is grace.

Paul’s invitation to the Corinthians remains an invitation to us: let your abundance become someone else’s enough. Let your gifts move. Let your life be loosened from fear. Let the grace you have received become tangible in the life of another human being.

My friends, the good news is that God has always been making riches out of what the world calls scraps: A manger in Bethlehem … a Galilean teacher with no place to lay his head … a cross outside the city … a frightened group of disciples … a little bread, a little wine … ordinary people, ordinary gifts, ordinary lives … all gathered into the extraordinary mercy of God.

And maybe that’s what we’ll hear, in a few moments, when the song is sung. More than nostalgia, more than a sweet childhood memory. Maybe we’ll hear the gospel in it: that love can be sewn into what seems small; that generosity can arise from unlikely places; that no one’s poverty defines their worth; and that in the economy of grace, even what looks like scraps can become part of God’s enough.

For when God truly moves among us, what we have is no longer purposed only for what it can secure for us. It is gathered into the larger mercy of Christ, where gifts move, needs are met, and no one is left with too much while another is left with too little.

May God make us such a people. May God sew us together in love. And may the grace of Christ make of our many colors something warm enough, strong enough, and generous enough for the world at our doorstep, and beyond.

To the glory of God! Amen.

For more information, check out our website! https://www.covpresat...