A community has a history and is constituted by its past.  This is a concept articulated by Diana Butler Bass in her 2009 book, A People’s History of Christianity, The Other Side of the Story.  Let’s join Reverend Sarah on Monday, November 30 at 6:30 PM, when she leads us in a discussion of this illuminating and relevant book that seeks a devotional and ethical renewal.  Butler Bass pronounced in her introduction that a real community is a community of memory, one that does not forget its past, and the primary calling of the faith community is to remember.  Bass believes that this “usable history” is comprised of “stories told for the purpose of strengthening community by deepening its spiritual practices and renewing its vision of social justice.”  Jack and I hope that the remembering we share today can strengthen our community, deepen our spiritual practices, and renew our vision of social justice.

            John Murray, during his brief fifty years of life, was a brilliant light in church and politics.  Our very first settled minister in Boothbay from 1766 to 1779, Murray leaped into politics as Boothbay’s representative to the Revolutionary Congress in Massachusetts around 1775.  He was the diplomat who likely saved Boothbay from British bombardment and burning in 1777 and saved Wiscasset from the same fate a year later.  Murray shipped out in 1779 with the Continental Navy to Castine, a loyalist stronghold, where the Americans were defeated.  By 1783, in Newburyport, Murray had built his congregation to the largest in New England, and he became a leading exponent of radical land reform to continue the American Revolution.

            Born in Northern Ireland in 1742, Murray was an unusually precocious student and graduated with high honors from the University of Edinburgh.  Three years after beginning ministry at age 18, this Scots-Irish man sailed to New York and then to the 33-year-old, frontier settlement of Townsend, a year later incorporated and named Boothbay, where his uncle and aunt, Andrew and Sarah Reed, had asked him to be their minister.  First, however, Murray joined the Presbytery of New York, in 1763, and, in 1765, he was ordained and settled as minister in the Second Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, a prestigious position in America’s leading city of that colonial era.

            John Murray, in July of 1766, became the first settled minister of the Boothbay Presbyterian Church, a frontier community barely over his age of 24.   Murray’s pastoral visiting and evangelical revivals attracted probably the largest congregation in Maine.  Many compared him favorably with England’s greatest evangelical revivalist, George Whitefield, who preached in these parts during the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, a period of increased religious activity and evangelism in England and in the American colonies.   Today we continue to experience the rise and now the ebb of such evangelical revival cycles.

            One time, Reverend Murray, still in his twenties, preached at the Brunswick church and encountered, barely into his sermon, a colorful and pretentious parishioner, Judge Aaron Hinckley.  Judge Hinckley, an English Puritan who had little respect for his lowly and largely illiterate Scots Irish neighbors in Brunswick, became displeased with something that this upstart, Scots-Irish minister declared from the pulpit, stood up, stepped into the aisle, and demanded of this young preacher if he “knew in whose presence he stood.”  Reverend Murray replied that he did and identified the judge and his position.   Judge Hinckley retorted, “Then, I will say unto you, as the Lord said unto Elijah, ‘What dost thou here,’ John Murray?”  Reverend Murray discarded his prepared sermon and immediately repeated verbatim, completely from memory, Elijah’s answer from the Bible and, taking it for his text, preached extemporaneously an entire sermon, probably well over an hour, on this Elijah message.  Reverend Murray would return several times to preach in Brunswick to this split congregation of English Congregationalists and Scots-Irish Presbyterians.  Today, there is also a considerable diversity of talent and treasure, and young John Murray, like our Reverend Sarah, wowed and stretched most church members.

            On the eve of the American Revolution, Boothbay chose and sent John Murray as its delegate to the provincial Congress in Watertown.  Murray quickly rose to prominence and was at one time president pro tem of that body, acting secretary, and chairman of the committee for reporting rules and orders for Congress.  Murray’s foray into politics had just begun.  Should we consider electing more clergy to represent us in lawmaking?

            During the Revolutionary War, in 1777, Reverend Murray likely rescued our town from bombardment and burning, a devastation that Portland (then Falmouth) had just suffered from British warship cannons.  Provoked by some Boothbay hotheads who had arrested eight British officers and still held an American loyalist, the British moved into our inner harbor, aimed their cannons toward the houses of Boothbay, and threatened destruction of all of Boothbay if the Tory was not returned in a half hour.  During these tense three weeks of late August and early September, John Murray climbed aboard the British ship several times under flags of truce and successfully negotiated in person and at other times by correspondence with the British commander.  These letters show the toughness and negotiating skills of Reverend Murray, who successfully earned the respect of the British and worked out a return of the British prisoners for an equal number and rank of Americans recently taken by a British privateer.  Should we turn more to ministers to be our diplomats during armed conflicts and other crises?

            In 1779, Reverend Murray shipped out as chaplain in the ill-fated Castine naval expedition, which was defeated by the British.  The American officers sent Murray as their diplomat to Boston to explain the failure and to seek aid for the discouraged inhabitants of the Province of Maine.  By this time, the British concluded that Murray was such a valuable aid to the American cause that they placed a price of 500 pounds (about $3,000 today) for his capture.   Should more of our ministers similarly serve in the ranks of our military?

            Murray became the minister of the Second Presbyterian Church of Newburyport, where he built the Newburyport church to over 2,000 members and remained a renowned minister in Newburyport until his death in 1793.  John Murray maintained his relationships with Boothbay through his many friends and his extensive family connections.  Murray had married Susanna Lithgow of Phippsburg, whose family members lived in our area; he still had his Aunt Sarah Reed and her husband, Andrew Reed, and their clan in Boothbay; he owned considerable property at Boothbay at and around Mt. Pisgah and Barrett’s Park; and he and Susanna had given birth to three of their six children in Boothbay.  Should we remember the Murrays as our first summer residents, who may have returned from Newburyport during warm and calm weather to visit with relations and old friends?

            John Murray’s most notable and radical foray into politics was when he spoke on the occasion of the public Thanksgiving for peace in Newburyport on December 11, 1783, just months after the close of the American Revolution.  John Murray delivered a remarkable address on behalf of many northern New Englanders who desired to continue the American Revolution toward a fairer and more egalitarian land ownership of the Maine frontier.  John Murray’s sermon was considered a wonderful performance at the time and was published in a popular pamphlet a year later, in 1784.  Significantly, Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Alan Taylor, recently singled out John Murray as one of America’s leading men.  Taylor quoted the phrases of John Murray, who “found oppression in the land when Agrarian Laws cannot be obtained; or must pass unexecuted – when individuals are permitted to purchase or possess such enormous tracts of land as may gradually work them up to an influence, dangerous to the liberty of the state.”  Reverend Murray declared agrarian reform as essential to the new Republic’s survival, probably pleasing some and alienating many of Newburyport’s wealthy seaport community.  Some of the more radical Whigs in Massachusetts unsuccessfully sought to enact “agrarian laws” to confiscate large landholdings for redistribution to the landless and even proposed a Massachusetts constitutional amendment to confiscate all landholdings in excess of one thousand acres to provide farms for the landless.  Despite the fact that many of the Great Proprietors had been loyalists during the Revolution, their money and prestige soon found favor with the Massachusetts legislators, and the American Revolution and agrarian reform ground to a halt in most areas.  Should we, during our own time’s unprecedented accumulation of wealth in the hands of so few, possibly dangerous to the liberty of the state, reconsider policies of land and wealth redistribution that Murray and others advocated over 200 years ago for the survival of our republic?

            Following Murray’s two years of sickness and then his early death in 1793 at the age of 50, the agrarianism of John Murray and others was seconded by the heritage of resistance, often armed resistance, particularly in the coastal towns of Boothbay and Bristol.  Backcountry towns, such as Jefferson and Liberty, learned from our predecessors to challenge proprietary claims and justify violent resistance.  Our area Liberty Men and White Indians were known for training terrorists here and elsewhere in the decades following the American Revolution.  Should we, in light of our own history of armed resistance, view today’s terrorists more from their own ideological and geographical perspectives? 

            John Murray’s political activism and radical agrarianism helped renew the vision of these rebellious Boothbay area settlers a generation after his death.  With John Murray’s leadership and example, our poor and lowly Boothbay predecessors struggled and succeeded here, more than anywhere else, to prolong the Revolution and win their squatters claims against landed and moneyed, Massachusetts-based Great Proprietors.  Should we, remembering how our predecessors survived and continued the Revolution and won their squatters’ rights, reconsider an extension of our ongoing revolution for true gender and sexual orientation equality for all?

            When you leave today, take a peek on the left wall of the entryway at the framed portrait of John Murray, our first and most famous settled minister, Revolutionary patriot and diplomat, and post-Revolutionary land reformer and prophet.  And give him a nod or a wink for our usable and remembered history, our community, our spiritual practices, and our own renewed vision of social justice.

            Now, Jack Bauman will leap just over 200 years, plunge into the early twentieth century, and paint a portrait of another remarkable and renowned minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, who preached in this sanctuary several times during the early to mid 1900s. . . .

References:

Ashby, Thompson Eldridge, The History of the First Parish Church in Brunswick, Maine, 1969.

Murray, John records at the Boothbay Region Historical Society.

Reed, Elizabeth Freeman, The History of the Congregational Church, 1948.

Taylor, Alan, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors:  The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820, 1990.

Vermilye, Rev. A. G., Memoir of the Rev. John Murray, of Newburyport, Mass, Collections of the Maine Historical Society, Vol. VI, 1959.