Feast of Pauli Murray. 9 July. 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Sirach 15:1-6. They will lean on her and not fall.
- Galatians 3:23-29. There is no longer Jew or Greek…slave or free…male and female.
- Mark 12:1-12. The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone [or keystone]; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing.
O God of reconciling love, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Today is a long-anticipated, special day at Emmanuel Church because we are celebrating the Feast Day of The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray with the unveiling of a statue of her, beautifully rendered by our Artist-in-Residence Ted Southwick. The statue is installed on the sanctuary pulpit, from which Dr. Murray preached. We are thrilled and honored to welcome her niece Rosita Stevens-Holsey, who will speak with us after the service. While Dr. Murray’s feast day is July 1, the day that she completed her earthly mission, today is the 112th anniversary of her baptism at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Baltimore. Just prior to being ordained, she had described herself as: woman, Christian, seminarian, poet, lawyer, person of color, and senior citizen. Last week in Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in the bigoted-website case, she recalled Murray’s pioneering work with regard to public accommodations.[1] I want to assure you that Pauli Murray is still speaking to us all.
It’s been 50 years since Dr. Murray spoke with Emmanuel’s then rector, Al Kershaw, regarding her sense of a call to ordained ministry. At the time, she was the Louis Stulberg Professor of Law and Politics at Brandeis University and a member of the vestry of Emmanuel Church. In her autobiography she wrote: [2]
Once I admitted the call of total commitment to service in the church, it seemed that I had been pointed in this direction all my life and that my experiences were merely preparation for this calling…. In spite of my own intellectual doubts and the opposition to women’s ordination, which was widespread within the Episcopal Church at the time, I took the fateful step of applying to the Rt. Rev. John M. Burgess, Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts for admission to holy orders.
While she was in seminary, she wrote to Emmanuel’s vestry telling them that she had never felt more at home in a parish than she did at Emmanuel Church. That says so much about what kind of place this was and still is.
In her third year of seminary, in 1975, she wrote an article about her vision for the next 100 years of The Episcopal Church. Her article was published in the Episcopal Women’s Caucus’s newsletter called Ruach (Hebrew for breath, spirit, wind). [3] She insisted that, when looking to the future, the question is: “What should be my focus as a Christian and a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, USA, for those years left of my human existence?” As she was shouting, she typed that question in all caps. Her answer was informed by the Second Great Commandment: “Thou shalt love by neighbor as thyself” and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Murray fiercely insisted that we look at people as individuals, not as members of stereotyped groups. She wrote that once she began to look at people as individuals, their stereotyped classifications began to fall away, and reconciliation became possible.
In the same article, Murray wrote about her experience attending the first ordination to the priesthood of eleven women in Philadelphia in July 1974. She described going to that service in “fear and trembling, in almost panic, having the same fears and apprehensions as one about to break a tribal taboo, therefore, completely unprepared for the resultant joy and sense of the Holy Spirit.” She continued:
In an electrifying flash of insight I saw the coming together of two groups who had been submerged in both our society and our church – no other two groups in the USA could have brought it about. The ordination of women was the focus of the event; the ghetto congregation played the role of sponsoring host. The stone(s) which the builders have rejected shall become the cornerstone(s). It was the reversal of traditional roles which contained the ‘magic’ of the experience – a glimpse into the future, the potential of two rejected groups for the enrichment of our Christian witness and our secular society.
I have to say that, in my institutionally racist and woefully incomplete education as a white woman in seminary, the social location of the Church of the Advocate, a church in the ghetto as Murray describes it, had been left out of the narrative. Like many other white people, I had been so focused on the ordination of the women, three of whom were my teachers, that I failed to notice the radical hospitality of the hosting parish, even when I visited it for the celebration if its 25th anniversary.
I believe that it was Murray’s testimony about the stones that the builders had rejected (which refers to Jesus’s criticism of religious officials who were colluding with the Roman Empire) that led to our Gospel text this morning being chosen for her feast day. The cornerstone or keystone becomes the stone upon which everything else is based. Murray had preached on this Galatians verse on 13 February 1977, when she presided at her first Eucharist at The Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which was the first time a woman had celebrated the Eucharist at an Episcopal church in North Carolina.
At that service, Murray read from a Bible that had belonged to her grandmother Cornelia Smith, from a lectern that had been given in memory of the woman who enslaved her, Mary Ruffin Smith. In her sermon that day Murray described her experience of becoming a priest:
All the strands of my life had come together: descendent of slave and of slave owner. I had already been called poet, lawyer, teacher and friend. Now I was empowered to minister the sacrament of the One in whom there is no north or south, no black or white, no male or female – only the spirit of love and reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.
She had nine years of ordained ministry before she died from cancer in 1985; and she is still speaking.
We are nearly halfway from 1975 to 2075, nearly halfway into Pauli Murray’s vision for the next century. Here’s what she concluded:
In the next century, PECUSA [the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America] can become enriched and can make its Christian witness by the fullest utilization of two of its most neglected assets – its women and its ethnic minorities….We can stand at the center of the ecumenical movement, drawing all communions closer together. We are the descendants of planters, slaves, immigrants, indigenous Amerindians, etc.; and if we are sufficiently creative, we will be flexible enough to reflect the range of our unique heritage, cross-fertilizing one another and breaking out of our cocoon into Christian joyousness. We will not really care whether one bows or genuflects at the Cross, whether one stands or kneels at the Eucharist, whether we use the Book of Common Prayer or the Second Service (STU) [think Enriching Our Worship]; whether the priest wears a chasuble or a plain surplice when celebrating –- all these are matters of personal taste, and have nothing to do with salvation, which is what we should be about. We will be as comfortable in a “low church” as in a “high church” — grateful and rejoicing in the range of our liturgical expression –- in the pageantry and the simplicity.…Only as we express our common humanity, can we hope to express the Glory of God!
Pauli Murray is still speaking. Listen to her and continue the work for all the years of our human existence left.
- Sonia M. Sotomayor, dissenting justice. 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U. S. Supreme Court, slip opinion, decided June 30, 2023, p. 11. PDF
- Pauli Murray. Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 427.
- —– “What PECUSA could be during the next century, 1975-2075″, Ruach, September/October 1975. PDF