Scripture Galatians 3:23-29 (NRSVUE)
Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be reckoned as righteous by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
Sermon
Happy Juneteenth! Blessed be the date of June the 19th, when, 160 years ago, Major General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston Texas to proclaim that the Emancipation Proclamation was to be enforced, and that all enslaved people were free. The Major General didn’t actually make a speech; he had the order posted all around the town.
Freedom for the enslaved had technically been the law of the land since 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as an Executive Order. Because the war still raged on, those enslaved in the southern states had to either find their way to a free state, or wait for the advancing Union troops to arrive, to claim their freedom.
Last weekend I saw the documentary “Natchez.” Natchez, Mississippi is a tourist destination for those enthralled with antebellum southern architecture, culture, and clothing. Many of the mansions in town are open for tours during what locals call “Pilgrimage Season.” The Natchez Garden Club authorizes the tours. Not too long ago, the club admitted Deborah Cosey, the first African American woman to be a member. Ms. Cosey’s tours of her home are significantly different from the others. She lives in what were previously slave quarters on a plantation, so her tour tells the history from that perspective.
In one scene member of the Garden Club talks about the Emancipation Proclamation. (For her tours, this woman dresses in the clothes of a nineteenth century southern belle.) She speaks of how, of course, after that became the law in 1863, the enslaved people on her family’s plantation must have been paid for their work. At this point the camera pans to Ms. Cosey, who has placed her forehead on the mantel of a grand fireplace, in a gesture of disbelief or maybe just exhaustion. It’s clear that not everyone knows the real history of what happened after Emancipation was proclaimed.
Our scriptures tell a story of emancipation. Our first passage is the scene in which the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob drafts Moses for the job. Moses has fled Egypt after killing a slave master who was treating the Israelites harshly. He is now living a peaceful, pastoral life in Midian, married, children probably on the way, working as shepherd for his father-in-law’s flocks and herds.
But God sees in Moses the leader needed to set God’s people free. After some hesitation, Moses accepts the challenge. God assures Moses: I will be with you. And God is with him, in the things he needs to do, in the words he needs to say, and in the journey he needs to take.
Our passage from Galatians takes place something like 1300 years later, but enslavement is still an issue, as it will continue to be for the next two thousand years. Paul, writing to the churches Galatia, first reminds them that they cannot earn the love of God, because God’s love is pure grace. The implications of this are enormous. Among other things, it means that categories of humanity—race, gender, status, for example—are no longer legitimate ways of ranking people’s worthiness. (They probably never were.) The man is not superior to the woman. The free person is not superior to the enslaved person. All are equal. All are one in the love and freedom of Christ.
These texts show us the ideal, the way things should be, much as our Constitution shows us the ideal functioning of our government and its laws. But as we are all aware, humans have a way of finding workarounds, of letting one another down, and of seeking out what will benefit them, no matter the cost to others.
Instead of embracing their freed black siblings in Christ, the former slave states enacted laws—known collectively as Jim Crow Laws—to keep those same black siblings from owning businesses, from voting, from gathering in public spaces with white citizens, from being free by almost any definition. They enacted campaigns of violence to terrorize the black residents of their states. I call them residents because they weren’t even granted citizenship until 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. The effects of these—including the more than four thousand black individuals who were lynched—weren’t abolished until nearly one hundred years after the end of the Civil War, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed congress and was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. This legislation prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
And so we celebrate. The earliest celebrations of Juneteenth took place in Texas one year after those Union troops came to town. Those early celebrations usually took places in churches, and they spread throughout the south over the next decades. By the 1920’s, former slaves and their descendants were having full-on food festivals in most of the United States (the Great Migration had brought Juneteenth north and west). In many areas these celebrations are still church-centered and take place on the third Saturday of June. Yesterday I saw the Church of God in Christ near my home setting up beautifully decorated picnic tables outdoors along Riverside Drive as that congregation prepared for their celebration.
There is still much work to do. As many of you are aware, the achievements of black men and women have been stripped from many of our federal websites. The NASA website removed information on the work of Katherine G. Johnson, Mary W. Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan, the “hidden figures” whose work as mathematicians made possible John Glenn’s first orbit around the earth as well as the Apollo missions that followed. A page on the Arlington National Cemetery website about baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s military history was taken town. Following the publication of news stories about these and pushback from the public, some of the pages were restored. Some were not. The work that remains includes the simple task described the great reporter and anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells, who wrote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
But the work also includes celebration. All around our nation black Americans gathered this week to celebrate this anniversary—complicated as that original moment was, followed as it was by nearly a century of obstacles and treachery and bad faith. That won’t and shouldn’t stop us, or anyone from celebrating the kernel of freedom that was planted, whose spirit was unleashed. That spirit of liberation cannot be stopped, no matter what obstacles remain in the present or future.
Celebration is essential. We can gather with friends and neighbors and celebrate that spirit of liberation. We can remember how God’s liberating word—despite efforts to keep it from enslaved people—nevertheless found its way to them and filled their hearts with hope and resolve and the conviction that God would set them free. We can sing to the Lord a new song of joy and hope. Joy is essential. Joy itself is resistance to anything that seems to threaten, or restrict, or harm. Joy is resistance. So let us celebrate. Let us rejoice. And let us trust that God will fill our hearts with hope and resolve. Let us trust that God will be with us. Let us trust that God will equip us in the things we need to do, the words we need to say, and the journeys we need to take to continue the work that needs to be done.
Thanks be to God. Amen.