A sermon by Marjorie D. Grevious

March 26th,  2023
St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church, St. Paul, MN

“I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.” Harriet Tubman

She was born in 1822, in Dorchester County Maryland to Ben Ross and Harriet Green. 1 of 9 children they named her Araminta Ross and called her Minty for short. Her enslaved family saw three of her older sisters sold away when she was just a young girl. Physical Violence was a part of her daily life as it was used as a tool of control, correction, and punishment. When she was only 5 years old she was hired out by her enslavers to care for an infant. She was repeatedly whipped for her mistakes. At the age of 7 she was again hired out to walk the wet marshes checking muskrat traps and caught a near fatal case of the measles, so was sent home to be tended by her mother. Somewhere between the age of 10-12 she was struck in the head by a full-grown man flinging a 2-pound weight at her for refusing to help an overseer restrain a runaway enslaved boy. She would go on to suffer from severe migraines, seizures, narcolepsy, and hallucinations that she understood as visions from God. These visions guided her for the rest of her life. This morning’s prayer reads:

Give us vision and courage to stand against oppression and injustice and all that works against the glorious liberty to which you call all your children; 

 She would forever be plagued by the pain and scars from the onslaught of early trauma. When she was 18 her father was freed from enslavement, but his wife and children were denied their freedom and so without the means for true justice he remained enslaved with his family. 

At the age of 22 she marries a free man named John Tubman and changed her first name to Harriet in honor of her mother. 

In 1849 at the age of 27 she made her first trip to freedom, alone, as her brothers had forced her to turn back on an aborted attempt the month before. She wanted her freedom as she feared having little value to new enslavers due to her fragile health.  She stood barely 5ft tall, was illiterate, suffered from epilepsy, and was considered sickly due to her childhood illnesses. She traveled on her own, mostly by night, 90 miles from the marshes of Maryland to Philadelphia. The prayer from this morning goes on to read:

 “O God, whose Spirit guides us into all truth and makes us free: Strengthen and sustain us as you did your servant Harriet Ross Tubman.”

After her first taste of freedom, she is quoted as saying “When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”

A year later The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed which allowed for the capture of free Blacks in northern free states. This led to abductions and captures as even disagreeing law enforcement was compelled to comply. Later that same year Harriet would return to Maryland on the first of over a dozen trips, over the next 7 years, bringing approximately 70 loved ones to Canada where slavery was illegal. There is evidence that she once stopped at the home of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglas as a stop on the underground railroad. 

In 1858 she met famed abolitionist John Brown after seeing him in one of her visions. It is believed that illness kept her from participating in his failed attempt at a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry. After his execution she praised him as a martyr. 

In 1859 she purchases property from anti-slavery politician William H. Seward in Auburn, New York and moves her parents from Canada to live with her there. 

In 1860 She helps a former enslaved man by the name of Charles Nalle elude the U.S. marshals who intend to return him to his enslaver.

In 1862, at the age of 40, she joins Union Troops in South Carolina during the Civil War. She worked as a nurse, a cook, and ran a wash house for laundry. Within a year she would be an armed scout and spy using detailed information from nearby enslaved people about the opposing confederate forces.

In June 1863: Harriet Tubman becomes the first woman to head a military expedition in the United States as she led an armed raid up the Combahee River in South Carolina. The mission destroys Confederate supplies and frees more than 700 enslaved people. A month later she helps to tend the wounded and bury the dead of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry made up of volunteer black soldiers.

In 1864 she’s granted a short furlough to visit her parents at her home in Auburn New York. In early 1865 she returns to nursing soldiers in Virginia and then goes to Washington DC to inform the surgeon general of the harsh conditions that Black soldiers faced in military hospitals.

 In July of 1865 she is denied military benefits and payment for her service during the civil war. In October of that same year, she refuses to leave a train car after being called a racial slur when asked to change cars. She is forcibly removed. This morning’s Old Testament scripture of Judges chapter 9 reads in part:

But a certain woman threw an upper millstone on Abimelech’s head and crushed his skull. Immediately he called to the young man who carried his armor and said to him, “Draw your sword and kill me, so people will not say about me, ‘A woman killed him.’ 

Back home, Harriet Tubman had to sell her homegrown produce, raise pigs, and accept the generosity of friends and supporters in order to survive. In 1868 Sarah Bradford’s somewhat exaggerated biography Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman offered a struggling Harriet $1200, the equivalent of about $25,000 today.

Over the next few years, Harriett Tubman would re-marry, a civil war veteran 22 years her junior, get robbed in a confederate gold scheme, and adopt a daughter name Gertie. In 1886 she purchases the 25 acres of land adjacent to her current property and creates a nursing home for Black Americans.

7 years after the death of her husband Harriet Tubman is awarded a widow’s military pension of $8 per month the equivalent of $170 today. In 1896 Harriet Tubman, who never learned how to read, speaks at the founding convention of the National Association for Colored Women. She would also become involved with the women’s right to vote movement being introduced by Susan B. Anthony at a suffrage convention later that same year. In 1897 Queen Victoria gifts her a silk and linen shawl inviting her to England, a trip Harriet could never financially afford. 

In the late 1890s she has brain surgery to help alleviate the ever-growing pain of her debilitating headaches.

In 1899 her monthly military pension is raised from $8 to $20 per month in recognition of her service as a nurse, NOT, her service as a soldier, scout, or spy. In 1903 she donated a parcel of her land to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn New York, where they opened the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. She would later move into that same care home in 1911.

She died in 1913 at the age of 93 from a bout of pneumonia. She was buried with long deserved military honors and is interred at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn NY, not far from the land she had purchased for her family 55 years prior. 

In World War II the ship The SS Harriet Tubman Liberty Ship was named in her honor

In 2016 it was announced that Harriet Tubman, who spent most of her life in dire financial need, would replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. thereby becoming the first woman, and, first Black American to be put on paper currency. 

The story of Harriet Tubman reminds me of what it truly means to be resilient, persistent, and steadfast in vision and faith. She is an extraordinary example of what it means to move through, in spite of, and because of, fragility and perceived weaknesses. 

It calls to mind King David’s prayer of Thanksgiving found in II Samuel, ““Who am I, LORD, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?

I am reminded of Moses in Exodus chapter 3: when Moses asked God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

I would imagine that there were times after an epileptic seizure, or a blinding headache of vision, or after an unexpected narcoleptic sleeping spell, that Harriet Tubman might have asked herself, Who am I, a small woman riddled with frailties and ailments, to fight for and show others the way to freedom.

I am reminded of my own walk of faith and call. Who am I Lord, a poor black girl from Kentucky, born to an overwhelmed teenage mother. Who am I Lord, born progeny of a simple country preacher. Who am I Lord with debilitating asthma that robs me of breath, joints that give way in pain, and a heart shattered by grief, Who am I  to proclaim your divine glory.

I dare you to ask yourself, ‘Who am I’, in the wake of a legacy like Harriet Tubman. Who am I to stand in my own fragility and still do the work of justice, and freedom. Might you be called into discomfort as you disrupt the complicated systems of inequality woven into all of our lives as Americans, as Christians, as human beings. 

Might you be called in a singular moment like the unnamed woman in Judges who critically wounded an evil and self-centered Abimelech. Like her, might you strike down an injustice so great that your work is ignored, covered up, and unrewarded? It’s like the attempted erasure of American History in our schools, ignoring the true stories of some heroes and heroines because some in our society don’t like that it exposes the fragility of an unjust system.

Might you be like the persistent friend knocking at the door asking for the needs of others to be met. In Luke’s gospel Jesus says:  “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” As the elders say down home where I come from, ‘a closed mouth don’t get fed’!

Who are you in spite of, or because of your fragility? from your weakness what are you being called to do? Are you stagnant in your comfort and ease? The work of justice does not wait for us to be perfectly healthy, well, and stable. Sometimes it simply calls us to ask questions, search for what is right, and knock on doors of possibility. The true legacy of Harriett Tubman is not what she overcame, but what she dared do in the face of all that plagued her body and attempted to squash her spirit. Fragility and discomfort are no longer acceptable excuses for complacency. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said- The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Harriet Tubman’s small stature made for ease of movement, she chose to see her epileptic hallucinations as divine vision, and her illiteracy did not keep her from using her voice in the fight for freedom. How might you use your own fragility, weaknesses, and ailments in the fight for justice and equality for all God’s people? 

And I will close with Psalms 146 which reads in part:

Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help! *
whose hope is in the Lord their God;

5 Who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them; *
who keeps his promise for ever;

6 Who gives justice to those who are oppressed, *
and food to those who hunger.

7 The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind; *
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;

8 The Lord loves the righteous;
the Lord cares for the stranger; *
he sustains the orphan and widow,
but frustrates the way of the wicked.

9 The Lord shall reign forever, *
your God, O Zion, throughout all generations.
Hallelujah!

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