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| Freedom Stairway: 100 steps led up the hill to the Rankin house where, over a period of approximately forty years, hundreds of fugitive slaves were hidden until they could be moved safely to the next station on the Underground Railroad. |
"Holy Transformation"
Matthew 17:1-9
We know from
reading the gospels that after his baptism, Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit
into the wilderness. He spent forty
days alone in the wilderness, fasting and being tested, before he began his
ministry.
Jesus had been praying alone, with
only his closest disciples near him, when he began teaching them that he would
have to undergo great suffering, be
rejected by the religious authorities, be killed,
and the third day be raised. Then he told them, "If any want to
become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose
it, and those who lose their life for
my sake will find it..."
It's six days after this when Jesus
takes his inner circle of disciples and goes up on a high mountain to
pray. Peter and James and John saw Jesus
transfigured before them. His face shone
like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Then the three disciples saw Jesus speaking
with Moses and Elijah.
Then a bright cloud comes and overshadows them-- a of God's presence. From the
cloud, a voice speaks, echoing the voice heard when Jesus was baptized:
"This is my Son, the beloved,
with whom I am well pleased."
At his baptism, there's a moment when the veil of the present is stripped away to reveal who Jesus is and who he will
be. Now, the disciples are told not only
who Jesus is-- but they also hear that they are to "listen to him."
How
would you respond to an encounter of the transfigured Jesus? The disciples seem overwhelmed! They want to put up some tents, to somehow
contain the glory they’d seen. But Jesus
tells the disciples to get up… and to not be afraid. And then they go back down off the mountain,
into the valley. What they’ve seen and
heard has changed them. This is Jesus, God’s beloved Son. They need to listen to him and follow his commandment to love God in every
aspect of their lives and to love one another.
That means they need to be merciful and peacemakers and righteous and
just. The light of God’s love needs to
shine through their lives so that others may see their good deeds and moral
excellence so that others will God will be glorified.
What does that look like?
In the scriptures, we hear prophets who
saw the suffering of those around them, the injustice of those who were living
comfortably at the expense of others, and their world was changed. They were moved to
call God’s people to live in the ways of righteousness and justice that God
demands.
Like the prophets of old, we look around
at our world, and we see that it’s filled
with injustice. People are hungry or lack clean, safe water
to drink. Women and children are trafficked
into sex slavery. There are workers who
are cheated out of fair wages in sweatshops so that our clothes and electronics
can be cheap.
If
we open our eyes we see some of the same injustices in our world that Amos and
Isaiah and other prophets saw in their time. If we choose to look in the right way, our
mountaintop experience can call us to lives of discipleship, to lives of
prophetic action, and we will work to turn the world to God’s ways.
In the parable in Matthew 25, Jesus taught that whatever we
do for the least of those among us, we do for him. “When did we see you, Jesus,” the disciples
ask. Jesus is transfigured every day when
we see him in the faces of those who are hungry, in the poor, in refugees, the
oppressed worker, the homeless, and the sick. If we have eyes to see, we encounter the transfigured Jesus every moment of every day.
Moments of transfiguration show us
that change is difficult-- but needed. The
Transfiguration is that moment between what was and what is to come. Like Peter, we get a glimpse of what could be.
Over the centuries, people of faith have looked around at their world,
and they have had transfiguration moments.
For most people in the early centuries of this nation’s history, slavery
was simply part of the American way of life, a necessary part of agriculture
and of the economy in the southern and northern parts of the country. Slaves
were considered property and a major part of slave owners’ wealth. This is a part of our nation’s history that a
lot of people would rather not think about, but it is a part of our history,
and we’re still dealing with our history today.
Runaway
slaves were seen as a problem as
early as colonial times, and the United States Constitution explicitly required
that fugitives “from service or labor” must be delivered back to their
owner. By 1793, the first Fugitive Slave
Act empowered slave owners or hired slave catchers to hunt down fugitive slaves
and return them to their owners. This
was the social and legal context.
In his book, Bound for Canaan,[1]
Fergus Bordewich tells how ordinary people, black and white, slave and free,
joined together to do what they believed was right in a movement of civil disobedience
that challenged prevailing social mores and local and federal law. This network of clandestine operators
eventually became known as the Underground Railroad.
As Bordewich writes,” Most members
of the underground uncompromisingly regarded their work as answering only to a
law higher and more sacred than those enacted by mere men….”
Most of us recognize names like
Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.
But there were many others who were part of the underground movement
that carried as many as 100,000 fugitives to the far northern states and
Canada.
There was David Ruggles, who
invented the black underground in New York City…William Lambert, a black
abolitionist who founded Detroit’s Vigilance Committee. There were many bold Quakers like Isaac
Hopper in Philadelphia and Levi Coffin and his family in Indiana. Arnold Gragston, who remained in slavery to
ferry hundreds of runaways across the Ohio River from Kentucky to Ohio, until
he and his family became his last passengers.
Bordewich estimates that the network of men and women who harbored or
conducted fugitive slaves, plus those who assisted with food, clothing, and
legal assistance, numbered more than 10,000.
One of the most celebrated stops in
Underground Railroad history was Ripley, in Ohio. Hundreds of locals were involved in the
resistance work, even before the Rankin family patriarch, Rev. John Rankin,
moved to Ripley in 1822.
The Underground Railroad network in
the Ripley area had three components. The
first were Presbyterian ministers, most of whom were Southerners, who had begun
around the year 1800 to come north to escape the horrific climate of slavery.
Later, there was an administrative body known as the Chillicothe Presbytery
that helped to connect the web of relationships that linked Ripley to Ripley to
several other towns in southern Ohio.[2]
The second component included
activist abolitionists. The Ripley
Anti-Slavery Society, which held its organizational meeting in Red Oak at the
Presbyterian Church, enlisted 337 members in its first year.
The third component was a sizable
population of free blacks including John Parker and William Atwood, and a small
number of courageous slaves who lived across the river in Kentucky.
Perhaps the most famous fugitive
slave to come through Ripley was Eliza Harris, who pushed her baby ahead of her
on the thin ice and is thought to be the inspiration for the character Eliza
immortalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was the
best-selling novel of the 19th century. It reached millions as a novel and a
theatrical production and energized anti-slavery forces in the American North.
Rev. John Rankin arrived in Ripley
in 1822. He and his family built a house
on top of Liberty Hill, overlooking the town, the river, and the Kentucky
shore. They kept a lantern burning through the night
as a beacon that could be seen from
across the river, signaling slaves when it was safe to cross the river and
guiding them as they made their crossing to the north side.
The United States Constitution and
the Fugitive Slave Law permitted slave owners to reclaim fugitive slaves, even
if they were in a free state like Ohio.
When abolitionists sheltered runaway slaves, there was always the
possibility that Federal marshals, hired slave-catchers, or local law
enforcement officers could demand to search your property. Over the course of the more than 40 years,
the Rankin family kept hundreds of fugitives safe until they could safely be
moved on to the next station
“You
are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do
people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives
light to all in the house. In the same
way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works
and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”[3]
We are changed through our
relationship with Jesus Christ. We look
around our world and see the face of Christ in those who are oppressed or
marginalized. When we have eyes to see and ears to hear, what
we see and hear changes us.
God isn’t finished with us yet. God keeps shedding new light on our
understanding and lights our faces with the radiance of Christ’s glorious
self-giving love. God continues to shine
upon us, to transform us, almost imperceptibly, one degree at a time, so that
we can work with God to transform our world.
And that, my friends, is good news!
Amen!
Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield Presbyterian Church
Dearborn, Michigan
February 26, 2017
[1] Fergus
M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan:The Epic
Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement. Amistad/HarperCollins
Publishers, 2005.
[3] Matthew
5:14-16
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