“Joy Comes in the Morning” is a PDF collection of 14 sermons delivered by the Rev. Dr. Cecil “Chip” Murray at First African Methodist Episcopal Church (FAME) in Los Angeles. It is part of the Murray Archive—a project of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, in partnership with FAME, to make Pastor Murray’s prophetic social witness available to a new generation of activists, pastors and scholars.
The sermons that we’ve chosen to highlight in this small sampling of Pastor Murray’s homiletics touch on several key moments in the recent history of Los Angeles: the civil unrest of 1992, the death of Mayor Tom Bradley, the racial and religious fault lines revealed during the O.J. Simpson trial and the tumult of 9/11. Sermons on more mundane topics—Mother’s Day and child-rearing, for example—also capture the distinctive combination of moral remonstrance, social critique and comfort for the afflicted that characterized Pastor Murray’s ministry at FAME.
Download the PDF: Joy Comes in the Morning – The Prophetic Social Witness of Rev. Cecil L. Murray
Donate to support the archive now, and we will give you a printed and signed version of “Joy Comes in the Morning.”
In addition to the sampling of sermons available in these pages, you can watch videos of a larger collection of sermons and read their transcripts at crcc.usc.edu/murray-archive. Additional sermons also will be available through the USC Digital Library.
