The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray

Sermon June 21, 2026
Commemorating the life and ministry of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on all of us.

Today we celebrate the Episcopal Church’s commemoration of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. Episcopalians may know her as the first African American who was perceived as a woman to be ordained to the priesthood.

Pauli was a trailblazer, who through her work as an attorney, educator, writer, and poet, addressed injustice and promoted reconciliation between races, genders, and economic classes. However, many may not know about Pauli’s struggle to come to terms with her own gender identity. While in her professional capacity, Pauli used she/her pronouns, she described herself as a man living in a woman’s body, and used the pronoun he/she in her diaries and correspondence with family members.

Born in Baltimore in 1910, but raised in Durham, North Carolina by her grandparents and her Aunt Pauline, Pauli graduated from Hunter College in 1933. Pauli was denied admission to the University of North Carolina’s law school because she was African American and was turned down by Harvard University because she was a woman.

In 1940, Pauli was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus in Washington, D.C., fifteen years before Rosa Parks’ arrest. While pursuing a law degree at Howard University, Pauli participated in sit-in demonstrations, challenging racial segregation.

In 1944, during her last year in law school, Pauli wrote a paper which challenged the unconstitutionality of "separate but equal" laws. Her argument eventually formed the basis for the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall called her 1951 book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, "the bible of the civil rights movement.” Pauli went on to receive her Master’s of Law from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1945.

As one of the most important thinkers and legal scholars of the 20th century, Pauli served as a bridge between the civil rights and women’s rights movements. Pauli’s legal theories inspired Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—who later used a law-review article co-written by Pauli—to argue that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause applied to women.

Pauli was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women and coined the term "Jane Crow” to highlight the intersection of sexism and racism. In later life Pauli discerned a call to ordained ministry and began studies at General Theological Seminary in 1973. She was ordained as a priest at Washington’s National Cathedral on January 8, 1977, and served in that capacity until her death in 1985.

In this morning’s Gospel reading we find Jesus teaching in the Temple. According to Mark, this is the second day after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the day after he overturned the tables of the money changers. Access to the Temple was granted based on one's ritual purity and holiness and was restricted by nationality, gender, ritual status, and tribe, with only the High Priest able to enter the Holy of Holies.

This formal hierarchy also reflected the political and social structures of the day. As an itinerate preacher, Jesus was not part of the religious establishment. The chief priest, scribes, and elders, who colluded with the Romans to retain their political power and prestige, questioned his authority to teach in the Temple. They feared Jesus was stirring up trouble during Passover, a particularly tense time, as there was an increased Roman military presence. They demanded:

Who are you?  What authority do you have?

Jesus responded with the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, exposing their preoccupation with their positions of power.

Fr. John Shea asserts that the religious leaders’ primary failure was a "subtle switch from being humble servants of God to being proud possessors of authority.” They had forgotten their place within God’s intended design of mutuality and reciprocity. They were not the owners but the stewards, yet they functioned within a mindset based on isolation, scarcity, and exclusion.

Shea continues, "For them, ‘including’ [meant] that there would not be enough righteousness, enough money, enough prestige, enough land, enough everything.”  Jesus warns us that whenever we make that same mistake, it leads to alienation and destruction. Jesus goes on to quote Psalm 118, 22-3, opening a door to restorative justice.

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing;
 it is marvelous in our eyes.”

On July 29, 1974, before women’s ordination was officially sanctioned, Pauli attended the ordination of eleven women to the priesthood, and described her experience, writing that she felt "fear and trembling, almost panic, the same fear and apprehension as one about to break a tribal taboo."

In her third year of seminary in 1975, Pauli further reflected on that experience:

“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 secular society.”

What we didn't hear this morning is that the Pharisees, Herodians, and Sadducees continued to question him. One of the Scribes, “seeing that he answered them well’, asked Jesus which commandment was the first of all. Jesus replied:

“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one;  you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these."

In her final year of seminary, Pauli wrote about her vision for The Episcopal Church, based on the Second Great Commandment and the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which established birthright citizenship and equal protection under the laws. She wrote that once she began to look at people as individuals, freed from the labels which separated them, reconciliation became possible. 

For Pauli, salvation and reconciliation meant living without fear, grounded in God’s unfailing love. It meant facing injustice honestly, naming what is broken in the world, and choosing love—even when it is difficult.

In her sermon The Second Great Commandment Pauli wrote:

“Pivotal to my relatedness to God, on the one hand, and to my neighbor, on the other, is my relationship to myself. Unless I love and accept myself, I am not free to love and accept my neighbor. Loving myself in this context simply means self-respect, a self-regard born of the realization that I am the object of God’s limitless love and mercy, part of his creation. Self-acceptance does not mean uncritical self-approval, but self-understanding, awareness of my strengths and weaknesses, and the blessed assurance that God-in-Christ is working in me and through me towards the perfection of my life.”

Many members of the LGBTQ+ community struggle to love themselves as God loves them. I know I have. I suspect that this is part of the human condition, regardless of our sexual orientation or gender identity.

Some years ago I came across an icon depicting Jesus as the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, surrounding his son with a loving embrace. It resonated with me, and I have often shared a copy of it with those who I knew were struggling to see themselves as God’s beloved children.

Up ’til now, I responded to this icon emotionally, and until working on today’s sermon, I never really thought about it intellectually. But over these past two weeks I came to realize that it was the embrace of Jesus I longed for, and the reminder that I am also God’s beloved child.

In her sermon, The Prodigal Son, Pauli wrote that the son, after having strayed, came to his senses, and remembered who he really was. He was brutally honest with himself, accepted responsibility for his actions, and for his alienation from God and his family.

Pauli affirmed that God’s love and forgiveness are unconditional but are not to be taken for granted. It was necessary for the son to experience a change of heart, a change in direction.

Between the ages of 40 and 42, I too had a change of heart. I began a process of repentance, but not one that our fundamentalist neighbors might expect. For me, it was the repentance of living a lie. I began to stop conforming to the expectations of society. I began to stop lying to myself, my wife, my son, my family, my friends, my church, and the larger community, and in doing so, began to experience new life, and for the first time began to really understand resurrection.

While I am still at times hesitant to speak my truth out of fear of what others might say or do, I believe through that process I have begun to better love my neighbors as myself.

Pauli challenged the religious and social injustices of her day. Let us follow Pauli’s lead as a church and as LGBTQ+ Christians to pick up the mantle set forth in the vows we made at our baptisms:

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

We respond with: I will with God’s help.

Two evenings ago, the West Michigan Voices of Pride chorus performed a mash up of "Go the Distance" (from Disney's Hercules) and "Defying Gravity" (from Wicked). It occurred to me that The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray had a vision almost like a prophecy, challenged the gravitational forces of her day, went the distance strong in her convictions, and ended up right where she belongs commemorated by the Episcopal Church.