Walk in the Way

Pride Sunday / Feast of Pauli Murray

Isaiah 55:10-13; Canticle: Dark Testament v. 8;

Passage from Song in a Weary Throat; Mark 12:1-12

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

June 28, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1205975642

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.

In the summer of 1993 when I was nineteen, I attended my first Pride march. It was in Philadelphia, and it followed my coming out the previous winter when Kateri and I had gotten together. I knew that being queer had to do with my gender as much as my sexuality, though it would be several years before I had a clearer sense of that. But that stepping out of the closet and into the light was such a gift of freedom. What I remember from that first march was the sheer number of people – not nearly as many as San Francisco’s or New York City’s, but enough to give me a wide-ranging glimpse of community. I teared up at the PFLAG contingent, touched that there were parents and friends – allies – supportive enough to walk along with us. Religious groups in Pride marches, especially churches refusing to be spoken for by condemning renditions of Christianity, moved me then as now.

Pride marches have always struck me as expressing a fundamentally living, transformative quality. Founded upon the resisting rebellion that spurred on the early Freedom Day parades following New York’s 1969 Stonewall rebellion and San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, they manifest an unquenchable joy, an abundant exuberance that cannot be contained. They reflect what the prophet Isaiah proclaims as the divine word that comes down among us, watering, sustaining, sprouting new life that “shall not return to [God] empty but achiev[ing] that which [God has] purposed” (Isaiah 55:11). The mountains and hills burst into pink triangles. The urban canyons resound with music and roaring Harleys. The streets flutter with colorful flags and pulse with dancing bodies.

I do not know if the Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray, whose July 1^st feast day we commemorate today along with Pride Sunday, ever attended a Pride march. They held the complexity of their gender and sexuality much more privately in life, while in death they made sure to preserve this crucial facet of their reality for scholars, activists, and history to know and share. Truly, if ever a life embodied the divine word that, as our Isaiah passage continues, “shall be for the Lord a memorial, an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off,” it was Murray’s (55:13). The website of the Pauli Murray Center of Durham, North Carolina, describes them in this way: “The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was a twentieth-century human rights activist, legal scholar, author, labor organizer, poet, Episcopal priest, multiracial Black, LGBTQ+ Durhamite who lived one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century.”^[1] Born in Baltimore in 1910, Murray lost both their parents early on and was raised by their aunt Pauline Fitgerald Dame after whom Pauli had been named (though in a sermon Pauli also named the Apostle Paul as a namesake).^[2] Their activism, creative expression, and scholarship pushed back against racism and sexism, sharpening attention to their systemic overlaps and intersections in coining the term “Jane Crow.” Their experiences of oppression, described in the posthumously published autobiography Song in a Weary Throat, reflect some of the horrific capacities of human beings expressed in our gospel passage from Mark.

Through it all, including struggles of emotional as well as physical well-being, Murray’s hope was founded upon Christ the rock, the stone rejected by the builders who became the cornerstone, as our gospel passage quotes Psalm 118 (Mark 12:10, Psalm 118:22). Spurred on by the “dream of freedom,” as Murray wrote in their epic 1942 poem “Dark Testament,”^[3] Murray broke trail for the interpretation of the US Constitution’s fourteenth amendment to recognize the rights of people of color, immigrants, women, and later queer and trans people.^[4] In the 2021 documentary My Name Is Pauli Murray, which we watched together here, we can hear Murray declaim with amazement how they had lived long enough to see their “lost causes found.”^[5]

Already by the time of that documentary, the terrain of Murray’s life and work was under intensifying attack by this country’s White Christian Nationalism. In this time as the freedoms of women, immigrants, people of color, trans people and the broader LGBQ community, and the intersections of these groups are undermined, as many of us struggle with overwhelm amidst this wave, Murray’s life speaks to us. We do well to remember the sheer odds they had to overcome to plant seeds that continue to sprout and grow. We need to remember especially their Christian faith – notably not understood by some of their colleagues, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.^[6] Murray’s gives us a vision of hope that refuses naïve optimism, grounded in the ongoingness of struggle. “Hope,” as they wrote and we just spoke together, “is a crushed stalk between clenched fingers….Hope is a song in a weary throat.”^[7]

Murray’s faith is, not surprisingly, very much on display in the sermons they preached both before and after their historic ordination to the priesthood on January 8, 1977. In one shared on Father’s Day in 1975, they expressed a wish that Father’s and Mother’s Day might be combined in some fashion down the road in a more expansive gender offering. Acknowledging Jesus’ originally Aramaic prayer to God named as “Abba,” Father, they render and interpret it more inclusively as “Father-Mother God,” and note how the prayer itself, which we pray in the context of the Eucharist each week, grounds us in the work of God’s Kingdom. Quoting on the Anglican theologian of Mysticism Evelyn Underhill, whose feast day recently passed, Murray emphasizes the power of prayer – and of the Lord’s Prayer in particular – to ground us in and spur us to the work of that Kingdom. Quoting Underhill, Murray  preached, “We therefore, when we dare to use [the Lord’s Prayer], offer ourselves as fellow workers for the Kingdom.”^[8] And what is that  Kingdom but the dream of freedom promised by God, on earth as it is in heaven; a dream in which the last are first and the first last, the rich are emptied and the hungry filled, the wounded are healed, and together we live out the reality that all things are possible with God. Murray’s life and work were founded upon this faith.

I think too of the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, “save us from the time of trial,” when I consider the major pivot of Murray’s life described in our second reading: the death of Irene “Renee” Barlow. The sermon I’ve just quoted from was a mere year and a half after this devastating loss.  As becomes clear in the film My Name Is Pauli Murray, Barlow was not only a friend but the love of Murray’s life. Her loss was utterly life changing. What has long struck me about the passage is how this loss became for Murray a catalyst for claiming deeply and fully their life’s calling: “I felt an urgency to complete my mission on earth in the days left to me.”^[9] Ordained ministry, for Murray, was not merely the final chapter of a life of various vocations, as they write: “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.”^[10] I want to take care with how the word “merely” is heard here. I read this realization not as a downplaying of the earlier facets of their vocation, the lifegiving seeds they planted in law and poetry, in classrooms, boardrooms and courtrooms. Their ordained ministry was not more important than their previous work. Rather, I see Murray interpreting the direction of their life in the midst of cataclysmic change, sharing with us how they came to know in the depths of grief that God had always been with them, calling them in each life chapter. Now, they were actively braiding together all of those strands with new clarity and vigor. Our passage was written at least a decade after Renee’s death. But in their Father’s Day sermon, much closer to the loss, Murray preached in the midst of that discernment and discovery process: “In the hour of dark bereavement, when we have lost those we love best; in that moment of utter failure of all our dreams and plans; when we barricade our homes like fortresses to protect our lives and our possessions, and find that nothing is safe secure, we learn at last the truth of Isaiah.” Then they conclude by quoting the Isaiah passage at the heart of their sermon – a different passage than ours. It states, “Though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your teachers will not hide themselves anymore, but your eyes shall see your teachers. And your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it’” (30:20-21).^[11] Not only in retrospect but in the midst of grief, affliction, and struggle, Murray wants us to hear the voice of God saying, This is the way. Walk in it.

This Pride Sunday, Murray gives us this sense of direction, of call. God is with us. God hears us. God urges us to continue forward step by step, day by day, this month and every month. The divine Word does not and will not return to God empty but shall accomplish that which God has purposed, in us and through us, in and through people around us, living out the dream of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Let the music resound, let the hills burst forth in pink triangles, let the motorcycles roar and the people dance. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice in gratitude for God’s dream; for the seeds God has planted in the life of Pauli Murray and all the holy ones of God; for the possibilities of God, planting seeds in and through us, even now.

^[1] https://www.paulimurraycenter.com/who-is-pauli

^[2] Pauli Murray, “Father’s Day Sermon” in To Speak a Defiant Word: Sermons and Speeches on Justice and Transformation. Ed. Anthony Pinn(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 29.

^[3] Pauli Murray, Dark Testament and Other Poems (Silvermine, 1970), 12. See also Ed Pavlic, “Ours Is No Bedtime Story: Pauli Murray’s Dark Testament reintroduces a major Black poet.” September 16, 2018: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/147831/ours-is-no-bedtime-story  

^[4] See the ACLU’s description of Murray’s path-breaking legacy in general and as a member of their board in the 1960s: https://www.aclu.org/news/womens-rights/pauli-murrays-indelible-mark-on-the-fight-for-equal-rights  

^[5] Betsy West and Julie Cohen, My Name Is Pauli Murray (2021).

^[6] Justice Ginsberg specifically expresses this lack of understanding in My Name Is Pauli Murray.

^[7] Murray, Dark Testament, 22

^[8] Murray, “Father’s Day Sermon” in To Speak a Defiant Word, 29, quoting Evelyn Underhill, Abba: Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer, Ch. 2 “The Father.” Abba can be found online at https://www.ecatholic2000.com/underhill/meditations.shtml#_Toc421822718  

^[9] Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1987), 426.

^[10] Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 426

^[11] Murray, “Father’s Day Sermon” in To Speak a Defiant Word, 31