A meditation on liberation
By the Rev. Hershey Mallette Stephens
Juneteenth is a word-smush (aka portmanteau) of June and nineteenth—also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, Liberation Day and Emancipation Day. It is a holiday that celebrates the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States and originated in Galveston, Texas.
On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth a national holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. June 19 is the anniversary date of the 1865 announcement by Union Army General Gordon Granger of General Order No. 3 proclaiming freedom from slavery in Texas. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 had officially outlawed slavery in Texas and the other states in rebellion against the Union almost two and a half years earlier.
Enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation generally relied on the advance of Union troops. Texas, as the most remote of the slave states, had a low presence of Union troops as the American Civil War ended; thus, enforcement there had been slow and inconsistent before Granger’s announcement.
Although Juneteenth generally celebrates the end of slavery in the United States, it was still legal and practiced in two Union border states, Delaware and Kentucky, until ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished chattel slavery nationwide in December 1865. Additionally, tribes in the Indian Territory that had sided with the Confederacy, namely the Choctaw, did not release those enslaved on their lands until 1866.
FREEDOM AND LIBERATION
I didn’t grow up celebrating Juneteenth. I knew it was celebrated in Texas. As a native North Carolinian, I thought of it as a holiday for the unfortunate Black folks who got the news late. Imagine toiling away in what I am sure felt like godforsaken hot Texas for two additional years after the Emancipation Proclamation made slavery illegal in the United States. Imagine the ancestors who passed in the brutality of chattel slavery never knowing the sweet songs of freedom. Imagine the children born and ripped from their mothers and families, the young people whose lives were stunted and circumscribed by the evil of enslavement. Just imagine. Now think in your life what two years means. Two years of growth, dignity, love and self-determination. Two whole years!
We should collectively, as a people and as a nation, mark, acknowledge and celebrate the end of slavery in the United States. The end of an era of sanctioned evil still haunting us today. It is important that we acknowledge, confess and turn from the sin of slavery that colors, even today, our shared life in the world and in The Episcopal Church, especially in our churches.
I am not usually a fan of celebrating national or secular holidays in church, like singing patriotic songs on the weekend of the Fourth of July or making the second Sunday in May all about mothers. Yet I wonder if there might be space for us to ponder what freedom and liberation mean to each of us—in the multiplicity of our physical diversity and varied backgrounds—this Juneteenth.
To understand the type of liberation that God offers, one must let go of the heretical patriotic Americanized and privatized notion of freedom. The American empire understands freedom as it is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants, without hindrance or restraint.” Secondarily, we have come to understand freedom as the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved. The absence of subjection to foreign domination. Generally the state of being free within society from oppression or restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life and behavior.
I do not write today to suggest that this understanding of freedom or liberty as celebrated and idolized in American culture—and I do mean idolized in the truest theological sense of the word—is not relevant. I lift up these definitions to contrast them with liberation in God. Freedom, as we come to understand and practice it, is the ability to do whatever one wants to do within the limits of the law. To act on others, in order to fulfill one’s own desire for wealth, power or influence. Freedom is connected to what we do.
Liberation, on the other hand, is how we live. Liberation is “the act of setting someone free from imprisonment, slavery, or oppression; release.” We are creatures. We are created by God, to give glory to God, because we have known or anticipate with joy the experience of God’s grace. Our salvation is inextricably connected to the release from sin, guilt and shame.
In 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” This speech exposes the uniquely American contradiction that celebrates freedom while denying it to others. His words challenge the American empire’s selective and self-congratulatory understanding of liberty as freedom that serves the privileged while ignoring the oppressed. In the same way, to understand the liberation God offers, we must reject this idolized, privatized and nationalistic version of freedom that centers on individual desire and power. Divine liberation is not about the ability to do whatever one wants but about being set free from systems of sin, domination and death. And actively working to help others be free! Liberation is rooted in love, justice and the flourishing of all creation. God’s liberation should be invasive, covering all we do, like kudzu in the American South.
God created us imperfect, striving, knowing that we could not inhabit the promise of liberation alone. My husband, Rob, often prays: “The more we learn about you God, the more we learn about each other. And the more we learn about each other, the more we learn about God.” We need each other to experience true liberation.
One more thing to consider, as we meditate on the meaning of Juneteenth, is that liberation is not a dichotomous experience. It is a paradoxical experience, meaning that for one to experience liberation, one must be subject to something greater than oneself. We pray over the Eucharistic Feast, “put all things in subjection to you Christ.” This is an important contrast! Many people think, wrongly, that to experience freedom or to be free, they must oppress others. In the physical, mental, spiritual and soul work of oppressing another, it is clear the oppressor is subject to their love of money, power and wealth. The love of these idols begins to shape a person’s identity, pulling them further and further from an understanding of creatureliness, or being created by God and subject to God. This is a source of interest for me both theologically and interpersonally. A person must understand themselves released or liberated from something to be truly free. What has God liberated you from? What has grace made possible in your life?
God is Liberation.
Liberation is at the center of the work of Jesus Christ.
Liberation is the way of the Holy Ghost.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, and all that is in the Earth, and God gave humans dominion over the Earth. Essential to the story of our faith is the story of God literally moving heaven and earth with the plagues, to set God’s people free from slavery in pharaoh’s land.
Jesus comes to God’s people to make the liberating way of God known to those with eyes to see and ears to hear. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus declares his mission, reading from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah:
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
(Luke 4:18-19)
In the season of Easter, we observe the Spirit at work, in the Acts of the Apostles, liberating those who love God from their prejudice, from their fear, from their selfish desires, into relationship with God and all that God has created.
True liberation sets others free.
Our Episcopal tradition continues God’s work of liberation. Our rituals set us free to offer our full selves to God, uninhibited by the distraction of novelties. Each Sunday we pray:
“Almighty God, to you, all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name; through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
That is a prayer of liberation!
We are exposed to liberation through prayer, worship and ritual. Through the Word of God. Through the sacrifice of Christ, body and blood. We do not worship God because God demands or desires it. We worship because we have been liberated, released, set free! And we pray for the strength and courage to do the same for others. After all, we are to be Christ in the world. Christ’s mission is our mission. Choosing to see the world, each person, and all creation as God sees it. Living to make all free. So maybe take a rest this Juneteenth, for siblings, we have much liberating work to do.
Happy Juneteenth!
Happy Liberation Day!
The Rev. Hershey Mallette Stephens is the university chaplain and Dean of the Chapel & Spiritual Life at St. Augustine’s University. Contact her.
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