LEGAL TENDER. Harriet Tubman was a conductor on the Underground Railroad who made nineteen

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1 LEGAL TENDER Acts 16:16-34; John 17:20-26 Harriet Tubman was a conductor on the Underground Railroad who made nineteen trips to the South to help bring more than 300 slaves to freedom. She was proud to say that in all those journeys she never lost a single passenger. By 1856 the capture of Harriet Tubman would have brought a reward of $40,000. Deeply religious herself, she became known for her trips leading people to freedom as Moses. Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland around the year First a house slave, then a field slave, she suffered a head injury from an attack by her owner that resulted in various physical difficulties that plagued her for the rest of her life. Born Araminta Ross, she married in 1844 and took the last name of her husband, John Tubman. She later changed her first name to Harriet after her mother. She ran away from the plantation where she was enslaved in 1849, following the North Star by night, finally reaching Pennsylvania and soon after the city of Philadelphia. The following year she returned to Maryland to bring her sister and her sister s two children to freedom, the first of her many journeys to lead runaway slaves from the South. After the Civil War she continued to work for the rights of former slaves throughout the rest of her long life. In Harriet Tubman we have a situation not entirely unlike the one we ve read about in the Book of Acts, though I don t think it can be said that Paul and Silas cared about the institution of slavery and its horrors, but the story is interesting in many ways. 1

2 In the first place, it is obvious that the slavery described in the story is a far cry from the slavery suffered by African slaves in the United States. Not that anyone would have wanted to be a slave in Palestine under the Romans. But it does seem that slavery in the ancient world was generally less brutal than American slavery where slaves were the absolute possession of their masters for life, forcibly prevented from being educated, sold away from their families if a good deal was available, and without any protection from the whims of their masters. Slaves in Paul s time and in the ancient world in general were mostly the captives of war or people who had fallen into debt so severe that servitude was the only way out of their debt. Paul and the entire New Testament accepts slavery as an institution, both legal and moral, and nowhere criticizes it, a point that was often taken as divine endorsement of the practice by Christian slave owners in the United States. Paul doesn t seem to care one bit that the slavery of the woman who is following him around. What bothers him is that she is a pain in the neck. The fortune teller s owners are incensed when Paul frees the woman of a spirit that had given her whatever ability she had as a fortune-teller and thereby deprived them of their economic asset. For that, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them before the authorities in the market place, as if the marketplace was itself a kind of court, which should probably not surprise us inasmuch as in our own day market forces are decisive for so much of modern life. As a case in point, large corporations have applied economic power to challenge North Carolina s law to prevent discriminating against transgender people from using the bathroom of the gender with which they identify themselves. Anyway, Paul and Silas, no foes of slavery so far as we know, are abused and arrested for treating the mental illness that had made the 2

3 fortune teller valuable to her owners. It s not quite Harriet Tubman, but it was also not a good day for Paul and Silas. You perhaps heard that American politicians and political hopefuls were asked about the recent decision to put Harriet Tubman s picture on the twenty-dollar bill. In a couple of notable instances, the answer given was that they didn t particularly care whose picture was on the bill as long as the currency worked and purchased twenty dollars worth of goods. Which is a sadly telling response that indicates quite well the failure to appreciate the power of the symbolic gesture of putting the picture of a slave woman who freed herself and others from slavery for the African American population of a nation that has never fully come to terms with its history of slavery and segregation and racism. It is difficult to imagine a more ignorant and offensive response to one of the great crimes of history. Nor in passing should we forget that Andrew Jackson, who will go to the back of the bill, was himself an unapologetic slave holder and a notably brutal killer of native Americans during his military career and instrumental in the Indian removal from their lands that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. As I have already indicated, slavery was taken for granted in the Bible. This is sometimes rationalized by the fact that slavery was practiced throughout the ancient Near Eastern world, protected in legal codes, including the Law of Moses, who really should have known better, given that the story of the Exodus has him leading Israel in its escape from bondage in Egypt. But really, where is the justice of God in the institution of slavery? Then again, where is the gospel of Christ in the institution of slavery? It s not just that Paul and Silas say nothing against it. Neither does Jesus. We might read anti-slavery into the so-called high priestly prayer of Jesus in the Gospel of John where Jesus prays that all who 3

4 believe in him will be one Jesus is in union with God in eternity, and he prays that his followers might also be so united. If we take Jesus petition in the prayer seriously, it is difficult to know how the institution of slavery could ever have been endured by a Christian conscience, however much it was the custom of the day. Or for that matter how the racism that was the basis for the institution of slavery in America could have been accepted and continue to be accepted by so many of Christians. Harriet Tubman was a deeply Christian woman who did what she did not only from outrage at the horrors of slavery as she had experienced it but also because she understood it as an abomination before God and a practice in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus. Thanks be to God for the witness of Harriet Tubman, especially in the present political climate where Mexican immigrants are described as rapists, and where candidates entertain barring Muslims from entering the United States, and where all sorts of coded language is used to suggest that the country might have been better off before the Civil Rights Act was passed or women began to rise in the society and as if it is nothing more than political correctness to respect the lives of people who have traditionally been excluded from the full benefits of life in these United States. Racism remains a great moral issue for us as a people. It is an issue that we cannot assume will be resolved by the passage of time or the changing of the census data or the election of an African American President. The slavery that Paul and Silas confronted was probably not race-based as was the slavery in our own land, though it was surely a humanitarian outrage. But racism is an affront to the spirit of Jesus, and from a Christian perspective a deep and tragic sin that continues to weigh on us as a people, and of which we 4

5 must repent and repent and repent again, even as we are grateful for the witness of Harriet Tubman and all who have struggled to overcome this stain on us as a people from long before we were even a nation. Amen. Seventh Sunday after Easter, May 8, 2016 Emanuel Lutheran Church 5