Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Those were the prayerful words of the Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray, whose feast we observe this day.

And we observe it alongside the Feast of Independence Day.

One of the very first women ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church, Pauli Murray was also a lawyer, a professor, a poet, an activist, and an organizer.

Born in 1910 in North Carolina, Pauli Murray was a person of color descended from both enslaved people and slave owners, and someone who wrestled with gender identity and expression throughout their life.

Pauli Murray lived in a body and an identity that the world's categories could not easily contain.

Murray refused to be reduced to a single identity or to be neatly categorized by the labels that the world had available.

Today, as we observe the feast of Pauli Murray and the feast of Independence Day, yesterday's 250th anniversary commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is still close at hand.

The fireworks may be over, but Sunday morning is as good a time as any to reflect on the hopes that our faith shares with democracy at its best.

Freedom, justice, and equality.

We tie these feasts together for a reason.

Independence Day asks us to remember the founding claim of our nation, that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

And Pauli Murray's life asks us to tell the truth about that claim, that those words have never become a reality simply by being stated.

In our nation, that claim has had to be fought for and expanded and amended, interpreted and lived into and made more true, often by the people whose lives were excluded from the promise when it was first proclaimed.

Again and again throughout our nation's history, those left outside the circle have been the very ones who have worked to expand this nation's moral imagination.

And Pauli Murray is one of those people.