June 15, 2008
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Scripture: Matthew 9:35 – 10:8
Juneteenth
I was in Atlanta Georgia a few years ago attending a UCC national event. One
night we went to a local church near downtown that was walking distance from where
we were staying for the installation of a new officer of the church. This was an
historically Black church, a sagging structure well worn from continuous use. I noticed
that one of its stained glass windows depicted Abraham Lincoln. I’d never seen Lincoln,
or any historical figure in stained glass before. All the windows I’d ever seen depicted
Biblical figures and scenes, angels and saints. But Lincoln was probably considered a
saint in this historic southern community for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation
during the American Civil War. We Northerners call it that, but in other parts of the
country it is more often referred to as the War Between the States or the War of Northern
Aggression, and sometimes even just The War, as if there has only been one war that ever
mattered.
This war that divided our young nation was fought between April 12, 1861 and
April 9, 1865. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared that all of the slaves in
Confederate states were to become free effective January 1, 1863. There were actually
two parts to the Proclamation. The first issued in September of 1862 announcing the
action and the January date. The second part was issued in January naming the states in
which the proclamation took effect on January 1st, specifically, those states that had not
returned to the Union by the January first deadline. But it wasn’t until two months after
the end of the Civil War, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took
effect, that slaves in Galveston, Texas were able to claim their promised freedom on June
19, 1865. And there were an estimated 250,000 slaves in Texas at that time because
southern slave owners had hidden them there because Texas was mostly under
Confederate control. Union General Gordon Granger arrived in the sea port city of
Galveston – which at that time was Texas’ most important city – with 2000 Union army
soldiers and read General Order #3, announcing that "all slaves are free" by Proclamation
of President Abraham Lincoln. Therefore, Juneteenth commemorates the day when
slaves in the last geographic area in America where slavery existed learned of their
freedom.
Evolution of the holiday
Originally celebrated only by the African American communities in Texas and
Arkansas, the holiday has gradually become more widely recognized both geographically
and beyond the people actually freed that day and their descendents. The 19th of June
was recognized by the Congress of the United States as "Juneteenth Independence Day"
through the passage of Senate Joint Resolution 11 and House Joint Resolution 56 in
1997. The House of Representatives passed House Concurrent Resolution 155 in 2007
urging President Bush to establish Juneteenth Independence Day as a National Holiday
Observance in America.
This past Tuesday, Vermont Governor Jim Douglas signed a bill into law to grant
official status to the day that marks the end of slavery in the United States. Vermont
became the 29th state to pass legislation designating Juneteenth as a holiday. As the first
state to abolish slavery, national organizers view Vermont as a significant addition to the
list. They hope that as more states honor the date, the president will be more motivated to
declare June 19th our nation’s second independence day.
Frederick Douglass on the Fourth of July
Former slave turned abolitionist and statesman, Frederick Douglass addressed a
Fourth of July gathering in Rochester NY in 1852. Here are some excerpts from his
speech entitled, "What To The American Slave Is Your 4th Of July?"
(excerpt from: www.Juneteenth.us/National Juneteenth Holiday Campaign)
I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the
pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the
immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice
are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and
independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The
sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me.
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of
millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more
intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not
faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand
forget her cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget
them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme
would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach
before God and the world.
Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in
the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered,
in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled
upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can
command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of
America!
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their
liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to
their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load
their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder
their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into
obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus
marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have
better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply....
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals
to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to
which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted
liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of
rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted
impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and
hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and
solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a
thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not
a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more
shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.
More than one view
Douglass offered his listeners an alternative view of their Fourth of July
celebration. It was different than the commonly told story, but equally true. Likewise,
each of the four Gospels included in our Bibles gives a different view of the events in the
life of Jesus of Nazareth. Gospels are not biographies in the sense that we think of them
today, but are consistent with biographies of the ancient world. The focus wasn’t on
getting all of the facts right, listing all the details of a person’s life in chronological order,
but on painting a portrait of the subject. That’s why all of the gospels are different, and
may even seem to contradict each other.
The Gospel of Matthew is sometimes divided into a sequence of five
narrative/discourse segments. The story is told, moving Jesus through his life and the
geography of his ministry. But at points, he stops to teach. This is probably why
Matthew is the first book in the New Testament even though it was not the first gospel to
be written. It draws from Mark’s gospel for some of its content. It draws from other
sources as well. And there is material unique to Matthew. Each of the gospels besides
describing the events traditionally associated with Jesus’ life gives us a window into a
particular faith community within the development of the early Christian tradition.
Therefore, each of the gospels has a particular perspective, or slant. It arranges stories in
an order that is suitable to its objective.
Matthew’s organization makes it an ideal teaching text. The “Sermon on the
Mount” is the first discourse. Chapter 10, from which this morning’s passage is chosen, is
the second discourse. This teaching is about what the disciples are to do in the larger
community. They are instructed where to go, who to talk to, how to greet people, what
to take with them and what to leave behind. A primary instruction is to “proclaim the
good news.” Specifically, they are to tell the people that, “the kingdom of heaven has
come near” (Matt 10:7). They are also instructed to “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse
the lepers, cast out demons” (Matt 10:8). That is they are to heal, renew life, restore the
outcasts to full inclusion, and expel anything that obstructs these goals.
Likewise, the history of Juneteenth teaches us that Proclamation is not enough. It
was necessary to go to Galveston to exorcise the evil of slavery and the sickness that it
caused. It was necessary to send the army to restore people once held as property to
inclusion as members of the community. Sadly our country still carries the remnants of
the sickness of slavery. The hope in the celebration of Juneteenth is that the recognition
and confession that the freedom America celebrates on the Fourth of July didn’t apply to
everyone’s independence is a step toward the kind of repentance that is needed to restore
the health of our nation. Gospels tell different versions of the Jesus stories from the
different perspectives of different communities, situated in different locations and at
different intervals of time following the Jesus’ lifetime. By reading them together we get
a more complete and accurate understanding of the events and of Jesus’ teachings. Every
view adds to the story. They don’t compete with each other; they complete each other.
It is the same with history. African American history is American history. We need to
hear the history of women in America, since women were not named in the Declaration of
Independence either and were left disenfranchised. And we need to hear American
history through the lens of Native America if we are ever going to understand who we are
as a nation.
I like the idea of multiple independence days, because some demons from our past
are still in need of exorcising. America still suffers from residual symptoms of the
sickness of slavery. While it was great to be able to go to the Internet to pull up
information this week while the Vermont legislation recognizing Juneteenth was being
signed, I discovered some ugly reactions to that news on the Internet as well. The
Burlington Free Press online article has the option for people to respond its content. My
unsystematic observation of these feedback setups is that mostly people with dissenting
opinions will post. That was certainly the case here. But it was the ugliness of some
replies that surprised and disturbed me. Disturbed me and revealed the ongoing need to
uproot racism here in Vermont. Its very easy to skate along believing that racism isn’t a
problem here, until these kinds of comments reveal how close to the surface this
underground hatred lies. To heal this sickness we need to expose it to fresh air. I don’t
believe we need to wallow in the ugly incidents of our collective past history. But we do
need to own that history and acknowledge that it is part of what makes us who we are
today as a nation and as a state.
Be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth
Two weeks ago the scripture passage was about Noah and the flood. Once the
waters receded and Noah and his family and all of the animals left the ark, God’s
instruction to them was to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth” (Gen 9:1). This
echoes the instruction in the creation story from Genesis chapter 1. By chapter 11 of
Genesis, we find all of humanity, sharing one language and planning to build a tower so
that they can ascend to heaven as if they too were God. So God confused their language
and scattered them over the Earth. In other words the people were disbursed into
different language groups, that is cultural groups so they wouldn’t stay all bunched up.
After all God had instructed them on several occasions to fill the Earth. Fill the earth –
well, looking at global population today, the earth looks pretty full. So now what? These
wonderfully different, divinely created cultures are starting to bump up against one
another. It’s even happening here in Vermont. When it does happen we can meet in
conflict and confront, assimilate and enslave each other. Or we can appreciate and value
one another’s unique gifts and perspectives. We can move beyond tolerance of each
other to celebration of the gift of the diversity of the human family.
A day for picnics
Back in the 1990’s the music group called “The Crash Test Dummies” offered the
following view of Paradise in their song entitled, “God Shuffled His Feet.”
After seven days
He was quite tired so God said:
"Let there be a day
Just for picnics, with wine and bread"
He gathered up some people he had made
Created blankets and laid back in the shade
The people sipped their wine
And what with God there, they asked him questions
Like: do you have to eat
Or get your hair cut in heaven?
And if your eye got poked out in this life
Would it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?
God shuffled his feet and glanced around at them;
The people cleared their throats and stared right back at him
So he said: "Once there was a boy
Who woke up with blue hair
To him it was a joy
Until he ran out into the warm air
He thought of how his friends would come to see;
And would they laugh, or had he got some strange disease?
God shuffled his feet and glanced around at them;
The people cleared their throats and stared right back at him
The people sat waiting
Out on their blankets in the garden
But God said nothing
So someone asked him: "I beg your pardon:
I'm not quite clear about what you just spoke
Was that a parable, or a very subtle joke?"
God shuffled his feet and glanced around at them;
The people cleared their throats and stared right back at him
So on Saturday, June 21st gather up some people that God made and bring your blankets
to the State House lawn. If we’re lucky, the boy with blue hair will be there, and some
people with red, black, brown and blonde hair, too. If we’re lucky the people with dark
skin will be there, and the people with light and medium shades of skin, too. We might
not all speak the same language. But we can lie back on our blankets and share the wine
and bread. If we gather in this way, God will be among us, and maybe some of our
questions will find answers. And we can start to get a feel for what it will be like when
we all find our way back to the Garden.
Let some people that God made say, Amen.
Sermon 06/15/2008