you can rebuke them yourselves (on Mark 4)

I spent the last week bouncing around Northern Virginia, DC and the Eastern Shore. I got to preach at both the Manassas Church of the Brethren and Washington City Church of the Brethren, see a bunch of friends, eat a lot of delicious food, and soak up a ton of beauty. I’m back in Roanoke now, back to regularly scheduled programming, I’ll be preaching with the good people of Central CoB this Sunday, 6/23.

While I was out on the Eastern Shore, I visited the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Park. It’s located all the way out there, in the middle of marshes and a national wildlife refuge because that’s where Tubman was born and raised, where she escaped slavery, and where she returned time after time to liberate her family and friends and community.

It’s a wild place. It is literally a wildlife refuge, intentionally protected so that bald eagles and great blue herons and ospreys and fox squirrels can have a safe place to rest and nest. But it is also WILD to learn about Harriet there, in the place she knew so well, in the marshes and wetlands and rivers that were the landscape she navigated to get to freedom.

It is hard for me to imagine Harriet Tubman’s courage, even more so after roaming around the landscapes where she lived and liberated so many people. Those trips she made were not strolls through carefully maintained trail systems; they were mucking through marshes, paddling through bogs, hiding in corncribs and listening for footsteps and owl cries. I would not know where to BEGIN, out there.

And, really, it’s hard for me to imagine Harriet Tubman’s LIFE. To be born into the death-dealing system of slavery, to endure violence and cruelty that I simply cannot fathom. To live with a bone-deep, bodily knowledge about how WRONG all of it was, and to KNOW that self-liberation was the only way.

Maybe you know that Tubman’s first attempt to liberate herself was stymied because she ran with her two brothers, and they got cold feet and made her turn around. Maybe you know that she tried again, this time without her brothers, and freed herself by making her way north through those very wetlands and rivers.

Maybe you know that she arrived in Philadelphia, felt the glory of freedom, and missed her family fiercely. She made 13 trips back and led 70 people northward to freedom. Later in her life, Tubman was a soldier and a spy for the Union Army. She led the raid on the Combahee Ferry in South Carolina, liberating 750 enslaved people.

It’s hard for me to imagine the kind of courage and faith that would fuel that kind of life. When she was a young girl, an overseer threw a 2 pound weight at someone else and hit Harriet in the head. She suffered from seizures and headaches for the rest of her life, but she also started having visions and dreams, which she understood as revelations from God. “He set the North Star in the heavens,” she said, “he gave me the strength in my limbs. He meant I should be free.”

In Mark’s marquee story about Jesus calming the storms, Jesus displays the kind of faith that Harriet Tubman lived. The disciples are in a tiny boat on the lake when a huge storm pops up, flinging the boat around and filling it with water. The disciples are LEGITIMATELY freaking out, but Jesus is just napping on the boat’s cushion, perfectly content to ride out the storm unconscious, perfectly happy to trust that God will take care of it all.

Mark’s doing a lot of things in this short story: he’s echoing an earlier exorcism story that he’s just told, invoking ancient tropes of the sea as CHAOS and human naps as TRUST, riffing on Psalm 107 and God stilling the seas, and asking all of his readers to understand that this is something more than a summer thunderstorm. This is Jesus’ power to cast out demons both intimate and systemic.

When the disciples shake Jesus awake and ask if he isn’t at all concerned that they are about to PERISH, Jesus rolls over, groans, and barks out commands: at the wind, at the sea, and at the disciples, too. Same tone of voice. Same rebukes handed out all around.

“PEACE, YOU WILY WINDS!”

“BE STILL, YOU STORMY WEATHER!”

“WHY ARE YOU AFRAID, YOU KNUCKLEHEADS?”

Later on in Mark’s gospel, Jesus gives the DISCIPLES this power to cast out demons. You too, he tells them, can have this kind of courage. You don’t have to be afraid of the evils of the world; you can rebuke them yourself.

And, like, WHAT? You mean to tell me, Jesus, that this whole drama with you casting out demons and stilling the storm, just rolling over from a nap and rebuking the forces of chaos and death…that, uh, WE can do that, TOO?

This is terrifying. It means that Harriet Tubman’s life of courageous, liberating faith does not need to be exceptional. It means that just like she knew in her bones that God meant for her - and everyone else - to be free, we should know it, too. It means that we don’t have to wait for Jesus to wake up and quiet the storm; we can get started on it right this minute.

If we are recipients of Jesus’ “authority over unclean spirits,” then no death-dealing power should keep us from planning our own escape and plotting to liberate everyone around us, too.

And, well, dang.

At the end of the exhibit at the Harriet Tubman site, there’s a statue of her likeness seated on a bench, with an empty space right next to her. Maybe it’s corny or manufactured sentiment, but I sat down there, next to the life-size bronze Underground Railroad Conductor, and I felt both emboldened and inadequate.

I’m a privileged white lady in 2024 America. What does liberation mean for me? How can I cast out demons without co-opting a story that isn’t mine? How can I lead others to freedom if I myself am still tangled up in the lies of white supremacy? I get caught up in all the what-ifs, persuaded by my terrified brothers to just go back to what we know, distracted by the anxious disciples who insist we have to wait for Jesus to do something, and forget that immediate, courageous action is an option, a built-in birthright, a gift from God who means we all should be free.