*National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, edited*

Our church’s commemoration of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth falls on a Sunday this year, March 10. What a gift this is to our congregations and their preachers and musicians! Why is this a gift? Because an occasion like this can help us overcome the vast distance that lies between us and the people we read about in Holy Scripture. Worship leaders who plan to commemorate Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth on the Fourth Sunday in Lent this year can draw the congregations they serve into a deeper understanding of the faith we share with our biblical ancestors through the connections we have with these two American women.

Here’s what I mean: There is a certain isolation that accompanies our weekly reading of biblical texts in our services of worship. While the words of Holy Scripture become very familiar to us over time, the actual lives of the people we know in this way are largely hidden from us. For the most part we encounter the heroes of the Bible only through the moments they appear in the biblical narrative, and so we tend to think of them as characters in a story and find few points of connection between their lives and ours.

By way of example, how tall was Moses? We don’t know. But we do know that Sojourner Truth was nearly six feet tall. What was the name of the mother of James and John, the Sons of Zebedee? We don’t know. But we do know that Harriet Tubman, named Araminta Ross at her birth, took her mother’s first name for her own just after she was married to John Tubman in 1844. Since there is a wealth of personal information available to us about these two heroic women commemorated by our church as renewers of society, their lives can help us better understand the people we know only as biblical figures.

The most obvious connection with the texts appointed for March 10, of course, is the experience of living in and escaping from slavery. That experience joins Moses and the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness (Numbers 21:4-9) with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. In fact, Harriet Tubman was nicknamed Moses because she freed so many people from slavery in Maryland, bringing them to Pennsylvania, and then on to southern Ontario.

It was The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that required Harriet Tubman’s wards to make that second journey farther north. Since we can learn about the effect that sudden change in legal status had on Harriet Tubman and the people she had already led to freedom, we might better understand the personal implications of similar political events mentioned in the Bible, such as that reflected in Exodus 1:8: “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” Suddenly, the legal status of the Hebrew people in Egypt was changed, and what a change that meant for their lives!

Sojourner Truth lived in New York, where state legislation adopted in 1799 freed in advance any children born to enslaved people. But as she was born in 1797, the status of enslavement that Sojourner Truth was born into remained in effect for her. Pursuing a plan for gradual abolition, the New York state legislature in 1817 set a date ten years into the future on which all enslaved people in the state would be set free – July 4, 1827. But the year before, in 1826, Sojourner Truth took her infant child, Sophia, with her, left the rest of her family, and made her way to the home of abolitionists Isaac and Maria Van Wagener, who arranged for her freedom by purchasing her services for the year that remained before state emancipation took effect. There is in this story a window of understanding into the deep personal longing for freedom that the stories of Holy Scripture bear witness to, and the joy of finding a place of refuge that we read about in the biblical account as well.

The lives of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, which are remarkably accessible to us by a simple internet search, include bracing examples of personal human suffering that grieve our hearts anew. These women suffered physical and emotional abuse and separation from their family members within a social and political context that accommodated deliberate cruelty and disrespect. But they also found joy and inspiration in the faith of the Christian church. Both women linked their efforts to provide freedom to others to the life of Jesus Christ, who suffered, died, and rose again for the sake of the world’s salvation. We can share to some degree in their sorrow and in their joy on March 10 by singing I Want Jesus to Walk With Me (ELW 325). The tune for this hymn was named for Sojourner Truth.

Harriet Tubman & Sojourner Truth