Today's Readugs:-
Exodus 3:7–8 – “I have indeed seen the misery of my people... I have come down to rescue them.”
Luke 13:10–17 – Jesus heals the bent-over woman and confronts the hypocrisy of those who prefer rules over liberation.
Pastor Emillie was not born in the United States, but she carries within her the spiritual DNA of those who dreamed and fought for freedom here long before her arrival. Today, Harriet Tubman felt like a kindred ancestor for her, not simply in Blackness, but in offering spiritual "Sabbath" to people.
Our pastor has an immediacy in her preaching that comes from her authenticity. Today's sermon, based on Exodus 3 verses, the bent-over woman in Luke, and the life of Harriet Tubman, illustrates this. Describing what it must have felt like for the healed woman to stand straight for the first time in almost 20 years, she had us imagine the relief of a morning stretch after a long sleep.
There is a thread that runs from the impossible cruelty of Israelite slaves forced to make bricks in Egypt without straw as a binding agent, to an oppressive slave plantation in Maryland, to the kangaroo court trying Trayvon Martin, to the more recent, disrespectful treatment of Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter protesters.
That thread is one of the circumstances that need God’s liberating attention. Where both God and some of God's faithful see troubles that many refuse to look at.
In Exodus 3:7–8, God tells Moses:
“I have seen... I have heard... I am concerned... So I have come down to rescue them.”
Harriet Tubman heard those same words from Exodus in her spirit. Her call didn't come from a burning bush, but from a burning conviction. God heard her people crying under the lash of American slavery. God was concerned. and Harriet answered God’s rescue mission. The response was not filled with plagues or thunder. She answered by becoming, in turn, a nurse, a Civil War spy, and, most famously, an Underground Railroad conductor. She, like others, followed quiet whispers in the night, secret songs, and the North Star.
She didn’t wait for any modern-day Pharaoh’s permission. Nor did she ask the oppressors to set the terms of freedom. Instead, she walked into Egypt herself and led her people out.
Harriet Tubman was born into slavery around 1822 in Maryland. Her birth name was Araminta Ross, and she later took her mother’s name, Harriet, after escaping slavery. As a child, she endured brutal treatment and hard labor. She suffered a traumatic head injury as a teenager when she was struck by a weight thrown by a slave overseer. This caused her lifelong seizures, visions, and intense dreams, which she understood as divine revelations. God used her just as she was. Her disability didn’t disqualify her from any liberation work. It may have deepened it.
In 1844, she married her husband, and in 1849, she fled to Philadelphia through the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was an organized group of free black men, whites, and Christian abolitionists who helped slaves escape the South.
She rescued her sister, her kids, and her two brothers. In 1851, she guided 11 fugitives north, earning her the name “Moses of her People”. Symbolically, the North became considered "The Promised Land". She was smart and figured out secret codes and paths to bring people safely to freedom. She lived in Canada because of the Fugitive Slave Act, but made trips twice a year to Maryland to save more slaves. She spoke out on behalf of slaves and women’s rights
In 1858, she assisted abolitionist John Brown in a raid on Harper’s Ferry. In the Civil War, she became a Union army scout, organizing a network of spies amongst Black men in the South. She was also a nurse and led an armed expedition to free more than 700 slaves. She never lost a life in her care.
After the war, she dedicated herself to building schools to educate freed men in South Carolina. She worked with Susan B. Anthony to support women’s suffrage in her later life, and in 1908, she established a home for older, impoverished African Americans in New York.
Many African American Spirituals include coded references to those fleeing the Underground Railroad that are disguised as worship. For example, the line in Wade in the Water “See that band all dressed in red” primarily draws on biblical imagery (a poetic image recalling the Red Sea). It is also known that people escaping slavery and Underground Railroad conductors layered spirituals with their double meanings. Red also alluded to sacrifice, the perilous journey to freedom, or served as a coded communication. These spirituals contained hidden messages of hope and safety, disguised as worship, to publicly communicate powerful dual meanings.
To continue with today's readings, in Luke 13, Jesus encounters a woman who has been bent over for eighteen years, unable to stand upright. He interrupts the religious service to set her free. To others, she was invisible, a disruption, and a rule-breaker. Jesus sees her fully and calls her a daughter of Abraham. That’s revolutionary. He was saying, “She belongs to the covenant people. Her healing matters now, not after Sabbath. Now.”
So, what does this scripture mean for us today?
This Holy Disruptors series highlights the work of historians: They can see things others have overlooked and identify previously unrecognized problems. They ask new questions of conventional interpretations, and suggest better ways of understanding what has gone before.
We see Tubman's Spirit of liberation at work in many who are among us today. For instance, there are the women who founded the Black Lives Matter movement: Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors; three Black women, two of them queer, all of them prophets in our time. Like Harriet, they heard the cries. They saw a modern-day Egypt in our streets, in the systems, and in the silence of others' reactions to our metaphorical Egypt's indifference. Within that silence, they found a modern call, “We must move. We must speak. We must lead.”
They weren’t content to hope for slow progress or polite justice. After Trayvon Martin's death, they demanded a world where black bodies are not just mourned, but honored. Where black people aren’t only allowed to survive, but free to thrive. Where the bent are lifted and the bound are loosed.
Like Jesus and Harriet Tubman, these women, together with their movement, faced ridicule and dismissal. They were labeled disruptive, disrespectful, radical, and always asking for too much..We must realize that movements that put love into action and threaten a comfortable status quo will be labeled in this same way.
What they promote, however, poses urgent questions for us to answer: Do we align with the systems that prefer people stay bent over, stay bound, and stay unseen? Or will we follow the Spirit of Moses, of Jesus, of Harriet, of Opal, Alicia, and Patrisse? On this, the Gospel is clear: Liberation is not a side project. It is humankind's mission.
Obviously, Pastor Emillie made this a central part of her sermon. She testified to what she felt going through the call process at Creator. She called it "battling her bondage" and detailed how she had to fight the inner voices that whispered before her call to Creator, "You're not good enough," and "You're too young. You're not ready. Wait." At that time Tubman's life reminded her: if you hear the cries, you go. If you see the misery, you speak. If you believe God is still concerned, then you act like it.
We all face these kind of inner whispers. And living with Tubman's story this week offered another, deeper understanding of what motivates the deliberate cruelty now being seen in the world around us. For example, there is this Florida place called "Alligator Alcatraz" that has captured the nation's attention in the past couple of weeks.
Through Harriet's story, the dynamics of what is happening is obvious. "Hurt" people are tempted to hurt others. Healed people tend to want to heal, and those who have been freed tend to liberate others. To break away from cycles of deliberate cruelty requires a holy disruption of the hurt surrounding us.
Unlike what the Pharisees thought, the Sabbath is not a reason to delay healing and justice; it is a perfect reminder that the Sabbath is a time for that holy disruption of the status quo and to bring it about.
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