Item Information
Title
Side B: February 13, 1977 sermon Murray-morning prayer, Chapel of the Cross
Creator
Murray, Pauli
Source
Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America
Publisher
Harvard University
Date
February 13, 1977
Type
Audio
Text
Pauli Murray: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Good morning! I didn't hear it.
Audience: Good morning.
PM: Now will you please turn to your neighbor and say “good morning”?
Audience: [Unclear]
PM: Thank you, that was to break the tension.
Audience: [Laughs]
PM: That hymn always gets me. Those of you who are as old as I am will remember that it was the funeral hymn of Franklin D. Roosevelt and it was the funeral hymn of my best friend whose death was the catalytic agent that sent me into the ordained Ministry. If you do not hear me in the back don't hesitate to raise your hand. Our Gospel lesson this morning begins sixth chapter of Luke seventeenth and eighteenth verses. “And He came down with them, and stood in the plain, and the company of His disciples, the great multitude of people out of all Judea and Jerusalem and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon which came to hear him and be healed of their diseases and they that were vexed with unclean spirits. They were healed.” A great multitude of people, always it seems to me is a signal for a deeply religious experience: joyous, friendly, full of song and praise, inclusive, embracing all sorts and conditions of mankind: men women, and children, old and young, the lame, the halt, the blind, Jew and Greek, Black, white, red, yellow, Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor.
In our own time, of course, we have seen some of these great multitudes. One of the most spectacular multitudes of the twentieth century was the great March on Washington in August 1963 when an estimated 240,000 people thronged from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial and heard among others the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a son of the American South give his famous “I Have a Dream” oration ending with a glorious shout, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty I'm free at last!” On that day the crime rate in many American ghettos dropped to almost zero and as I recall there was not a single incidence of violence connected with the March itself. Typical of human experience, which combines the sacred and the profane, I myself marched twice that day: first under the banner of the American Civil Liberties Union with my niece and my Howard University schoolmate, whom today you know as The Honorable Patricia Roberts Harris, President Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Housing and Urban Affairs and then when we reach the the Lincoln Memorial my niece and I reversed our field and walked backward to see the oncoming thousands until I found and fell in line with my own parish church contingent from St. Mark’s on the Bowery in New York City. Those who experience that witness for jobs and freedom said that it was more like a religious festival of the people of Israel at the time of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century than a political crusade. All I can think of that day was the old familiar song, “Oh When the Saints Come Marching In,” “when the saints come marching in Lord I want to be in that number when the saints come marching in.”
I see the events of the past nearly two centuries roughly from 1870 to 1789 through 1976 as efforts to complete the first American Revolution. I like to think of January the 1st, 1977 as a signal for the visible beginning of the second American Revolution, a revolution marked by the healing of vexatious unclean spirits. The reconciliation of groups of Americans now alienated from one another by various means by reason of race or color or religion or sex gender sense or age or sex preference or political and theological differences or economic and social status and other man-made, and just know that I won't be accused of being a super feminist, human-made barriers. This is not to suggest the coming of the millennium. It is to suggest that I take with utmost seriousness the words of Jesus as the Christ to use Paul Tillich’s characterization when Jesus said, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Why January 1st, 1977? On that day an important segment of the Anglican communion, which as we know exists as a hybrid Church, a bridge between the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox faiths on the one hand and the more Protestant faiths on the other hand, on that day the Anglican communion in the U.S.A. broke a 2000 year tradition and admitted women to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church USA and lest we appear to be too exclusive let us remind ourselves that our communion is merely the grandchild of Judaism and that we resemble our grandparent. in more ways than we are sometimes willing to admit. This event in my opinion will take its place and significance with the great changes in the history of religion and more particularly in the history of the Christian church. God moves and work the Divine Purposes out in and through history and in historical perspective. The ordination of women to the priesthood may rank with the admission of the Gentiles to the faith of the followers of Jesus Christ in the 1st century, the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and the growing liberal Liberation theology of the late 20th century, which is now being reflected among other things in the revolt are Roman Catholics against authoritarian oppression and apartheid respectively in Latin America and in South Africa. These ordinations of women evoked an outpouring of spirit and an excitement which confirmed the fact that the struggle of Episcopal women to fulfill God's call to the priestly vocation was the number-one religious news story of the year 1976. The mass media reflected the upsurge of religious witness. For the first two weeks of January 1977, there were front-page news in the national and international press and they were prominent features of the radio and television networks. Regions and local communities vied with one another to be included in the ceremonies and to publicize their firsts. The first regularly ordained woman in the USA, Jacqueline Means in Indiana on January 1st; the first woman in New York, Carol Anderson on January 2nd; the first woman in Virginia, Pat Parks, January 3rd; the first woman in New England Janet Kelly Brown in Vermont; the first woman from Virginia, from Massachusetts January 8th; the first woman from Alaska and the first woman from Los Angeles, California on January 15th, Victoria Hatch and so on and so on. And if I may sanitize an old familiar expression, when a woman of color suddenly popped up from the woodpile moving along in the ordinary course or procedures and was ordained at the National Cathedral in Washington as one of three women and three men, the national media went crazy and nearly out did themselves. To the national wire services and television networks, she was the Episcopal church's first Black woman and since I am talking about myself and since all of my friends know that I have a personal allergy to the word “Black,” it served me a just exactly right. To the Boston newspapers, she was Massachusetts’ first. To the local Morning Herald in your rival twin tity, she was a woman priest from Durham. To the Washington the Baltimore Afro-American, she was headlined “Baltimorean” is an Episcopal priest. A friend of mine taking her first venture in marriage in her late sixties and honeymooning of all places in Australia sent me a clipping from the West Australian Perth, Australia dated Monday, January 10th only two days after the ordination and it was headlined “History as Black Woman is Ordained.” Now, here we have the clue to all the hubbub. When the Episcopal Church dropped the barriers to one half of the human race, it not only leaped from the 15th to the 20th centuries but it witnessed to inclusiveness the least of these as part of the Anglican communion and in secular terms it moved from 1789, the year in which both the Constitution of the United States was ratified and the Protestant Episcopal Church U.S.A. broke away from the mother Church of the Church of England and became its sister Church, it move from there to 1977, in which we hope and pray that the Equal Rights Amendment will be ratified. Legislators from North Carolina, please take note. I attended three of these ordinations and I have seldom seen such joy unconfined. At the passing of the peace, the congregation can hardly contain themselves. In fact, they did everything but speak in tongues. People embraced and wept and almost danced in the aisle. The National Cathedral jammed with 2,000 people, many crowding the balconies. According to one reporter, erupted into happy chaos and considering the reputation of us Episcopalians for being God's frozen people…
Audience: [Laughs]
PM: ..it was a great for the thaw. As the ordination of the last of the six priests in the cathedral took place, I'm told, the sun burst through the clouds and sent rainbow colored shafts of light down through the stained glass windows and this was seen by some as a sign of God's grace being poured down upon the women priests. For me, the most moving symbol of what was taking place in history was the site of the new priest, Pat Park, ordained in Virginia on January 3rd. Mother of two small children and wife of an Episcopal priest processing out at the end of the recessional in her gorgeous Eucharistic vestments and along beside her skipped her tiny daughter clinging to her hand. This joy unconfined is part of the reconciliation after a long and painful struggle which almost tore the Episcopal Church apart: censured bishops, ecclesiastical trials, violent gestures against women deacons at the altar rail during of all things the Holy Communion, close friends and members of families alienated one from the other, and the victory for women's ordination in 1976 and 1977 has come at the cost of great pain to those members of the clergy who hold it as an article of faith that only a male can represent the sacramental sign of Christ. Now it is true that they do not go further and say that only a white Jewish male is eligible for the priesthood. For if they did that, they would be more accurate about the biological condition and status of Christ. But if they did that that would mean that Paul VI immediately becomes ineligible to be Pope and that all caucasian and Gentile males are ineligible to be priests to say nothing of that two-thirds of the world's population who are not white. Despite their selective theology, however, I take very seriously the pain of those who cling to an article of faith, which appears to be overtaken by history. Having been on the losing side for so much of my life, I do indeed understand their agony and yet, I find it significant that I come out on the winning side in the one decision I made to put God in the center rather than in the periphery of my own life. And so as we rejoice, as we feel healed of the sickness that came upon our communion during the course of the struggle, let us not forget that along with our brethren who hold with the Vatican that the church is not authorized by God to admit women to the priesthood that all of us on both sides of the question stand in judgment before God for our choices.
Every break with long-standing tradition is [unclear] to be a moral victory and a risk. In the first century, it was a risk to accept the uncircumcised gentiles into the primitive Church. There was a risk in parting company from the Roman Catholic Church and establishing the Church of England, which is our ancestor. There was a risk in emancipating 4,000,000 negro slaves without compensation to their masters to whom they represented a heavy capital investment or compensation to the slaves for two centuries of forced labor. There was a risk, as you know, in declaring unconstitutional state-enforced segregation. The price of that last victory was the blood of the martyrs Black and white in Mississippi and Alabama and Tennessee and Texas and California and elsewhere. All of us who are adults and who have lived in the South whether we are Black or whether we are white have suffered in various ways in the course of the struggle.
Yet one of the veterans of the struggle, a victim of the University of North Carolina's rejection in 1938, 39 years ago stands before you today in Chapel Hill the site of that rejection proclaiming the healing power of Christ’s love who paid the ultimate price of crucifixion for our Redemption. As followers of Christ, we are called upon to take risks to work for the liberation of the body, the mind, and the spirit. To exorcize the unclean spirits which vex us and prevent us from being our true selves created in the image of God and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. The late Dr. Frank P. Graham, who some of you may remember, who was president of the University of North Carolina in 1938 when I unsuccessfully applied for admission to the graduate school and with whom I was later privileges to serve on the board of the National Sharecroppers Fund, once spoke of our country as “this little island of Christianity.” Now by this I do not think he meant to put down other religions but to express the fact that Christianity is a minority religion. Often suppressed in other parts of the world and that here in the United States at least we are free to practice it. As baptized Christians, we are all ministers of Christ in the outline of faith in the new book of common prayer we learned that the ministers of the Church are first lay persons and then bishops, priests, and deacons. All of us without exception belong to the royal priesthood of all believers. Today at this time and in this place we are the gathered church. Tomorrow as we go about our secular pursuits, we are the scattered Church. Those of us who are ordained, do not lose our lay ministry and whether we are lay ministers or ordained clergy, we all have the same fundamental calling and that is to represent Christ and his Church, to bear witness to him wherever we may be, and according to the gifts given to us to carry on Christ's work of reconciliation in the world. Each of us therefore is called upon to proclaim the good news of God in Christ’s redeeming love. And the good news today, in our small corner of the planet in the American South, is that the South is rising out of its own ashes, out if its redemptive suffering, it is becoming purified, it is being healed of its unclean spirits, and its Representatives, notably Jimmy Carter in the White House, are beginning to fulfill that beloved song, which is now sung all around the world wherever people are striving for freedom from oppression: “We shall overcome, we shall overcome, Black and white, together we shall overcome.” Deep in my own heart, I do believe that the American South will lead the way toward the renewal of our moral and spiritual strength and our sense of mission. I think perhaps the initiative may have passed from New England, where those first pilgrims back in the 17th century saw the new country as the New Jerusalem a city set on a hill and a light unto the world, and it may have move from there to places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina where we are today witnessing the reconciling of Isaac and Ishmael in the house of Abraham.
I owe much of my religious devotion and my Episcopalian Heritage to my grandmother Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald born February the 10th, 1844, baptized in this Parish next door in the Old Chapel of the Cross on December the 20th, 1854 at the age of 10 and it is listed in the Parish registry that she was one of “five serving children of the Smith family” and the registry added “the mother of these five children is Harriet.” Harriet is my great-grandmother and I am mindful of the biblical prophecy that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Here, the Old Testament story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, the bondswoman, Isaac the legitimate heir, and Ishmael the outcasts comes alive in our own time. Read Harriet Smith for Hagar and you have the connection. The promise of the Angel of the Lord to Hagar in the wilderness when she laid her son Ishmael down to die for lack of water was to make Ishmael and his descendants a great nation. I have come to fulfill that promise but in my eyes the great nation is the American nation neither Black nor white but all colors living freely to be able to express themselves as children of God. It was my destiny to be the descendants of both slave owners as well as slaves, to be of mixed ancestry, to be biologically and psychologically integrated in a world where the separation of the races was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States as the fundamental law of the land in the South. My entire life's quest has been for spiritual integration and this quest led me ultimately to Christ in whom there is no East or West, no North, no South, no Black, no white, no red, or yellow, no Jew nor Gentile, no Islam or Buddha, no Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox. There is no Black Christ or white Christ nor red Christ although it may be that these images may have certain transitory cultural value. There is only Christ, the spirit of love and Reconciliation, the Healer of deep psychological wounds drawing all of us closer to that goal of perfection of which we are capable, which links us to God our creator and to Eternity. Let us pray. Oh God, who created all peoples in your image. We thank you for the wonderful diversity of races and cultures in this world and in our native land. Enrich our lives by ever-widening circles of fellowship and show us your presence in those who differ most from us until our knowledge of your love is made perfect in our love for all your children through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Choir: [Begins singing hymn]
Audience: Good morning.
PM: Now will you please turn to your neighbor and say “good morning”?
Audience: [Unclear]
PM: Thank you, that was to break the tension.
Audience: [Laughs]
PM: That hymn always gets me. Those of you who are as old as I am will remember that it was the funeral hymn of Franklin D. Roosevelt and it was the funeral hymn of my best friend whose death was the catalytic agent that sent me into the ordained Ministry. If you do not hear me in the back don't hesitate to raise your hand. Our Gospel lesson this morning begins sixth chapter of Luke seventeenth and eighteenth verses. “And He came down with them, and stood in the plain, and the company of His disciples, the great multitude of people out of all Judea and Jerusalem and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon which came to hear him and be healed of their diseases and they that were vexed with unclean spirits. They were healed.” A great multitude of people, always it seems to me is a signal for a deeply religious experience: joyous, friendly, full of song and praise, inclusive, embracing all sorts and conditions of mankind: men women, and children, old and young, the lame, the halt, the blind, Jew and Greek, Black, white, red, yellow, Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor.
In our own time, of course, we have seen some of these great multitudes. One of the most spectacular multitudes of the twentieth century was the great March on Washington in August 1963 when an estimated 240,000 people thronged from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial and heard among others the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a son of the American South give his famous “I Have a Dream” oration ending with a glorious shout, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty I'm free at last!” On that day the crime rate in many American ghettos dropped to almost zero and as I recall there was not a single incidence of violence connected with the March itself. Typical of human experience, which combines the sacred and the profane, I myself marched twice that day: first under the banner of the American Civil Liberties Union with my niece and my Howard University schoolmate, whom today you know as The Honorable Patricia Roberts Harris, President Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Housing and Urban Affairs and then when we reach the the Lincoln Memorial my niece and I reversed our field and walked backward to see the oncoming thousands until I found and fell in line with my own parish church contingent from St. Mark’s on the Bowery in New York City. Those who experience that witness for jobs and freedom said that it was more like a religious festival of the people of Israel at the time of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century than a political crusade. All I can think of that day was the old familiar song, “Oh When the Saints Come Marching In,” “when the saints come marching in Lord I want to be in that number when the saints come marching in.”
I see the events of the past nearly two centuries roughly from 1870 to 1789 through 1976 as efforts to complete the first American Revolution. I like to think of January the 1st, 1977 as a signal for the visible beginning of the second American Revolution, a revolution marked by the healing of vexatious unclean spirits. The reconciliation of groups of Americans now alienated from one another by various means by reason of race or color or religion or sex gender sense or age or sex preference or political and theological differences or economic and social status and other man-made, and just know that I won't be accused of being a super feminist, human-made barriers. This is not to suggest the coming of the millennium. It is to suggest that I take with utmost seriousness the words of Jesus as the Christ to use Paul Tillich’s characterization when Jesus said, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Why January 1st, 1977? On that day an important segment of the Anglican communion, which as we know exists as a hybrid Church, a bridge between the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox faiths on the one hand and the more Protestant faiths on the other hand, on that day the Anglican communion in the U.S.A. broke a 2000 year tradition and admitted women to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church USA and lest we appear to be too exclusive let us remind ourselves that our communion is merely the grandchild of Judaism and that we resemble our grandparent. in more ways than we are sometimes willing to admit. This event in my opinion will take its place and significance with the great changes in the history of religion and more particularly in the history of the Christian church. God moves and work the Divine Purposes out in and through history and in historical perspective. The ordination of women to the priesthood may rank with the admission of the Gentiles to the faith of the followers of Jesus Christ in the 1st century, the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and the growing liberal Liberation theology of the late 20th century, which is now being reflected among other things in the revolt are Roman Catholics against authoritarian oppression and apartheid respectively in Latin America and in South Africa. These ordinations of women evoked an outpouring of spirit and an excitement which confirmed the fact that the struggle of Episcopal women to fulfill God's call to the priestly vocation was the number-one religious news story of the year 1976. The mass media reflected the upsurge of religious witness. For the first two weeks of January 1977, there were front-page news in the national and international press and they were prominent features of the radio and television networks. Regions and local communities vied with one another to be included in the ceremonies and to publicize their firsts. The first regularly ordained woman in the USA, Jacqueline Means in Indiana on January 1st; the first woman in New York, Carol Anderson on January 2nd; the first woman in Virginia, Pat Parks, January 3rd; the first woman in New England Janet Kelly Brown in Vermont; the first woman from Virginia, from Massachusetts January 8th; the first woman from Alaska and the first woman from Los Angeles, California on January 15th, Victoria Hatch and so on and so on. And if I may sanitize an old familiar expression, when a woman of color suddenly popped up from the woodpile moving along in the ordinary course or procedures and was ordained at the National Cathedral in Washington as one of three women and three men, the national media went crazy and nearly out did themselves. To the national wire services and television networks, she was the Episcopal church's first Black woman and since I am talking about myself and since all of my friends know that I have a personal allergy to the word “Black,” it served me a just exactly right. To the Boston newspapers, she was Massachusetts’ first. To the local Morning Herald in your rival twin tity, she was a woman priest from Durham. To the Washington the Baltimore Afro-American, she was headlined “Baltimorean” is an Episcopal priest. A friend of mine taking her first venture in marriage in her late sixties and honeymooning of all places in Australia sent me a clipping from the West Australian Perth, Australia dated Monday, January 10th only two days after the ordination and it was headlined “History as Black Woman is Ordained.” Now, here we have the clue to all the hubbub. When the Episcopal Church dropped the barriers to one half of the human race, it not only leaped from the 15th to the 20th centuries but it witnessed to inclusiveness the least of these as part of the Anglican communion and in secular terms it moved from 1789, the year in which both the Constitution of the United States was ratified and the Protestant Episcopal Church U.S.A. broke away from the mother Church of the Church of England and became its sister Church, it move from there to 1977, in which we hope and pray that the Equal Rights Amendment will be ratified. Legislators from North Carolina, please take note. I attended three of these ordinations and I have seldom seen such joy unconfined. At the passing of the peace, the congregation can hardly contain themselves. In fact, they did everything but speak in tongues. People embraced and wept and almost danced in the aisle. The National Cathedral jammed with 2,000 people, many crowding the balconies. According to one reporter, erupted into happy chaos and considering the reputation of us Episcopalians for being God's frozen people…
Audience: [Laughs]
PM: ..it was a great for the thaw. As the ordination of the last of the six priests in the cathedral took place, I'm told, the sun burst through the clouds and sent rainbow colored shafts of light down through the stained glass windows and this was seen by some as a sign of God's grace being poured down upon the women priests. For me, the most moving symbol of what was taking place in history was the site of the new priest, Pat Park, ordained in Virginia on January 3rd. Mother of two small children and wife of an Episcopal priest processing out at the end of the recessional in her gorgeous Eucharistic vestments and along beside her skipped her tiny daughter clinging to her hand. This joy unconfined is part of the reconciliation after a long and painful struggle which almost tore the Episcopal Church apart: censured bishops, ecclesiastical trials, violent gestures against women deacons at the altar rail during of all things the Holy Communion, close friends and members of families alienated one from the other, and the victory for women's ordination in 1976 and 1977 has come at the cost of great pain to those members of the clergy who hold it as an article of faith that only a male can represent the sacramental sign of Christ. Now it is true that they do not go further and say that only a white Jewish male is eligible for the priesthood. For if they did that, they would be more accurate about the biological condition and status of Christ. But if they did that that would mean that Paul VI immediately becomes ineligible to be Pope and that all caucasian and Gentile males are ineligible to be priests to say nothing of that two-thirds of the world's population who are not white. Despite their selective theology, however, I take very seriously the pain of those who cling to an article of faith, which appears to be overtaken by history. Having been on the losing side for so much of my life, I do indeed understand their agony and yet, I find it significant that I come out on the winning side in the one decision I made to put God in the center rather than in the periphery of my own life. And so as we rejoice, as we feel healed of the sickness that came upon our communion during the course of the struggle, let us not forget that along with our brethren who hold with the Vatican that the church is not authorized by God to admit women to the priesthood that all of us on both sides of the question stand in judgment before God for our choices.
Every break with long-standing tradition is [unclear] to be a moral victory and a risk. In the first century, it was a risk to accept the uncircumcised gentiles into the primitive Church. There was a risk in parting company from the Roman Catholic Church and establishing the Church of England, which is our ancestor. There was a risk in emancipating 4,000,000 negro slaves without compensation to their masters to whom they represented a heavy capital investment or compensation to the slaves for two centuries of forced labor. There was a risk, as you know, in declaring unconstitutional state-enforced segregation. The price of that last victory was the blood of the martyrs Black and white in Mississippi and Alabama and Tennessee and Texas and California and elsewhere. All of us who are adults and who have lived in the South whether we are Black or whether we are white have suffered in various ways in the course of the struggle.
Yet one of the veterans of the struggle, a victim of the University of North Carolina's rejection in 1938, 39 years ago stands before you today in Chapel Hill the site of that rejection proclaiming the healing power of Christ’s love who paid the ultimate price of crucifixion for our Redemption. As followers of Christ, we are called upon to take risks to work for the liberation of the body, the mind, and the spirit. To exorcize the unclean spirits which vex us and prevent us from being our true selves created in the image of God and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. The late Dr. Frank P. Graham, who some of you may remember, who was president of the University of North Carolina in 1938 when I unsuccessfully applied for admission to the graduate school and with whom I was later privileges to serve on the board of the National Sharecroppers Fund, once spoke of our country as “this little island of Christianity.” Now by this I do not think he meant to put down other religions but to express the fact that Christianity is a minority religion. Often suppressed in other parts of the world and that here in the United States at least we are free to practice it. As baptized Christians, we are all ministers of Christ in the outline of faith in the new book of common prayer we learned that the ministers of the Church are first lay persons and then bishops, priests, and deacons. All of us without exception belong to the royal priesthood of all believers. Today at this time and in this place we are the gathered church. Tomorrow as we go about our secular pursuits, we are the scattered Church. Those of us who are ordained, do not lose our lay ministry and whether we are lay ministers or ordained clergy, we all have the same fundamental calling and that is to represent Christ and his Church, to bear witness to him wherever we may be, and according to the gifts given to us to carry on Christ's work of reconciliation in the world. Each of us therefore is called upon to proclaim the good news of God in Christ’s redeeming love. And the good news today, in our small corner of the planet in the American South, is that the South is rising out of its own ashes, out if its redemptive suffering, it is becoming purified, it is being healed of its unclean spirits, and its Representatives, notably Jimmy Carter in the White House, are beginning to fulfill that beloved song, which is now sung all around the world wherever people are striving for freedom from oppression: “We shall overcome, we shall overcome, Black and white, together we shall overcome.” Deep in my own heart, I do believe that the American South will lead the way toward the renewal of our moral and spiritual strength and our sense of mission. I think perhaps the initiative may have passed from New England, where those first pilgrims back in the 17th century saw the new country as the New Jerusalem a city set on a hill and a light unto the world, and it may have move from there to places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina where we are today witnessing the reconciling of Isaac and Ishmael in the house of Abraham.
I owe much of my religious devotion and my Episcopalian Heritage to my grandmother Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald born February the 10th, 1844, baptized in this Parish next door in the Old Chapel of the Cross on December the 20th, 1854 at the age of 10 and it is listed in the Parish registry that she was one of “five serving children of the Smith family” and the registry added “the mother of these five children is Harriet.” Harriet is my great-grandmother and I am mindful of the biblical prophecy that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Here, the Old Testament story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, the bondswoman, Isaac the legitimate heir, and Ishmael the outcasts comes alive in our own time. Read Harriet Smith for Hagar and you have the connection. The promise of the Angel of the Lord to Hagar in the wilderness when she laid her son Ishmael down to die for lack of water was to make Ishmael and his descendants a great nation. I have come to fulfill that promise but in my eyes the great nation is the American nation neither Black nor white but all colors living freely to be able to express themselves as children of God. It was my destiny to be the descendants of both slave owners as well as slaves, to be of mixed ancestry, to be biologically and psychologically integrated in a world where the separation of the races was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States as the fundamental law of the land in the South. My entire life's quest has been for spiritual integration and this quest led me ultimately to Christ in whom there is no East or West, no North, no South, no Black, no white, no red, or yellow, no Jew nor Gentile, no Islam or Buddha, no Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox. There is no Black Christ or white Christ nor red Christ although it may be that these images may have certain transitory cultural value. There is only Christ, the spirit of love and Reconciliation, the Healer of deep psychological wounds drawing all of us closer to that goal of perfection of which we are capable, which links us to God our creator and to Eternity. Let us pray. Oh God, who created all peoples in your image. We thank you for the wonderful diversity of races and cultures in this world and in our native land. Enrich our lives by ever-widening circles of fellowship and show us your presence in those who differ most from us until our knowledge of your love is made perfect in our love for all your children through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Choir: [Begins singing hymn]