Modern Saints: Writing Ourselves Whole, the literary witness of Pauli Murray & James Baldwin (Sermon 11.16.25)

In the summer of 1954, Pauli Murray—civil rights lawyer, activist, and writer—arrived at the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire as an artist-in-residence. At 43 years old, Murray had come to work on what would become her first autobiography, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. The book tells the remarkable, true story of Murray's own family through enslavement, survival, and interracial family histories in the South from the pre-Civil War era through Reconstruction. It was a groundbreaking, but often overlooked, work in African American genealogy. 

That same summer, another writer and civil rights advocate was also at the McDowell Colony—James Baldwin. The year before, at the age of 29, Baldwin had published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, which immediately established him as a powerful new voice in American literature. He came that summer to begin work on his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, a radical new story that explored queer desire, shame, and the struggle for self-acceptance.

That summer of 1954, Pauli Murray and James Baldwin became the first Black artists ever admitted to the Colony since its founding in 1907. The two quickly formed an easy, supportive friendship. 

Beyond small glimpses into that summer, detailed in Pauli's diary, we don’t know much about the relationship between these two important Black figures. It’s possible their paths didn’t cross much afterward. James was a northerner; Pauli was a Southerner. Pauli was a trained lawyer; James had left high school to help support his family. Although both were involved in the struggle for civil rights, they belonged to different generations and inhabited different corners of the movement.

Yet for all their differences, they shared something profound.

• Both were fiercely committed to the work of human rights.

• Both spent time abroad, learning about the needs of Black folks internationally and the possible futures for their communities back home.

• Both were gay at a time when such honesty was unthinkable in mainstream society.

• Both wielded the pen as a tool of prophetic critique, liberation, and healing.

• And both were reshaping the trajectory of this country in ways no one at the time could have imagined.

Both Pauli and James insisted on being seen in their full humanity. Even as both hid parts of themselves from the public view, they both yearned for a world in which everyone was freer, more loving, more themselves.

Their longing to be truly seen is not just a modern desire. It’s woven through our sacred stories. 

Which brings us to today’s scripture. The story of Hagar. 

It’s a difficult story. 

The story is, in the words of feminist Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, “a text of terror.” 

It begins with Abram and Sarai, who have not yet changed their names to the ones we're more familiar with—Abraham and Sarah. God had promised that the couple would have many children, to “make a great nation.”

But at this point in the story, the aging Sarai has yet to have any children. 

In her desperation, Sarai suggests that Abram have a child with Hagar, an enslaved Egyptian woman working in the couple's house.

As Trible writes, “From the beginning, Hagar is powerless because God supports Sarah…Hagar is a symbol of the oppressed. She is the faithful maid exploited, the black woman used by the male and abused by the female of the ruling class, the surrogate mother, the resident alien without legal recourse, the other woman, the runaway youth, the pregnant young woman alone, the expelled wife, the divorced mother with child, the homeless woman, the welfare mother, and the self-effacing individual whose own identity shrinks in service to others."

In today’s story of Hagar’s wilderness encounter, we hear echoes of Murray and Baldwin’s own journey. A journey in search of dignity, identity, and liberation.

…

Pauli Murray was born in 1910 into a family of African American, Irish, and Cherokee heritage. Orphaned at a young age, she was taken in by her Aunt Pauline in Durham, North Carolina, where she grew up surrounded by strong women, rich family stories, and a resilience that would shape her life’s work.

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, the eldest son of a single mother. When he was still young, his mother married a Baptist preacher whose stern faith and complicated presence left a deep and lasting imprint on Baldwin’s early years—and on the spiritual wrestling that would later animate his writing.

Try and imagine the world of their childhoods—

• Lynchings, particularly in the South, reached their historic fever pitch as white communities violently enforced white supremacy and racial segregation.

• Pauli’s family, as a mixed-race Black family in a world obsessed with rigid racial lines, faced a unique and constant form of scrutiny and prejudice. 

• Meanwhile, in the poverty of Harlem’s Black community, young James watched as many of the children he once sat beside in church were pulled into drugs, crime, or prostitution. 

There would have been deep resonances between the worlds of young Pauli and James and the world of Hagar in Genesis 16—each marked by racial and ethnic marginalization—each marked by the vulnerability of women and gender minorities—marked by the violence of those in power—and marked by the ongoing struggle simply to be seen. 

After Hagar becomes pregnant, Sarai quickly regrets the plan she herself set in motion. Perhaps she was jealous. Perhaps she couldn’t live with her shame for having facilitated the sexual abuse of another woman. We don’t know exactly what she projected onto Hagar, but we do know that her emotions turned harsh and volatile.

Abram, for his part, doesn’t want to get in the way of Sarai’s rage. So, he tells her that Hagar is still under her authority and that she may do with her as she pleases. And so, as the text puts it, “Sarai dealt harshly with Hagar, and Hagar ran away from her.” 

Scholars note that the word harshly mirrors the same term later used to describe how the Israelites were oppressed in Egypt—treatment marked by hard labor and physical abuse. 

Like the Great Migration of African Americans fleeing the South to the North—a movement that shaped both Pauli’s and James’s family stories—Hagar, too, attempts to escape her abusers by running headfirst into the wilderness. 

But out in the desert, an angel finds Hagar and tells her to return to her mistress. If she does, the angel tells her, God would greatly multiply her offspring: “Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.”  

We might ask, why is Hagar sent back to her abusers? It’s a troubling part of the story.

We don’t know for sure, feminists have struggled with this passage for decades… but perhaps there is something to a name. 

The name Ishmael in Hebrew means “God hears.” Black feminist readers of scripture have often pointed to this moment as an example of how God often works, not in obvious miracles, but through provision. The desert is no place to carry a pregnancy. So perhaps, Hagar can imagine what would eventually happen later on in Genesis,  that when Hagar is ready, God will hear her cry for freedom and respond…   

As often happens in the Hebrew Bible, the well where the angel speaks to Hagar is given a name.

Then something remarkable happens. 

Hagar identifies this messenger not as an angel, but God. She doesn’t just name the location. She names God as well. “She names the Lord who spoke to her, "you are El-roi," meaning "God sees."

Here in the Book of Genesis, Hagar is only the second person to whom God speaks. The first to be so bold to actually name God. To attempt to mark this divine encounter with words.

In a world that refused to see her, God both hears and sees—and Hagar’s story becomes a testimony to every forgotten, cast-aside life that is held in God’s sight.

...

Pauli graduated first in her class at Howard Law School in 1944, the only woman in her class. She was then denied her chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University, as was tradition for Howard’s class valedictorian, because of her gender. The sexism she endured in law school inspired her to coin the term Jane Crow, to describe the unique discrimination Black women faced at the intersections of race and gender. 

Her legal brilliance would have profound, but underrecognized consequences. One of her law school papers directly influenced Thurgood Marshall’s strategy in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and, years later, her work would influence Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s argument in Reed v. Reed (1971), which secured the first Supreme Court recognition that the Constitution’s equal protection clause applies to women. 

She was a person ahead of her time—an advocate for racial integration from childhood, a feminist before the word was widely used, and someone whose imagination for equality far exceeded that of many of her peers. She once said, “I have lived to see my lost causes found.” 

Pauli’s story also offers a rare, intimate window into the life of a Black, gender-nonconforming person in the early 20th century. 

Many of us were taught that trans and gender-expansive experiences are new, but Pauli’s life, documented in pictures, diaries, and medical records, makes clear they are not. Her struggle with her gender and her sexuality contributed to a lifelong battle with depression. We don’t know what pronouns they used or medical care they may have sought today, but this has not stopped communities of trans and gender-nonconforming people from celebrating Pauli as “one of us."

In her 60s,  Pauli began to recognize that the human rights she fought were not just legal questions but deeply moral and spiritual ones. “My profession of law could not give us the solutions to these problems,” she reflected. So she asked herself, “What do I want to do with the time I have left?” And so, at the age of 66, she stood at the very altar where her grandmother had been baptized as a slave and celebrated the Eucharist for the first time. The first Black woman ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church. 

Pauli’s ministry was rooted in listening. Her niece remembered that before seminary, Pauli was a talker, but afterward, she became a listener—one who embodied her conviction that, and I quote:

“Reconciliation is occurring between individuals through groping out, that reaching for one another.” Pauli felt this most intimately as she handed out the communion bread. 

In her last years, Pauli returned once again to writing. Her last book, the dreaded autobiography. She wanted to tell her whole story on her own terms. But it was a race against the clock, as health declined. She finished the book before succumbing to pancreatic cancer in 1985. 

It’s somewhat ironic to consider that while Pauli entered the priesthood in her 60s, her fellow writer, James Baldwin, had begun preaching at the age of 14.

At seventeen, he left the church—unable to reconcile the glaring hypocrisy of white Christians with the gospel they claimed to preach. And because his own stepfather, a moralistic and abusive preacher, had instilled in him the belief that he was ugly, worthless, and that most people were bound for hell, Baldwin did not see the Black church of his youth as a liberating alternative. 

Baldwin began to unlearn his inherited sense of unworthiness not in the church, but in the art world. In his twenties, he befriended the painter Beauford Delaney, who created a series of portraits of him. In Delaney’s loving, affirming gaze, Baldwin encountered a dignity he had never been shown as a child—an experience that helped unravel the shame his stepfather had planted in him.

In The Fire Next Time, he wrote, “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

Baldwin saw with painful clarity the ways religion could mislead people. He saw that when the church focuses only on personal spirituality without addressing the realities of injustice, it risks encouraging people—especially Black parishioners—to grow complacent rather than to seek real change. 

Like if Hagar’s story ended when God sends her back to her enslavers, instead of with her ultimate liberation as it does in Genesis 21. 

Baldwin observed within Christianity—as well as other religions—a dangerous “us versus them” impulse—an instinct to divide the world into the righteous and the damned, the chosen and the rejected. As he once commented, “I am not a member of any Christian congregation because I knew they had not heard, nor did they live the commandment Love one another as I love you.”

For Baldwin, any faith that results in exclusion, moral superiority, or domination cannot be called holy. A truly moral life, he insisted, must be rooted in love, justice, and the radical affirmation of every human being’s dignity. 

Baldwin stepped down from the pulpit in favor of the typewriter, becoming both a keen observer and a passionate participant in the struggle for Black equality. Over the span of his thirty-eight-year career, he wrote six novels, seven essay collections, a volume of short stories, two plays, and a screenplay. He also emerged as a prominent cultural critic, appearing in public forums and televised debates to challenge the nation’s conscience. Baldwin’s significance lies not only in the brilliance of his literature but in the piercing clarity of his moral witness. 

James Baldwin was in many ways a prophet for the Church, but more significantly a prophet for the whole of the United States. 

In Notes of a Native Son, he wrote of his life’s work:“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Pauli Murray and James Baldwin may not be the most obvious choices for a series on saints, but perhaps that is why we need them. In their stories—of activism and heartache, of writing for justice and writing for liberation—we hear a prophetic message that echoes across generations.

Like Hagar in the wilderness, they knew what it meant to live in a world that refused to see them fully. And like Hagar, they answered that injustice not with silence, but with naming—with words that told the truth about their lives and the God who accompanies those on the margins.

Both Baldwin and Murray understood that justice begins with truth-telling.

Hagar named God El-roi—“the God who sees me”—claiming her dignity with the power of a single sentence.

Murray named Jane Crow and unmasks a system that sought to diminish her.

Baldwin named the hypocrisies of a nation and calls us back to a love big enough to set us free.

Each, in their own way, shows us that naming the truth—writing it, speaking it, refusing to hide from it—can make us whole.

Sermon preached on 11.16.25 by Rev. Delaney Piper.