Black?
Randolph’s sermon was daring for the time and daring for a woman because women still had a difficult time finding acceptance from men both inside and outside the Church that they had a call from God to preach. Randolph was fortunate because the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church began ordaining women in 1894. A lot was at stake for her, as a woman and as an African American to preach as she did. Race prejudice and violence were an ever-present threat. Jim Crow, segregation, and the lynchings of Blacks who did not “know their place” were never far from the minds of African Americans. It was not outside the realm of possibility that she could have been lynched. She knew she was vulnerable; she took the risk anyway.
A great preacher brings a word to the congregation and brings the self to the sermon. They bring scripture to life and offer a glimpse into who they are, what they believe, what they stand for, and how they have evolved. The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray was one such preacher. She was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1977 at the age of sixty-seven. In 1974, she served as the crucifer at the irregular ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven, the first women irregularly ordained in the Episcopal Church. It was a time of change and challenge in the Episcopal Church. Women had challenged the belief that God did not call women to preach and serve at the Table in the Church. Murray was the first African American female ordained as priest in the Episcopal Church. She was used to bending the rules and norms that attempted to define the place of women and African Americans in society and the Church. Pauli Murray came to the priesthood after an illustrious career as an attorney, civil rights activist, and educator. She could have easily ignored God’s call on her life, but she did not.
In five sermons preached between 1974 and 1979—“The Dilemma of the Minority Christian” (1974), “The Holy Spirit” (1977), “The Gift of the Holy Spirit (1977), “Can These Bones Live Again?” (1978), and “Salvation and Liberation” (1979)—we see an evolution of her thinking as a theologian and how she wrestled with being obedient to Jesus and being a Black Christian in a racist society and the Episcopal Church. In “Dilemma,” preached three years before her ordination, she took as her text Isaiah 53:3–6, the Suffering Servant, and concluded that even in the face of racism and racial violence, the Black Christian must follow the example of Christ who went to the cross and said not “a mumblin’ word.” To follow Christ as he hanged from the lynching tree was difficult for Murray and she revealed that her rebelliousness and impatience tested her ability to accept Black suffering as Jesus had accepted his. She did not want to be despised because of her race (or her gender, which was fluid).
She was torn because she wanted to be a true follower, a true disciple, but questioned whether she was able to do as the Lord did. The answer was not clear and she knew it was because she questioned the meaning of salvation as it related to life in the present, to life on earth. She said that life in the here and now should involve being safe; that people should be able to live in safety, and live without fear, knowing that God’s love was available to everyone, although that was not the life for African Americans. She struggled with what many Christians have always struggled: how to love those who make it difficult to love, those who treat God’s Black children as less than human, and she concluded that as long as we live as we are called to do—in community—there will always be conflict. However, if we respond with conflict, we cut ourselves off from God’s love and a sense of community. If we fight back with violence, we become lost and alone. She acknowledged that African Americans fought for self-respect and pride, both which had been denied by Whites, and she knew that having self-pride was a stumbling block to salvation. She questioned whether African Americans had to make a choice between having self-pride and enduring racism and injustice without saying “a mumblin’ word.”
She seemed to rely on redemptive suffering because she offered that “whatever we suffer is part of God’s ultimate plan; that we are in fact God’s Suffering Servants in the salvation history of the world.”13 Ultimately, she offered that what African Americans endured was not a struggle between White people and Black people but a struggle between good and evil.14 Like those in our cities who face the constant fear of meeting death at the hands of a police officer, or those who are sentenced to life in substandard housing, or those who find themselves in the snares of an unjust justice system, Murray understood that there are times when we ask about the presence of evil and the seeming inability of God to handle it.
In “Can These Bones Live Again?,” a sermon using the text of Ezekiel 37:1–7, Murray said she was unable to fully grasp the Holy Spirit unless she was able to relate it to her own life. In her previous sermons, the Holy Spirit was a given; however, here she pushed back, harkening to her words in The Dilemma of the Minority Christian where she confessed she was rebellious and impatient. When will her people be free? she asked. She used Psalm 137 to examine what it was to be in exile, to be exiled away from everything you know. She related exile to the experiences of African Americans, stolen from their homeland and then, during the Great Migration, experiencing exile again. Babylon of the spirit is everywhere for those who try to find their roots and as they roam rootless in a country that denies their humanity and yet is home.15 As Nikole Hannah Jones writes in the New York Times “The 1619 Project,” African Americans are African by heritage and American by citizenship.16 How do we keep singing, saying everything will be all right when everything around us says otherwise?
Still, she lamented, even after all she had done in her life before and after ordination, that she might die before she was able to complete God’s mission in her life. How many of us share her feeling that there is just so much to do and so many more years in the rearview mirror than lie ahead? She voiced possible doom and admitted that she was an exile who was returning to the South after a fifty-year absence. Still, she continued living into her call and “out of these dry bones, the outcasts of the earth—even women—shall arise and the House of Israel shall be reborn.”17
Murray posed a series of questions that challenges the relevancy of the Church. These questions lead us back to Kelly Brown Douglas when she asks whether the Church is going to be White or is it going to be Church?18 A White Church forces everyone who is not White to attempt to be something they can never be—White, which causes trauma and self-loathing. Murray wanted to know if the Church is strong enough, courageous enough to challenge the “powers and principalities,” the systemic evils that destroy humanity and seem to be “virtually immune to individual morality.”19 She offered that the Church had become too ingrained in maintaining the status quo to be a force for change; the Church had been coopted and corrupted by a false world that competed with God’s creation. She extolled the virtues and writings of liberation theologists, among them Gustavo Gutierrez. The civil rights activist and the theologian in her united as she argued for a life of freedom “here and now.”20 Sin was corporate as well as individual; the Church could not ignore corporate sin and focus solely on individual or private sin. She quoted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in that for the church “to accept passively an evil system [is] as immoral as active perpetuation of it, [and] . . . a righteous person has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system.”21 It was time to fight back and no longer accept things as they were. It was time to throw off the negative stereotypes and beliefs of African Americans that dominated White society and call out the Church that fed into that system. Finally, she said, what was needed was a “redefinition of the task of the Church in the world.”22
