Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

John 3:14-21 

Today is the day Harriet Tubman died in 1913.

Her birth year is uncertain, but it probably around 1820. As a 15-year-old, after refusing to help an enslaver restrain a runaway, Harriet was hit in the head, knocked unconscious, and left for days. After her recovery, she suffered from seizures, dizziness, and sleep problems throughout the rest of her life. At the same time began to have prophetic visions and dreams, which she understood as communication from God.

In 1849, she escaped from enslavement. She then went back again and again to rescue members of her family and dozens of others, one small group at a time, traveling by night from safehouse to safehouse along the Underground Railroad. After the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, she helped guide people even farther north into Canada. She became known as “Moses,” and is said to have accompanied hundreds of people from enslavement to freedom.

Her mission didn’t stop after the Civil War. She began taking in orphans, the sick, and the elderly that weren’t being cared for. She bought land near her home in 1903 and opened the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged and Indigent — where she herself died ten years later.

Frederick Douglass wrote to her in 1868: “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day — you in the night… The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism.”

For God so loved the world.

Often under the cover of darkness, away from those who relish the spotlight and its searching threat, one by one, group by group, God is moving us along the way, from one safe house to another; one step to the next–the border into safety often still far enough away that it doesn’t feel certain.  There’s always the risk of being caught again, pulled back, enslaved by powers that still seem bigger than me.

I always want salvation to be big; to be overwhelming and clear, when all the scales fall away. All our problems resolved.  In the blink of an eye, we’re free. We have clarity. Life is easy.  Isn’t that what it means to be in Christ, after all?

In today’s very famous gospel reading, Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, who was a ruling elder in Jerusalem. He comes at night to grapple with who this Jesus is.  He heard about the overturning of the tables in the temple. He senses something different, new, powerful in his presence.  But he doesn’t anyone to know he’s opening the door.

That encounter with Jesus must have been his first safe house. I love that he doesn’t go dancing out, having it all figured out.  He goes back into the night being told that he has to be born from above.

We don’t hear about him again until later in the book when he shows up to remind the ruling council that a man can’t be convicted unless he has a chance to testify.  Then he disappears again, turning up after the crucifixion to help take Jesus body off the cross and buy him in the tomb.  And then he’s never heard from again.  I like imagining that Nicodemus just kept going, finding the ways to offer his tentative but very real faith in moments when he was needed, an agent of love.

He must have kept going.  I don’t think we’d be here if he, and a lot of others like him, didn’t just keeping taking in the runaways, the lost, the indigent, the confused, making it safe for them to take whatever it is are the next steps.

So often this gospel text from John gets trapped in our endless anxiety, always wanting to know who is in and who is out, and how you can make sure the right people are in and the wrong people are out.  It starts off trying to tell us just how God loves; but we focus on the whole confusing last part about who is in the light and who is in the dark. My favorite meme lately said, “If God didn’t send Jesus into the world to condemn it, God probably didn’t send you.”

The mechanism is love, in the night, in the wilderness where there are poisonous snakes that we might have brought into the camp ourselves, the places where we’re working so hard, or afraid, or unsure, or bearing the wounds of our own destructiveness. God meets these moments with love, providing the means for healing or belonging, or the salvation that our bodies and souls cry out for.

Jesus himself is lifted up so that we can see that even suffering, death, rejection, humiliation, narcissism and oppression aren’t the end of our stories, but are the place where God is building a safe house, a place to take the next step on a saving journey.

I want to imagine the church as Harriet Tubman’s safehouse.  We assemble week to week, all of us on the way to whatever it is freedom means for us.  There are people here who are tending the house, making it safe, setting the table, drawing the bath, lighting the light in the window.  And then then we head back out, pushing on toward a greater freedom, looking for the ones that need what we’ve been promised, inviting them to join us, all of us headed to the promised land.

And then we become the Harriets, the Moses, Nicodemus, the Christ.  The safe houses.  The dwelling places.  God as part of us, out there working love into the mix, kneading it into our relationships, our places of work and study, making moments of healing words, providing a space of rest and belonging.

It may still be night.  The time changed this morning after all.  God is lifting a light, and moving all of us toward the border, toward abundant life, toward Easter.