The Responsorial Psalm for the Fifth Sunday of Easter comes from Psalm 67. The psalm is addressed to “the leader with stringed instruments” and functions as a petition to God and a rallying cry for the nations to worship the LORD. “Show kindness and bless us, / and make Your face smile on us,” the Psalmist writes. What were the conditions for such an appeal? What experience of grief or lament was the psalmist responding to to prompt such a direct ask of the Divine? The psalmist then turns to the nations imploring them to “be glad and sing for joy.” The psalm moves from being an appeal to God’s goodness and justice to a testament of God’s justice on earth. 

In a short essay on lament and hope, Christian social ethicist Emilie Townes writes about the importance of facing the harsh realities of grief and lament: “Naming the hot mess…is both admitting the realities – and possibilities – and confessing that we cannot right things without leaning strong and hard into our faith for the sustenance to stand up, dig in, and do the work our souls must have.” The 67th Psalm has a dual function of expressing profound grief while also excessive praise for the Divine. The appeal for God’s kindness is an inverted plea to end the suffering and brutality faced by the nations so that “And all the nations will know of Your power to save.”  

In a series of masterful poems entitled “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This?,” poet Hanif Abdurraqib speaks to the duality of expressing joy and praise during times of violence and oppression. Just like the poem’s title, this psalm challenges its readers to consider what it means to praise God at a time like this. 

One figure that exemplifies this duality is Harriet Tubman. Tubman, born in March 1822 as Araminta Ross, later changed her name to Harriet three years before her first trip to freedom in 1849. Over the course of a decade, Tubman would travel back and forth between Maryland and Philadelphia, New York, and Canada on what she would call “trips of mercy” to help liberate enslaved people. She made over a dozen trips and freed 70 to 80 people. For her bravery and resilience, Harriet is also known to us as Moses.

Tubman knew intimately the duality of grief and praise, as she spent five decades of her life braving the perils of enslavement to free her people. In Sarah Bradford’s account of Tubman’s life, Tubman is quoted upon reaching freedom: “I looked at my hands…to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees, over the fields, I felt like I was in heaven” (Harriet, the Moses of Her People, 30). The glory that Tubman experienced upon reaching freedom is not unlike the kind of glory that the psalmist describes once the Creator “smiles on us.” It is a transformative experience that reveals something profound about the nature of God – God’s desire for our salvation on earth and in heaven.

I’m particularly interested in Tubman’s experience on the run, in the wilderness of Maryland’s coastal plain of the Chesapeake Bay – land that was originally inhabited by and then stolen from the Algonquin, Iriquois, and Powhatan peoples, because like the psalmist, Tubman was most attuned to the functions of grief and praise on her journeys to and from freedom.

In Tiya Miles’s biography of Tubman called Night Flyer, Miles writes about the ways that Tubman’s spiritual orientation and ecological sensibility were instrumental as she made over a dozen trips between territories of enslavement and freedom. “Slavery and injury, unease and illness, cast Minty Ross into the wilderness. A place of material hardship, of spiritual difficulty, and potentiality, the biblically inspired ‘wilderness’ was well known to Black holy women” (Miles, 81). 

Much has been written about the role of the wilderness in womanist theology, particularly from Delores Williams, who was referenced in last week’s reading. The wilderness is an appropriate frame for this psalm as well, because it holds the danger and possibility of God’s provisions. As Townes wrote, “[Harriet] stood among peers who believed liberation had “spiritual and social dimensions” with the purpose of “restoring a sense of self as a free person and as a spiritual being” (Miles, 9).

I invite you to imagine yourself in the wilderness. For some of us, that may not be all that difficult. As we enter this clearing in the wilderness, take a posture of contemplation or meditation, softening your gaze and your attention. Then begin to meditate on the following questions:

What does the wilderness mean to you? What does it look like, sound like?
What work are you called to do here?
Who are you taking with you?
Who are you going back for?
What does praise look like in the wilderness?
What does it sound like? What does it look like?