Stone the Builders Rejected

Feast of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray

July 6, 2025

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.

Early in 2007 when I was serving in my first parish, an article in Episcopal News Service grabbed my attention. It described a 30^th anniversary celebration of the ordination and first celebration of the Eucharist by someone then unfamiliar to me, the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. Our Presiding Bishop at that time, the Right Reverend Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, preached at this event.[1] I looked at the photo of Rev. Dr. Murray with short hair, glasses, collared jacket and clerical collar, sitting at a desk writing, surrounded by books, and was intrigued.[2] I began to read of this person’s numerous path-breaking accomplishments, starting with having been the first Black person assigned female at birth to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church on January 8, 1977. Prior to ordination, Murray had been a poet, an early civil rights activist in the 1940s, and a lawyer, navigating rejection along the way by the University of North Carolina for not being white, and by Harvard Law School for not being male. Murray went on to coin the concept “Jane Crow” to signal the compounding scourge of sexism with racism, a forerunner of the concept of intersectionality, and became one of the founding members of NOW (the National Organization for Women).[3] Having fought to receive tenure at Brandeis, teaching in what became the university’s American Studies department from 1968-1973, Murray left that position for seminary and the priesthood.[4] As I read of all these accomplishments I thought, how have I not heard of this person?

The following Sunday I remember incorporating a reference to the Rev. Dr. Murray into my sermon.[5] The gospel for that Sunday was from the sixth chapter of Luke, his version of the Beatitudes, with woes as well as blessings. It included this line: “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Humanity. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets” (Luke 6:22-23). I hear an echo of this sentiment in the sentence from today’s gospel passage from Mark, assigned to what is now Pauli Murray’s Feast Day: “‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’” (Mark 12:11). There is throughout Murray’s life a pattern of rejection and uplift, of desolation and consolation, of weeping and rejoicing. These fluctuations reflect the dynamics of faithful struggle, persistence, determination to speak the truth and make a transformative impact upon the world. Reading Murray’s poetry, the memoir Song in a Weary Throat (from which our second reading comes), sermons and essays, these themes resound loud and clear.[6] Truly, Murray was a prophet and suffered for it. The image of the stone’s rejection and transformation into cornerstone speaks to the faith that Murray relied upon while navigating deep difficulty.

And not without doubt, may I add: Murray preached about struggling with doubt and its connection to faith. “Perhaps the most important concept I learned in my study of theology in seminary,” Murray shared in a sermon on “New Creation,” “is that doubt is an element of faith; that if all things could be proven by empirical evidence, it would no longer be faith. Faith enters when reason falters. And it was Paul himself who saith, ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.’”[7] In so many ways, Murray’s Christian faith, paired with a razor sharp intellect and a restless energy, allowed them to partner with God in the coming of what Verna Dozer called the divine dream,[8] working for justice and transformation in this world, and making room for things unseen to emerge beyond the powers of human agency.

You may notice I have been referring to Murray either without pronouns or with singular they/them.[9] This is in reflection that years before what we now call gender affirming care was organized and available, Murray sought out medical assistance to help understand why they had long felt more male than female, and to access transition as hormone replacement therapy had begun to become available. Murray did not write publicly about this crucial theme in their life, or about their relationships with women over the years. Scholars only began writing about what we might now call these queer and trans dimensions of Murray’s witness over the last ten to fifteen years.[10] This aspect of Murray’s life is known to us from correspondence, photo albums, and other records they painstakingly preserved to be shared after their death at Harvard’s Schlesinger library as a reflection of their beautiful, complex humanity. I remember sitting in my study a few years after I had first learned about Murray, reading a book called How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz. I came across a reference to a Pauli Murray as one who had sought access to transition and thought, that’s a distinctive name – could this possibly be the same person? Indeed, it was. The footnote referenced the Schlesinger library files.[11] As the 2021 documentary My Name Is Pauli Murray shows, trans communities around the country have taken increasing, deep interest in the gender complexity of Murray’s life, claiming them as a “trancestor.” Chase Strangio, openly trans lawyer with the ACLU (on whose board Murray once sat), speaks movingly in that documentary about how so much of the legal work for social justice in this country has built upon Murray’s interpretation of the fourteenth amendment. Shortly after the deeply disappointing Skrmetti decision from the U.S. Supreme Court came out last month, allowing Tennessee to legally deny access to gender affirming care to trans youth, Strangio recorded a moving video using Murray as his background image. “I wanted to stay grounded in the reality that our histories stretch back decades and centuries,” he said, referencing our struggles and our resistance. “We are going to keep fighting … whatever the court says, we always keep fighting…. For Pauli, for all of you: I love you.”[12]

I join Strangio and many others in turning to Pauli Murray’s life and witness in this moment, seeking wisdom and strength in a fearful time. And as I turn, look, and listen, what overflows is an unquenchable hope. Hope founded on a faith in what cannot be seen – not now, certainly not fully. Hope rooted in a cornerstone that was rejected, stigmatized and ridiculed, left for dead, but come to life, transformed and transforming. When I look at Murray’s life and witness, I see them turning to others in despair and in joy, as we saw in our first reading: “I dared not open the package. It was a moment I could not endure alone.”[13] A moment of joy not to endure alone, but in friendship and solidarity, in community. I heard this hope in Murray’s wise observation about that same joyously published book, that though it had shortly become an historical document, “During its brief existence… it had helped to further the developments that made it obsolete.”[14] I see that hope in a poem published in Murray’s 1970 collection Dark Testament, entitled “For Pan:”[15]

I did not know when I had climbed the hill

Past cruel rocks and thorny underbrush

That I should find so desolate a place.

There land ended on barren cliff,

There earth and sea embraced

In perpetual union of tenderness and strife –

Unyielding stone against relentless wave.

There was the loneliness of God

Molding the first small world in mist and flame.

I would have fled the awful emptiness

Had I not seen you standing there,

Poised lightly as a gull on swirling surf –

Bright promontory of defiance –

Your arms flung windward,

Your hair a golden pennant.

And though no word was uttered

Above the tumult of advancing tide,

You came uncalled

And placed your hand in mine.

There on the furthest rim of earth

We stood, my hand in yours,

Your breath upon my cheek,

Our wild impatient dreams

Thundering echoes of the flood,

Our laughter mocking ancient shibboleths,

Shattering boundaries of space and time.

Beloved comrade, high-hearted rebel,

If I had paused,

Let wisdom shield the vulnerable heart,

I would have walked a safer path,

Crept blindly underground

And never glimpsed your shining essence,

Earth-trapped star on lonely height.

McDowell Colony, April 1959

Murray would have walked a safer path had they not seen this shining presence, perched at the very edge of creation. And so might we. The world is not safe, dear friends – we know this. In so many ways the foundations of protections and structures we hold dear are being eroded. We do not know what is to come. But the witness of Pauli Murray and of so many others who have walked the treacherous paths ahead of us show us the way. Step by step, day by day, together, in hope even if it be “a crushed stalk,” as Murray famously penned,[16] we may know that rejected stones can and have become the foundation for something new. A rock on which we stand, together.

[1] “Presiding Bishop brings message of 'Shalom' to Episcopal Urban Caucus conference.” February 8, 2007 https://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/ENS/ENSpress_release.pl?pr_number=020907-04

[2] The photo at the top of this article: https://www.paulimurraycenter.com/who-is-pauli

[3] Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (Oxford University Press, 2017).

[4] https://www.paulimurraycenter.com/who-is-pauli  

[5] It would have been February 11, 2007 - the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany in year C. Unfortunately, I no longer seem to have it!

[6] Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper and Row, 1987),

pp. 287, 289.

[7] Pauli Murray, ed. Anthony Pinn, To Speak a Defiant Word: Sermons and Speeches on Justice and Transformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 160. Quoting Hebrews 11:1.

[8] Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1991).

[9] The Pauli Murray center shares this reflection about Murray and pronouns: https://www.paulimurraycenter.com/pronouns-pauli-murray . The film My Name Is Pauli Murray also discusses the quandary of what pronouns to use for Murray.

[10] See, for example, Rosenberg, Jane Crow. Doreen Drury, “Boy-Girl, Imp, Priest: Pauli Murray and the Limits of Identity” in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 29, no. 1 (Indiana University Press), 2013, pp. 142–47; Naomi Simmons-Thorne, “Pauli Murray and the Pronominal Problem: a De-essentialist Trans Historiography” in Activist History Review, 30 May 2019. Troy Saxby, Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[11] Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in America (Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 36-37, 296 n.73 & 74.

[12] @chasestrangio Instagram reel from June 18, 2025.

[13] Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 287

[14] Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 289

[15] Pauli Murray, Dark Testament and Other Poems (Norwalk, CT: Silvermine Publishers, Inc., 1970), pp. 86-87.

[16] Murray, Dark Testament, 22