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Jessica and Jeff McCord were tight-lipped and unified after capital charges for felony murder were filed on February 22, 2002. Neither was ready to throw the other under a bus, just yet. Jessica wouldn’t talk at all. Jeff babbled in circles. Now it was up to prosecutor Roger Brown to make sure all the evidence the Hoover PD had collected, while working in tandem with the Bureau, would serve to convince a jury that the McCords were guilty as charged.
The Edgewood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham was buzzing with talk after Jessica’s arrest. Many relatives from her mother’s side were members of the church. The pastor, Sid Burgess, focused much of his Sunday, February 24, sermon on “fellow parish member” Jessica Inez Callis Bates McCord.
The title of the sermon spoke to the church’s reaction to the charges against its member: “Still ‘Open-Hearted, ’ Still ‘Open-Minded.’”
There was going to be no judging going on inside the walls of Edgewood. Jessica was going to be given the benefit of the doubt.
“Right here, right now,” Burgess preached from the pulpit that morning, “this congregation has been rocked on its very foundation. . . .”
Burgess then explained how murder charges had been brought “against one of our own.” He called Jessica a “third-generation member.” He spoke of the “headlines” in the newspapers and the “highlights” on television. He mentioned how Jessica’s family had been pillars inside the Edgewood church community for “almost sixty years.” He asked parishioners, after listing all the health problems Jessica’s family had endured throughout the years, to be there, as the church itself would be, for Jessica, Dian and Inez, Jessica’s grandmother. The “embarrassment, the pain and agony, now the anguish of a daughter and granddaughter charged with a capital offense, we, their brothers and sisters,” he shouted, pumping his fist, “must also share.”
The pastor next poeticized how Jesus had taken up His cross. Then asked those who believed in Him to stand by His side, follow and do the same for Inez, Dian and Jessica.
Unity.
Jessica’s church family was a devoted group of Christians—no doubt about it. Pastor Burgess spoke of how, during the week leading up to that Sunday’s service, he thought perhaps he could “duck” out of talking about the case “up here in the pulpit.” But after seeing the effect the news had on church members during the week, crying for Jessica’s “innocent children,” coming together and “openly weeping” for Dian, Inez and Jessica, there was no way he could deny his flock his shoulder. So he decided to take the difficult path and confront the issue head-on.
“How can a pastor not at least try to address such heartfelt pain?”
“Open-Minded, Open-Hearted” was this church’s slogan. Local television cameras showed file shots of the building during the nightly news—and there was that recognizable bumper sticker from the church with that so-familiar slogan plastered on the back of Jessica’s vehicle as it was towed away by the police.
By the end of his impassioned and compassionate sermon, Burgess said that while the “larger community” was prepared to “give up on Jessica McCord,” God was not. Even if she was to be ultimately found guilty, he explained, “we know God has a history of redeeming murderers.”
Ending the sermon, he compared Jessica to Saul on the road to Damascus, and recalled how Jesus was able to convince this onetime Christian basher and nonbeliever to drop everything and follow Him.