Dear Freedom Seekers

Today’s Monday Musing comes to us on the first Federal celebration of Juneteenth, a day set aside to recall the long-delayed announcement of emancipation to a quarter of a million slaves tucked away in Galveston Bay, Texas on June 19th, 1865. Technically slavery had been abolished January 1, 1863, by Executive Order 95 in which President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation of all slaves held in the United States, but the Confederacy was formed to reject such foreign interference in their self-proclaimed sovereignty; so, for obvious reasons plantation owners failed to share the memo with their chattel. For southern slaveholders the Emancipation Proclamation was an unwarranted intrusion into their right to property; to them it was not an announcement of freedom, it was one of the greatest diminutions of private wealth in human history.

The Thirteenth Amendment transformed an Executive Order into a Constitutional amendment on February 1, 1965, but the US Constitution held no sway in the Confederacy until their absolute surrender to the Union on November 6, that same year. Prior to the surrender at Appomattox the Union army pressed through the south, announcing liberation to enslaved people town by town, farm by farm, plantation by plantation. The news at long last came to the Galveston Bay slaves who, by Union Constitutional standards had been free for at least 4 ½ months, and by Executive Order for 2 ½ years. Tradition holds that when the news came to the emancipated community someone asked the date. The excited herald compressed the June 19th into a single word, Juneteenth! And the name stuck.

What makes the meaning of this holiday so rich is how it focuses on the experience of the emancipated. Other commemorations recognize the sacrifice of the combatants and glorifies the benevolence of the abolitionists, but the experience of those liberated is lost in the shuffle of enlightened self-congratulations.

Prior to statutory liberation an entire race of human beings and their offspring could be bred, bought and sold as livestock. They were beasts of burden enslaved for the sole purpose of bringing profit to their importers, brokers and owners. Treating emancipation as a generous act made law by compassionate statesmen focuses on the nobility of the ruling classes and glosses over the horrific daily experience known by millions of women and men, boys and girls, infants and elderly. That there was even a minute’s delay between the fact of freedom and the experience of its reality serves as a powerful reminder of human selfishness that sought to squeeze one more dime of profit from the flesh of captives.

It's a deep embarrassment to our modern minds; we are quick to suggest we are made of different stuff. Most Americans are not descendants of those who directly benefited from slavery’s inhumane benefits, but as citizens we all share the history and its lingering legacy and consequences.

To the Christian ear the delayed news of emancipation should carry a powerful resonance. Our evangelistic project is the declaration of freedom from the consequences of human sin made possible long ago by the work of Christ. Ours is not to claim distance from the oppressed or wash our hands of the complicity of oppressors, we are instead to see everyone through the lens of Christ’s compassionate love. We are kin to enslaved and enslaver alike, liberated not by human insight or political enlightenment but by Divine will. On Juneteenth the commemoration of freedom’s declaration should serve as a reminder of the great news that our future needs no longer bow to the captivity of our past.

Sharing a ring of freedom, I remain

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor