A Sermon for Juneteenth
A Sermon for Juneteenth
On struggle, triumph, and more struggle. Plus: America's early-90s neuralgia.
NB: I prepared this manuscript for Sunday, June 19, 2022. Then I got very ill on Sunday morning and had to send it to our intern to read for me. She did an admirable job, notwithstanding some challenging references. For obvious reasons, I am no authority on either the history or the culture of this celebration. But I do consider it important and urgent for white clergy like myself to find ways to bring this history alive and give it theological context for contemporary Christian communities (especially if they are also predominantly white). I don’t know how successful this was, either as preaching or as literature, but it was an earnest effort that someone might hopefully find useful.
Elijah in the Wilderness
On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the United States Army announced that slavery had been abolished in Texas. This was the last part of the former Confederacy in which the end of slavery had not been made official. And the date, ever after known and celebrated as “Juneteenth,” marked the end of a long process of emancipation. It began in the resistance of enslaved people to slavery itself, to the violent separation of their families and the brutal exactions of their masters.The Underground Railroad began long before there was any clear hope that slavery would be abolished by law. But enslaved people and conscientious citizens chose to defy the federal Fugitive Slave Act that required the whole country to enforce slavery.1
When the Civil War began and the Fugitive Slave Act was no longer in force, escapes from slavery increased. As the Union Army moved south, former slaves fled across the battle lines to what they hoped would be freedom. There they encountered various kinds of treatment. Most of it pretty bad.
In 1862, President Lincoln drafted the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring as a matter of war policy that slavery would be abolished in the territories still at war with the federal government. In the next year, former slaves would be armed and given the chance to fight for their families and the only country most of them had ever known. In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, making slavery illegal throughout the United States. Former Confederate states had to accept this amendment in order to be readmitted to the Union.
And finally, as the last embers of the war were stamped out, word got as far as Galveston that slavery was over. A generations-long struggle had reached its triumph. A triumph on a truly Biblical scale. Long before Juneteenth became a federal holiday last year, it was celebrated in communities who traced their heritage to the people who had been formerly enslaved and who had persevered and fought for their own freedom.
But June 19, 1865 wasn’t the end of the story. Remarkable things happened in the United States in the following years. States whose constitutions had forbidden slave owners to set their slaves free–as Texas did–suddenly had to write new constitutions for free citizens. In places that had never before had free public schools, the former slaves built them. People united across lines of race to advocate for fair farm prices and better labor practices.
At the same time, there was backlash. Some governments tried very hard to keep the former slaves tied to the land they had worked and made it very hard to break free. People arrested on fake or trivial charges could be put into forced labor. Violence from governments and from militias targeted the people who were organizing and voting for their rights. And, by 1877, that violence had more or less won the day. Slavery as such would never return. But the hopes and triumphs of ages were slowed into a brutal stalemate that lasted for two generations.
In some segments of American popular culture ever since, there has been a note of celebration matched with a note of lament. Blues, jazz, gospel music and their descendants; the poetry of Langston Hughes, the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison; the preaching of Martin Luther King, Jr: all of it captures the ambivalence of frustrated hope, of joy that endures despite hardship and betrayal. All of this, one way or another, is part of the legacy shared by all Americans.
Today we hear the story of Elijah the prophet fleeing into the desert and succumbing to despair. And what we don’t hear in today’s passage is that Elijah has just won a massive victory over the false prophets of the demon-god Baal. The false prophets are, in fact, ex-prophets because they are now dead. Elijah’s God, the God of Israel, has defeated Baal. But the royal court still supports the worship of Baal. And the royal family is very angry with Elijah. They are seeking his life.
So Elijah the great prophet flees as a refugee and sees no way forward. If, after all this, the king and queen are conspiring against me, what good am I? What did any of it matter? Take my life, he tells God. I am no better than my fathers.
And Elijah is not playing around. He lays down under the broom tree and just waits to die. “Lay my head on the old railroad line / and let the 2:19 pacify my mind,” as the song goes.
one day’s triumph only delivers us to the next day’s struggle
But God does not abandon Elijah to his despair. And this is important: God does not argue with Elijah’s despair. God sends help. An angel comes to the prophet and gives him food and drink. Elijah eats and drinks and lays down again. Still gonna die, God. So the angel appears a second time with more food and water. Elijah eats and drinks and this time he goes on. “Keep your eyes on the prize,” as the song says.
Forty days he goes on until he reaches a cave at Mount Horeb, where God spoke to Moses centuries before. What are you doing here, God says to him. And Elijah explains: the people have all gone astray, they’ve killed your prophets and thrown down your altars and I alone am left. “Like a motherless child,” as the song tells us.
Go outside, God says. I’m about to pass by. There was a mighty wind that cracked the rocks, but God was not in the wind. There was an earthquake but God wasn’t in that either. There was a fire, but God was not in the fire. Then there was utter silence, like death itself. And Elijah the prophet, who had faced down the king and queen and all the false prophets, wrapped his head in his scarf. Just like Moses. And he came out of the cave and in the midst of that deep silence he heard the still small voice of God: Go, God says. Go back up to Damascus and raise up a ruler who will work my will against the false rulers of Israel. Keep moving. Don’t throw in the towel.
That, sisters and brothers, is real. The work of truth, the work of justice, the work of liberation is never done. And you can get very, very low. You can find no hope in yourself and in your circumstances. You can think, “the great ones of the past were better, I can’t do what they did.”
Because one day’s triumph only delivers us to the next day’s struggle. Jesus himself heals a man with a legion of demons, who rants and raves alone in the tombs outside the town. And when God in Christ shows the power of his arm and sets the man free, everyone in town says, basically, get lost. We don’t want any part of this. We were better off before. Take us back to Egypt, the Israelites say to Moses. Go away from me for I am a sinful man, Peter says to Jesus. Take my life, Lord, Elijah says to God. Don’t give us this burden.
But God never calls you down a road that God won’t travel with you. God never gives us that empty wind without the still, small voice that follows. God never sets us free without giving us the bread of angels for our strength.
That’s a way that grace works in our world: it helps us persevere. It shows us that our lives are important to God even if they aren’t important to us ourselves. Let alone anyone else. It shows us that while we may be lost, we are never abandoned. Grace teaches us that while the world fashions chains, God comes to us in the silence of our hearts to set us free. Amen.
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiricists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz
I’m a big fan of John Ganz’s Popular Front newsletter, so I knew I wanted to review his new book, which officially came out yesterday. It’s an excellent book, both on its own and as part of a wider reassessment of 20th century political history:
Ganz’s project is part of a growing field of revisionist history of the American Right. Since Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2009), scholars and writers have been looking beyond presidential candidacies and mainstream publications to tell the story of the modern Right, and thus modern America, from the perspective of its obscure intellectuals, movement organizers, and little-known funders. (I encountered Ganz’s thesis about the early ’90s on the podcast Know Your Enemy…)
Nixon’s “southern strategy” and the backlash to the gains of the civil rights era were long treated as central to the remaking of American politics between 1964 and 1984 and the breakup of the New Deal coalition that had held sway for the previous 30 years. But by looking at figures who were, or are, one or more rungs below the daily awareness of the liberal intelligentsia, these new histories more fully describe the swirl of trends, anxieties, and transformations that connected intellectuals and grassroots movements to the electoral upheavals of the era. Racial backlash was critical, but it was only one part of a bigger, weirder story of a society losing its bearings and the people offering salvation.
Something I didn’t have time to do justice to in the review is Ganz’s treatment of John Gotti, a man (and a cultural phenomenon) now mostly forgotten apart from some references in The Sopranos. The Mafia is such an interesting cultural phenomenon, and while I love the movies as much or more than the next guy, the appeal mystified me until Ganz started dealing with it as a political theme (here’s the best, fullest explanation of his that I’ve seen so far). The ideal of the Mafia as a tribal, pre-modern Gemienshaft—explicitly identified as such by Sam Francis, one of the 1990s writers Ganz talks about—was always idiotic; the Mafia was only ever parasitic on productive people doing useful things. But it has an emotional appeal that even ends up overlooking the shoddiness of a figure like Gotti. He earned the cognomen “Dapper Don” for his suits, which were tacky, and was admired as a folk hero despite the secret recordings that revealed him as a fundamentally shabby and small man. “He lives in a regular house, like you, and worries about normal things, like you, but also he had his boss gunned down in Manhattan, which you are too scared and small to do even if you were deranged enough to believe you had cause.”2 The half-normality of it is psychologically compelling even if the non-normal half is not only violent and ruthless but deeply stupid and pointless.
I followed that story, and most of the rest of the ones Ganz talks about in real time (we got two daily newspapers and Newsweek when I was a kid, and watched the nightly news every night; there was no consumer internet to speak of yet, and my parents were admirably opposed to all video game systems, so I was a news media superuser). But I was not yet in high school and the deep weirdness of it didn’t get through to me. By the time it could have, America had moved on. It took me a long time to see Goodfellas (which Sam Francis disliked compared to The Godfather because it showed mob guys being the cheap, shabby thieves and killers they actually were rather than the noble aristocrats he wanted to believe in) as a story about ethnic assimilation and suburbanization, which The Sopranos continued as a story of economic decline. But the appeal is not in the part of the story we all lived, but the part where the resentment and rejection reside. There appears to be a fundamentally insatiable desire for this kind of license, not just in media consumption but in the body politic. I don’t know what to say about that other than it seems pretty bad. Check out Ganz’s book for more.
The “states’ rights” whitewash of the causes of the Civil War (still a mandatory part of Texas school curricula!) is the sort of thing I am very capable of getting mad about even today in light of the total disregard for state sovereignty expressed by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
The nondescript, boring luxury of the new houses in The Sopranos (and the nondescript, boring older houses of the old characters) does at least 25% of the thematic work in most episodes.