Juneteenth

Today, the nineteenth of June (‘Juneteenth’), Americans celebrate the abolition of slavery in Texas and more broadly throughout the Confederate South. It was on this date, in 1865, in Galveston, that General Order No. 3 was read aloud by Union General Gordon Granger. That order began

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

And yet even here we see the contradictions that have plagued the lives of so many African Americans since; the order went on to read

The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

And so African Americans were considered free and equal in theory, but were assumed by those in power to be inclined to idleness, were advised to stay put and stay quiet, and were not to be given any assistance to move out of their state-authorized position of subservience. This legacy, through the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the continuing gross inequality, ongoing erosion of voting rights, and disproportionate incarceration and murder of African Americans at the hands of the police-prison-industrial complex, is still very much with us, and it would be easy to see Juneteenth as a hollow celebration.

Furthermore, the joy over the extension of marriage rights to gay and lesbian Americans has been tamped down by what is being called the deadliest mass shooting in American history (though, depending upon one’s definition of that term, I suspect there have been massacres of indigenous people, slaves or freedmen, and perhaps others that may have a better claim to that title) and ongoing discrimination in other areas of life, while transgender persons in North Carolina and elsewhere are caught in a ridiculous and tawdry tug-of-war that belittles and disenfranchises many of them who are already in a vulnerable position, while also making their oppressors, like all others in that position, something less than human.

These are but two signs of the great labor in which our world groans: we are promised freedom, but we wait to see it come to full flower; the demons and powers of this world still, for a little while longer, hold it in thrall.

And yet today the Apostle claims that the promise of equality, unity, true identity, and belonging is already being fulfilled in Christ:

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.

     Ga 3.23–29

And Our Lord Himself, in healing the Gerasene demoniac [Lk 8.26–39], shows us what this looks like:

Possessed by demons, we are naked.
In Christ, we are clothed.

Possessed by demons, we reside among the dead.
In Christ, we are made alive.

Possessed by demons, we are separated.
In Christ, we are all one.

Possessed by demons, we are shackled.
In Christ, we are truly free.

Possessed by demons, we do not know our own names.
In Christ, we know our true selves, even as we are fully known.

Possessed by demons, we are out of our minds.
In Christ, we use our minds aright: to sit at His feet;
to praise God; to tell of divine love and healing grace.

This frightens us just as the healing of the demoniac frightened his neighbors, and so we resist it, fearing (as did the demons) the destruction of our old selves, the old boundaries, and all else that is familiar. And yet God always calls us, as God has always done, out of the familiar and into the unknown, out of physical or social weakness into strong leadership, out of scarcity into abundance, out of a life leading to death into a death leading to life. We are called to contemplate and act, act and contemplate, to pray until we can work and to work until we can pray, that the freedom from sin and inheritance of divine love promised to all are enjoyed by all.