February 22, 2026
Lent 1
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11
“Hope is a song in a weary throat” goes a line from Dark Testament and Other Poems by Pauli Murray. Anna Pauline Murray defies easy categorization. She was the first African American woman ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. But she had already lived 67 years by that time. Over 3 decades spent as a Civil Rights attorney; a co-founder of the National Organization for Women; arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus 15 years before Rosa Parks; author of the principal supporting document used in the Brown v. Board decision about which I spoke last week and which Thurgood Marshall referred to as the bible of the movement. Murray was a confidant and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. She was also a woman who struggled with her gender identity and who has been embraced as a gay and trans rights icon. Upon her ordination, she celebrated her first Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a church at which her enslaved grandmother was baptized.
Murray graduated with a Doctor of Juridical Science from Yale in 1965, and when Yale announced the naming of one of its new residential colleges after Pauli Murray in 2016, a letter to the editor in the next issue of alumni magazine sneered, “Pauli who? Surely Yale could come up with someone more worthy of this distinction.”
“Hope is a song in a weary throat.”
The kind of hope Pauli held onto was not a mild and meek, pie-in-the-sky kind of hope, much like the late Jesse Jackson often used the refrain “Keep hope alive” as a reminder to just keep going. They had both seen too much, experienced too much, endured too much, to believe in soft hope. I am reminded of a quote I once saw that says
People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider webs. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth…as she rises for another go.[1]
I like to think that Pauli Murray held onto that kind of hope, that kind of song in a weary throat.
After 40 days in the desert, Jesus needed that kind of hope, that kind of song in a weary throat. In Luke’s telling of the temptations in the wilderness, the devil tempts Jesus over the course of his wandering, spread it out a little, make it easier to resist. Not so in Matthew. This devil – διάβολος – shows up at the very end when Jesus is surely at his weakest, his hungriest, where thirst parched every fiber of his being. And then the tempter comes. You can eat your fill. As far as the eye can see, it can all be yours. I can make it happen if you will just come over to my side. Just bow down and worship me.
This “worship” the devil is talking about isn’t the kind of worship we are about here. The worship Satan is demanding is to fall down prostrate, pledging complete obedience, full allegiance. There is even a sense that the root of the word used here for worship is derivative of a kiss, like a dog licking its master’s hand. Twice in this encounter, Satan taunts Jesus with the words, “If you are the son of God.” Satan already knows who Jesus is, just as we already know who Jesus is. Everything Matthew has written so far has been very clear about who Jesus is, the Messiah we have been waiting for.
What may not have been clear to Satan or the early followers of Jesus is just what kind of Messiah Jesus was. Many are ultimately disappointed that Jesus isn’t more like the kind of Messiah the devil thinks he might be: one who can be bought, manipulated, who seeks after power and authority for its own sake. There are plenty of people in our world today who think this is precisely the kind of Messiah Jesus is: one whose enemies are my enemies, one who thinks weakness is for fools and there are some who are on the inside and some who are on the outside, and that we have to take care of ourselves first even when people are hungry and suffering all around us, and that violence is an acceptable way of making sure that our version of Christo-Nationalism prevails.
Apparently they have forgotten that Jesus had 40 days to figure out who he was. 40 days after hearing the sound of the voice thundering in his ears: “This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). God said that. God called him beloved. All he had to do was to hold on to that, to hope in what had been promised. Nothing this devil has on offer can match that. Beloved. Beloved.
What the devil and the Christo-Nationalists among us seem to have forgotten is that before Jesus was called Beloved, he was called Emmanuel – God with us. God who “is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness” (Psalm 145:8); “near to the brokenhearted” (Psalm 34:18); “who forgives all your sins and heals your infirmities” (Psalm 103:3); the God who says that those who will inherit the kingdom are not those who bow down to power and seek privilege and dominance, but those who recognized Jesus in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned and fed, gave water, welcomed, clothed, provided medical care, and visited the incarcerated (See Matthew 25:31 and following).
Oh, yes, Jesus knew who he was. By the time ole Diabalos came a’ calling, he might as well have saved his breath. Jesus knew what it meant to be called Beloved, he knew whose he was, and the God he called father was and is a God of love. A God that inspires the kind of hope that is a song in a weary throat.
Like many of the earliest women ordained priests, Pauli Murray could not get a job in a church in any of the places she had lived and worked. She was the wrong color, the wrong gender, the wrong age. And so, she cobbled together an itinerant ministry in and around Washington, D.C. before relocating to Pittsburgh where she died in 1985. Reflecting on the Eucharist she celebrated in her grandmother’s church back in 1977, Murray wrote:
Whatever future ministry I might have as a priest, it was given to me that day to be a symbol of healing. All the strands of my life had come together. Descendant of slave and of slave owner, I had already been called poet, lawyer, teacher, and friend. Now I was empowered to minister the sacrament of One in whom there is no north or south, no black or while, no male or female—only the spirit of love and reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.[2]
No wonder she could say that hope is a song in weary throat.
As this season unfolds and the world tempts us to stray, dangles shiny distractions in front of us, tries to draw us from God’s presence, we can hold onto a hope that is fierce and unrelenting. We know who we are. We know that we are beloved. And we know that God is with us.
[1] Last seen here on social media.
[2] Pauli Murray. Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, reprinted as The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987, p. 435.