This morning’s word is The News Arrived.
The anchor verses are Luke 4:18 and Galatians 5:1.
I am not Black. I approach Juneteenth as a listener, grateful to the Black communities that carried this memory, and responsible for examining the church to which I belong.
On June nineteenth, 1865, a Union officer named Major General Gordon Granger walked into the city of Galveston, Texas with about two thousand soldiers. He read aloud a piece of paper called General Order Number Three. The first sentence of the order read: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” That sentence was the news. The Galveston Historical Foundation, which stewards the memory of the place and the day, names this as the moment two and a half years of waiting ended.
The waiting was not innocent. For much of the war, the proclamation could not be enforced in Texas, and enslavers continued extracting labor through violence and power. Whatever individual enslavers knew or claimed not to know, the slaveholding order kept more than two hundred fifty thousand Black men, women, and children in bondage until Union troops arrived to enforce emancipation.
When Granger read the order, the news arrived. And the day became Juneteenth.
The same order that announced freedom also carried paternalistic instruction, advising the freed people to remain quietly and warning they would not be supported in idleness. Even the order that declared freedom assumed it could direct how the freed would live. The proclamation was real and the work was not finished.
That is the thread this morning. A proclamation can be true while power still resists it. The work of remembering Juneteenth is not just to celebrate the day the news arrived. It is to ask the church a question.
Ignatius of Antioch, the second-century bishop and martyr who wrote seven letters to early churches on his way to Rome and execution, writes in his letter to the Trallians the same question from another angle. He uses the word “truly” again and again in the heart of his ninth chapter. Christ was truly born of Mary. HE truly ate and drank. HE was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate. HE was truly crucified. HE truly died. HE was truly raised. The reason Ignatius keeps saying truly is that some teachers in his day were saying Christ only seemed to suffer, only seemed to die, only seemed to rise. Ignatius arms the church with the reality of what was finished. The cross was a real cross. The empty tomb was a real tomb. The proclamation has been made.
Here is the question the morning puts to us. The church must never use completed truth as an excuse to ignore unfinished suffering. The church is called to proclaim freedom, and it must also examine where its own life has contradicted that proclamation. The question is not only who still needs to hear. The question is where our witness has failed to make what we confess visible.
The Day Twelve reading from ResLife Church on whether GOD heals today tells a story about a man who once knew this and then sat in a prison cell wondering. John the Baptist had declared Jesus the Lamb of God at the Jordan, watched the Spirit descend, and sent his own disciples to follow Jesus. Then his ministry led him to prison, and prison led him to doubt. He sent disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one, or shall we look for another?” Jesus did not rebuke John. HE did not explain. HE pointed John back to the Word and listed the prophecies being fulfilled. The author’s line for that reading: do not throw out in the dark what was clear in the light. The believer who knew the truth on the page does not stop knowing it because the cell is dark.
Peyton Jones and Kris Langham, in the Affection step of their disciple-making plan Discipology, name what the freedom is for once it is known. Kingdom love cannot remain a private feeling within the household. It must become visible wherever dignity, protection, belonging, and freedom are denied.
HE did not author the suffering of the two and a half years, and HE did not author the suffering of the centuries before. HE is the One who proclaims and reverses. The Spirit is the messenger who keeps reaching for those who have not yet heard. The church is called to do the same.
What freedom has the church proclaimed that has not yet been made visible in the lives of others? Where has our witness fallen short of what we confess?
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.