June 19, 2022 + Second Sunday after Pentecost + Lectionary 12c + Luke 8:26-39 + Pr. Michelle Sevig
Happy Juneteenth everyone!
Nope. That doesn’t seem right. What is someone who is not Black supposed to say and do on a holiday like today? In America, we love to celebrate. Whether it’s St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Thanksgiving, or Syttende Mai. Any excuse to hang with loved ones, eat festive foods and celebrate seems like a good one.
But if you’re like me you likely never even heard of Juneteenth until just recently, because it just became a federal holiday last year. We’ve ignored what’s often called Black Independence Day or Juneteenth. When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, Black people were still classified as property. Therefore, the freedom found on the 4th didn’t apply to them. While the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 declared an end to slavery, it wasn’t until the end of the Civil War, more than two years later, that news of emancipation finally reached the 250,000 people still enslaved in Texas.
For more than 150 years Juneteenth has been celebrated by communities around the country. People gather to celebrate Black culture, honor Black history and remember the Freedom Fighters who paved the way. Juneteenth is a day of celebration for Black people. And it should be a day of education, remembrance, mourning, and service for non-Black people, especially white people.
So today we began our liturgy with a confession of our own racism–overt and subtle, known and unknown, past and present–asking God to empower us to speak boldly for justice and truth, working toward freedom for all in the name of Jesus Christ.
We don’t choose the scriptures for Sundays, but sometimes they choose us. This Sunday’s texts are about freedom. A naked man being freed from his demons and the freedom we have in Christ, because there is no longer Jew or Greek, enslaved or free, male and female.
In the letter to the Galatians, Paul passionately proclaims that everyone is free in Christ. There is no distinction “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.” That doesn’t mean our differences will disappear, but that our differences are to be celebrated, instead of used as weapons to distinguish who’s in or out, good or bad, worthy or not.
Until recently I didn’t know the story about Elizabeth Key, an enslaved woman from Virginia, in the mid 1600’s, who gained freedom from her enslavers because of her baptism. She, and a white former indentured servant, argued before a court that because she had been baptized and was a practicing Chrisitan, that she was free in Christ, and could no longer be enslaved by man. The story is more complex than this two sentence account, but it’s true that the committee who heard her case in 1659 determined that because she was born of a white man and was baptized the same as he, that she ought to be free and be paid for “the time she hath served.”
Soon afterwards others began arguing for their freedom based on their baptism into Christ–no longer slave, but free. Of course this didn’t last long and white slave owners in Virginia took action to change the law just 11 years after Ms. Keys gained her freedom. A new law said that “baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.”
Cases like Elizabeth Key’s help highlight the ways in which justifications for discriminatory practices were intentionally built over time. The sins of white supremacy and systemic racism didn't just pop up overnight and these systems of oppression won’t be dismantled overnight either. More than 400 years of slavery in America before the first Juneteenth in 1856. Then another 100 plus years of racist laws, attitudes and actions before the Civil Rights Movement. And today though some laws have changed and some believe we’ve had our racial awakening or we don’t see color anymore, the all too often reality is that bias, prejudice, privilege, supremacy are still demons that possess people and keep you and me from being free in Christ.
In the gospel reading today there is a man who is possessed by many demons; not just one, but thousands of them. Jesus asked the man his name and he responded, “My name is Legion,” which is also a Roman army of 5,000 soldiers, as if to say he has many demons tormenting him. The sources of his brokenness are countless. The assault on his mind, soul, and body is multi-pronged.
We may not be standing naked outside the gates of a cemetary, as this man was, but we know what it’s like to live with brokenness and sin. We are all — every one of us — vulnerable to forces that seek to take over and separate us from God and from each other. Sometimes we talk about those evil forces as systems of oppression, systems that surround us like the air we breathe, so entrenched in our lives that we often don’t recognize them alive and well within us.
“And there are other demons that go by different names. Some of us suffer from depression or anxiety. Some of us are addicted to sex, alcohol, wealth, or thinness. Some of us are prone to bitterness, or caught up in cycles of dishonesty, or in lust with our own rightness. Some of us can’t shake traumatic memories. Some of us were abused as children. Some of us are seething with jealousy. Some of us are imprisoned within systems of injustice that stretch back so many centuries, we can’t imagine liberation. Some of us experience our skin colors, our accents, our genders, or our sexualities as magnets for other people's hatred.” (From Journey with Jesus, Debi Thomas)
You see, if we expand the definition of “possession” to include everything that conspires to keep us dead when God wants us alive, everything that keeps us bound up, when God wants us free, then this ancient story is not an oddity about a crazy demon-possessed naked man, but it is a reflection of our own lives. We too seek freedom from all that torments us. And like the healed man we find freedom (or salvation) in the presence of Jesus. Because there is no death-dealing power in this universe that can withstand the saving, healing, resurrecting power of Jesus.
We always live in the uncomfortable tension of the now and not yet. Yes, we are already made free in Christ to live in unity, where there are no separations by color or class or gender or religious affiliation. And yet there is work to be done for the healing and liberation of all God’s people. Because we cannot fully be free, until everyone is free.
Our hope is grounded in what Jesus has already done, in the power he has already demonstrated. That means we have every reason to go out and share the good news of God’s freedom, God’s love and God’s healing with confidence now, just as the healed man did. “With thankful hearts and voices raised,” as our closing hymn encourages, we “tell everyone what God has done! With shouts of thanksgiving. Alleluia”