One of the many things it means to be people of faith is that we get to draw on a long memory. We inherit an enormous living body of the stories and testimonies of our ancestors in the faith. This is a tremendous resource we can draw from for wisdom and inspiration and challenge for our lives and times, as we seek to know God for ourselves, and grow into who God has created us, has called us to be in the precious and urgent moment of our lives and times. So we draw on the tradition of our faith, even as we bring our own needs and creativity to bear on interpreting our tradition and helping our tradition evolve, like any vital living thing, to the news things our ever-living God may be doing and calling us to do.

Especially in times of storms and trouble, it is wise to be deeply rooted in whichever great ancestors of our faith may be especially helpful in guiding us to integrity and good fruit.

Whose life example from the past can help you find the encouragement and the challenge and the faith you need to receive right now?

I genuinely want to know who comes to your heart with this question. Please feel free to share that with me.

I’m willing to bet that a lot of the people who come up for us are those who have displayed moral courage, who were people of integrity on behalf of love and justice and compassion, in the face of great challenges, guided by deep faith in the Living God.

Let’s name them. Let’s remember them. Let’s tell their stories as we make our stories. Let’s be guided by them and by the faith they embodied.

The particular saint, the particular great ancestor of our faith I invite us to learn from today is Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Tubman was a person of great moral courage, of integrity on behalf of love and justice and compassion, in the face of great challenges, guided by deep faith in the Living God.

Harriet Tubman was born in Maryland in 1822, with the name Araminta Ross. She was born into the condition of chattel slavery in the United States. A man named Edward Brodess legally owned her, because he legally owned her mother. This meant he was legally able to control every aspect of their lives and profit from their forced unpaid labor. Araminta suffered under this condition of enslavement under a system that did not recognize her humanity, but rather treated her and her people like things, commodities. This was justified legally in our country because of racist beliefs and practices.

Araminta endured tremendous hardships because of her enslavement, including being forcibly separated from members of her family, suffering brutal punishments, and surviving a terrible head injury at the hands of a slave owner.

Araminta married at the age of 22, which is when she took her husband’s last name Tubman and she decided to change her first name to Harriet, after her mother.

A few years after that, Hariett Tubman undertook a daring escape. She had been quietly preparing for this by gathering knowledge and social connections that would help her make it through the wilderness to freedom. For several years prior, she had also been having visions and dreams that assured her that God was leading her to escape her eslavement.

Tubman fled into the wilderness and succeeded in make it to the free state of Pennsylvania, where she was able to start a free life for herself in Philadelphia.

But she didn’t settle down. Tubman soon joined a network of folks helping other people escape slavery. This was known as the Underground Railroad, organized by free Black folks and abolitionist white folks.

As a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, Tubman headed back south into danger to get members of her family and friends, relying on her experience and savvy and courage to bring them to safety. After she helped members of her family make it to freedom, she kept coming back, leading people out of bondage through the wilderness, to freedom.

To do this, and to keep doing this, Harriet Tubman demonstrated tremendous courage, physical courage and moral courage. She demonstrated tremendous intelligence and toughness and savviness. She became a master of disguises and guile and trickery, to slip under the noses of slave owners and law enforcement. She became a master of wilderness navigation and survival, with a vast knowledge of edible and medicinal plants, adept at wildcraft and at reading the landscape and the skies. She became a master of psychology and organizing, working with networks of allies north and south, and guiding groups of people who were at times scared and desperate and in need of encouragement.

Through all of this, according to her own telling, Harriet Tubman was animated and sustained by a profound and active faith in God.

A lot of folks started calling her “Moses.”

Because, like Moses, she was helping to lead her people out of slavery, through the wilderness, to freedom. And as she did so, like Moses, Tubman was preaching and teaching and praying and singing about God. She had the clear and firm knowledge that in her efforts for the sake of liberation, she was guided by the same God that called Moses by name and helped him lead his people to freedom. Tubman was guided by the same God that spoke to Hagar in her condition of enslavement, and let it be known to her that she was not alone: God witnessed her and was with her. Tubman was guided by the same God that shook the great Hebrew Prophets to preach against the terrible sins of their societies who treated the poor and powerless as tools to be used and discarded. She was guided by the same God embodied by Jesus, who said, “what you do to the least of these you do to me.”

There’s a wonderful book recently published about Harriet Tubman’s religious and spiritual beliefs. It’s by the scholar Tiya Miles (“Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People.”). Tiya Miles draws on biographies written about Tubman during her life, based on her dictated memories and reflections. These include prayers she would lift up to God, and hymns she would sing in her own devotions and in the course of her work encouraging and guiding others to freedom. The portrait that emerges is of a very strong woman with a very strong and active relationship with the living God.

Tubman was clear that it was not she who was at the center of her activities, but God:

“’The good Lord has come down to deliver my people, and I must go and help Him.’” (Miles, “Night Flyer,” 210)

“God’s time is always near,” she said. “God set the North Star in the heavens; He gave me the strengths in my limbs; He meant I should be free.” (Miles, “Night Flyer,” xviii)

Tubman knew that not only did God mean for her to be free, but that as a free person it was her duty to use that freedom – and to risk that freedom – to help others to be free as well.

As Tiya Miles puts it, “she believed it was God’s intention that all people should live in freedom, and she ardently felt enlisted in this higher cause.” (Miles, “Night Flyer,” xviii)

It’s really important to appreciate that this was not at all what the preachers of the day were saying about God and saying about Tubman and her people. “God” in the mouths of all the authorities of the time was used to sanction the brutality of the social order as somehow natural; they taught that God had decreed racial hierarchy and domination. This was the prevailing belief.

The genius of the religion of African Americans and of the white abolitionists was to pierce through the lies of this dominant and dominating religion to see clearly into a higher moral and natural order.  

“Harriet believed she had divinely endowed rights,” Miles writes, “even as a Black-slave-woman, a recombinant mix of the lowest categories in American, and indeed global, society. Her understanding of these rights was rooted in her religious faith in which God championed liberation and was no respecter of persons. It was also based … in the language of natural rights (now understood as human rights) embedded in the founding documents of the United States. The will of God, as well as the letter of the moral law guiding the nation into which she was born a chattel-child, authorized her action. There were no higher powers in this land, and Harriet Tubman knew it. With God on her side, in a country that espoused self-evident truths of human worth as endowed by God, she believed she would prevail. And she did.” (Miles, “Night Flyer,” 168)

She prevailed, but she did not prevail without a terrible struggle.

After the U.S. Civil War – which Tubman served in as a scout and spy – and after the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery, Tubman’s faith and moral conviction led her to join the movement to expand the vote to women. It also led her to turn her household in Auburn, NY, into a communal home for folks with all manner of disability and ailment.

“Tubman’s worldview,” as Tiya Miles sums it up, “was one of ‘responsible freedom,’ that recognized living in liberty required tending spirits, soothing hearts, and putting food on the table… Every person had innate value and deserved care in the eyes of Harriet, who attempted to view the world through the lens of her God, an ‘almighty helper.’” (Miles, “Night Flyer,” 222 & 224)

This is something I hope we can identify with, and find inspiration and courage and challenge. The danger of looking to a life like Harriet Tubman’s is if we judge ourselves in a belittling way against such a heroic and epic life. This is why I believe it is important to learn from the faith and moral convictions of great souls in a way that can empower and guide us in our moral choices and faith witness.  

“Harriet Tubman fought for the ability of all God’s creatures to share this earth in freedom and dignity.” (Miles, “Night Flyer,” 234)

That struggle continues in this sin-sick world, where religion too often is used by powerful people for domination and dehumanization, and far too many people are deprived of the essentials for the flourishing of life, liberty, and happiness. Every generation needs to remember and rediscover the God who spoke to the prophets, the God manifested by Jesus, the God who guided the saints and great ancestors, the “Still-Speaking God” – as we say – who calls us each by name and calls us each to be and do our best in our lives and times to be fellow workers on behalf of our God of love and justice and liberation.

Delivered Sunday, February 16, 2025 by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.

Image by Marcy Hall