In 1849, in fear that she, along with the other slaves on the plantation, was to be sold, Harriet Tubman resolved to run away. One night she set out on foot. Following the North Star, she made her way from Maryland to Pennsylvania and on to Philadelphia. She found work there, saved her money, and the following year she returned to Maryland to escort her sister and her sister’s two children to freedom. And then she went back again to rescue her brother and two other men.
And she didn’t stop. The reward for her capture kept going up. By 1856, it was at $40,000. That’s a lot of money. We know that the Christian Church in Nashville, the congregation we know today as Vine Street, built a mighty fine church in 1852 for half of that. Nineteen times during a ten-year span, Harriet Tubman made the dangerous trip into the South, leading more than 300 slaves to freedom. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all of her journeys she “never lost a single passenger.”[1]
Calling her a “conductor” for the underground railroad seems very understated. John Brown addressed her as “General Tubman” in their correspondence, and many others simply called her “Moses.” She made a way in the wilderness, from the house of slavery to freedom. And she didn’t just tell others how to escape, she went with them, again and again, and she “never lost a single passenger.”
The author of Hebrews describes Jesus as one “bringing many children to glory” and calls him “the pioneer of their salvation.” A pioneer makes a way where there is no way, and the pioneer of our salvation doesn’t just blaze a trail and urge us to be careful and stay on it; he walks with us through the difficult landscape.
Somebody once asked Anne Lamott what she most wanted to convey to her son Sam about God. “I want to convey that we get to be human,” she answered.
We get to make awful mistakes and fall short of who we hope we’re going to turn out to be. That we don’t have to be what anybody else tries to get us to be, so they could feel better about who they were. We get to screw up right and left. We get to keep finding our way back home to goodness and kindness and compassion… I want him to know that no matter what happens, he’s never going to have to walk alone… That’s what I’m trying to convey to Sam.[2]
When you hear the opening verses of Hebrews, that kind of intimacy and closeness may not be the first thing that comes to mind. The first lines are like the Grand Tetons of poetic God-talk rising from the plains of everyday speech: enormous, majestic, awesome.
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, who is the God-appointed heir of all things, through whom God created the worlds, who is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, who sustains all things by his powerful word, who, having made purification for sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
In the original Greek, the first four verses are just a single, carefully composed sentence, drawing listeners into the radiance of the divine presence and illustrating the bold claim that the entire history of creation, from the first day to its consummation, is contained in the life of Jesus. Commentators have long suggested that the writer may indeed be quoting, in entirety or in part, from the liturgy of the church to which the words were first addressed, reminding them of the powerful affirmations they shared.
I keep saying “the author” or “the writer” because no one knows who wrote Hebrews, and no amount of research has been able to overcome the anonymity. But we can piece together a picture of the community for whom the text was composed: They are believers who have experienced a great deal of shaming and hostility from their neighbors. Why? They have withdrawn from certain religious and social activities that bind a city and its people together, and their neighbors disapprove.[3] The believers experience serious pressures to conform to the ways things are done in the city, ways that go against their values as followers of Jesus, and not going along has consequences. The ongoing assaults on the believers’ honor, their economic standing, and even their persons are taking their toll on individual commitment. Some have stopped identifying with the Christian community entirely, others are in danger of “drifting away” or “turning away.”[4] The hymnic opening lines of Hebrews redirect their attention and ours toward the Son and the significance of the divine word spoken through his life and suffering, his death and exaltation. If this pioneer is not our constant, our central point of reference amid the swirling currents and pressures of our days, be it in first-century Rome or in twenty-first-century Nashville, who or what is?
The writer of Hebrews wants us to remember that the righteousness of God is not an idea or a concept; it is an embodied reality in Jesus. In him God embraces humanity, all of it, the best and the worst we’re capable of, our deepest joys as well as our anxieties, our desires, our hurts—us. And in him humanity opens itself up to God’s embrace, in complete trust and obedience. And so Jesus is the exact imprint of God’s very being and of ours as creatures made in the image of God.
The author of Hebrews recognizes God’s deep solidarity with us particularly in Jesus’ death:
We see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
For Jesus, any life short of suffering and death would have been less than a complete identification with humankind, less than a complete embrace of our condition. And tasting death for everyone, he made a way for everyone, to set free those who were held in slavery by their fear of death, and never to lose a single passenger.
Rowan Williams has referred to the church as the “pilot project for the new humanity.”
What is the new humanity? The humanity set free for intimacy with God. It’s the restoration of God’s image in us. That image, which is fulfilled perfectly in Jesus, is now communicated to us, and we are restored to where we ought to be. Our position in the world is now what it was meant to be because we were made for intimacy. We were made for communion. We were made for meaning. And for all those things to come alive again in the presence and the power of Jesus, that is what life in the body of Christ makes possible. That’s why the Church is the pilot project for the new humanity. The point of the Church, if you like, is that glory may dwell in our land. The glory of God in transfigured human faces, and we are there to hold that space and that hope, that place for the imagination to go, where human beings are allowed to grow into more than they’re allowed to grow into in [this] materialist environment. Our job is to try to make sure that the Church goes on being a landscape for that kind of humanity: a pilot project for the human race, a project worth joining because it leads into a bigger, not a smaller, world.[5]
Our passage from Hebrews ends with a joyful exclamation from Psalm 22, words spoken by Jesus who is not ashamed to call any of us his siblings. “I will proclaim your name to my siblings, in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” Psalm 22 continues for several more verses after this one, and they open windows to an even bigger world. The psalmist - and I don’t mind imagining Jesus as the one speaking those lines as the author of Hebrews did - Jesus proposes a banquet for all the beneficiaries of God’s deliverance: himself, the poor, the sick, foreigners, even the deceased and future generations—all of us are siblings by virtue of our deliverance, all of us come home to goodness and kindness and compassion, all of us have a seat at God’s table because Jesus is the pioneer of our salvation.
Every Sunday we gather at the table to give thanks to God for the gift of life and for Jesus who leads his siblings out of any house where their dignity as children of God is being denied. And today we give thanks that this table stretches across the ages and around the world, reminding us who and whose we are, and inspiring us to give ourselves to the pilot project for the new humanity, to entrust ourselves completely to the pioneer of our salvation.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1535.html
[2] Jennifer L. Holberg, ed., Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak About Their Writing and Their Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 199-200.
[3] See Hebrews 10:32-34; with thanks to David A. deSilva for his notes about the pastoral situation https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-27-2/commentary-on-hebrews-11-4-25-12-5
[4] See 10:25; 2:1; 3:12
[5]Rowan Williams, Archbishop's address to the Chelmsford Clergy Synod, 4th May 2006,
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/060504%20Chelmsford%20clergy%20address.htm