“One of the most precious gifts of life is a sense of wonderment, a sense of awe, a sense of the holy.”

These are the first words of a Christmas sermon delivered in Washington, D.C. by the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray on December 25, 1977. Pauli Murray — born in Baltimore in 1910 and raised during the Jim Crow era in the segregated Southern community of Durham, North Carolina, with all that entails — was a nonbinary African American member of the LGBTQ community, a civil rights and women’s rights activist, the brilliant legal scholar who influenced Ruth Bader Ginsberg and who is responsible for producing what Justice Thurgood Marshall called “the Bible of Civil Rights law,” a poet and writer, the first female African American Episcopal priest in the United States, and a saint in the Episcopal Church. Murray offered communion for the first time in 1977 at Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her grandmother had been baptized 123 years earlier as a slave.

To Speak a Defiant Word: Sermons and Speeches on Justice and Transformation (2023) by Pauli Murray; edited by Anthony B. Pinn brings together the most important sermons, lectures, and speeches from 1960 through 1985 written by one of the most consequential and hopeful of 20th century Americans. In this work one sees how Murray’s religious ideas and her sense of ministry evolved over a period that became one of the most tumultuous in American history, not unlike the one we are living in today. Yet through it all, she remained struck by a sense of wonder and hopefulness, which makes her Christmas message an appropriate one to hear again this year, on this Christmas Day. Here is an excerpt from that sermon.

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One of the most precious gifts of life is a sense of wonderment, a sense of awe, a sense of the holy. Yet often we are so consumed by our own troubles or we become so conditioned to extravagance in modern living that we are in danger of losing this gift. We are assaulted by constant images, instant coverage by on-the-spot-television of today’s significant events, which are soon crowded out of memory by the next day’s news . . . As the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. commented a few days ago . . . the insatiable consumption of novelty by our high-velocity age has enfeebled our capacity for wonder.” The wonder of Christmas is often overshadowed by the bustling preparations for the holiday season . . .

But if we take the time to listen to Luke’s beautiful Gospel narrative of the birth of Christ, we cannot help but be filled with wonderment — not so much because of an angelic host singing “Glory to God in the Highest” but because of the utter simplicity and unpretentiousness of that heavenly event in Bethlehem. As one biblical scholar has said, “God, who is the source and meaning of all life, reveals himself in a little child coming unnoticed in the stable of an unregarded town,” as if to say to us, “here in this lowly place in the most ordinary circumstances, I have come to dwell with you.”

For what could have been more ordinary — and yet more amazing — than the Prince of Peace being born among animals? What could be more astonishing by today’s standards than the fact that the universal Savior who came to demonstrate God’s great love for all human beings appeared among the poor and needy, his coming first announced to lowly shepherds out in the field?

And what is more remarkable in a commercialized society than the simple truth that the greatest gift of Christmas is the gift of oneself? . . .

The wonder of Christmas is that the greatest event in the history of humanity came silently in the night . . . The wonder of Christmas is that in the darkest hour of loneliness and despair, new hope is born if we have faith. . . .

The wonder of Christmas is that suffering and death are not the last word. Emmanuel — God — is with us in every human situation. The little unprotected baby in the manger and the desolate man on the cross revealed that where God is least expected, in the most unlikely times and places — whether at the beginning of life or in the emptiness of death — God is at hand! In every agony, every crisis we are not alone. The light of God’s eternal love shines in the darkness and we shall be safe.

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Wishing you a Christmas season filled with wonderment, awe, holiness, and happiness.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by David Deshaies on Unsplash