What is Juneteenth to the Liberated Black Person?
TRANSCRIPT
If the storm comes, if we burn up…
If it all ends…
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Rev. Bro. Frederick Douglass was invited to give the keynote speech on July 5th, 1852, at an event intended to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He showed up in all his Frederick Douglassness, and gave his speech, entitled: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”
One of the key things about Frederick Douglass’ speech is that he was speaking in his ministry—as was part of his ministry, God bless him--to specifically invite white persons to understand that the July 4th is completely meaningless to black persons given that black persons were still legally enslaved—and so unfree—in the so-called land of the free and home of the brave.
More—and this is truly the gift of his speech—that so long as black human beings remained enslaved, white persons were also not free. Or, as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us: “Until everyone is free, no one is free.”
168 years later, we strongly recognize that white persons and individuals invested with the evil of white supremacism still aren’t hearing this message. And many of us also are waking up to the reality that black lives mattering—the realization of our freedom and liberation—must go far beyond an appeal to white persons to recognize our humanity, and to “allow” us to breathe.
Largely because the humanity of black persons, children created as belovedly of God as any other group of persons in the human race, is not hidden. Our humanity is not obscured. When God created human beings in order with the rest of Their creation and said, “It is good,” that is all of humanity—not some of us. And certainly, if we believe God is God, not a single one of us has the right to determine who’s good and who’s bad, who’s in and who’s out. That is God’s job. Unless we think we’re God.
So black people’s humanity, our value, our worth, our beauty, our creativity, our grace, our love, our being, our lives are not something that we need to impress upon those invested with whiteness as mattering. The work there in fact needs to be reversed—to folks removing the beam from their own eyes, and asking why they are struggling to see the manifestation of God’s great works in one another, in their darker hued brothers and sisters in God.
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So I want to turn this conversation, 168 years later, after Rev. Bro. Fred did his work, and after 168 years of due diligence has quite definitively demonstrated that asking to be seen for who we are and Whose we are by people who do not want to see is not where our primary focus lies—in the name of Jesus. It may be a part of the work for some of us. It is not the work.
And I am led by the Holy Spirit to invite us to ask of ourselves:
What is Juneteenth to the Liberated Black Person?
As Sounds of Blackness demands to of know of us in their song, “Stand”:
Don’t you know that you are free?
Well, at least in your mind, if you wanna be…
The truth is that we as black persons—and indigenous persons, and other persons of color—still have a journey to the reality of our whole freedom as human beings in this country, which means we have an even longer journey of liberation. And the journey of liberation is our every moment of every day. It's not a destination. It's what we live and how we live together—right now. Our history did not begin in enslavement and oppression, and in the name of Jesus, that is not where it’s going to end.
So, there is this question:
In being who we are created to be beyond how white supremacism seeks to tell us to be, how are we living as we are right now able the world of healing, resilience, and thriving we imagine in the spaces and ways that we are able? That we are not looking to the sickened disease and dynamics of whiteness to heal and fix, when it is what damages?
How are we fulfilling our vision of a just and powerfully loving world in our communities and in ourselves with such passion and vigor and persistence that we are pushing out and out and out until our freedom is not a request but a requirement?
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If we wake up, lose our patience…
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Rev. Pamela Kellar just shared as a reminder on a pastor call the II Cor. 4:8-9, which affirms that, no matter the circumstances, in our being God’s,
8 We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not [remaining] in despair;
9 Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;
So to those of us who are gathered here with a desire to live a call towards holy liberation—not to expand our energy thinking about how we impress upon white folks that we are equal, that we're human and our lives matter. But rather that we focus our energy towards who God has created and called us to be in our blackness and boldness, in the beautiful brilliant magnificence in which they created all of their children, and how that manifests, and what it looks like in the reality of right now.
What does it look like in our God-given gifts and passions and love for each of us to receive that God when said, “It is good,”—we are good—that means that despite the circumstances, and even though the circumstances should not be there, we have the capacity to help bring healing through our lives, in our communities, in this nation, and in this world? What does it look like for us to care as much with one another while we are breathing as we do when our breaths are threatened, or out and out taken from us?
There is so much pain, there is so much suffering every and all day. And we need to see it everyday, and meet it with the Holy Spirit everyday—not only when the pot boils over, and we express our outrage while we await its return to a simmer.
How are we called to help heal, to push for healing, to push forward healing, so that there is greater resilience, there is greater thriving, there is greater love? Where is our love and care for the Dan-Dan Hambricks and Jacques Clemmons—and their mothers and fathers right here in our Nashville community—in these moments when we are seeking justice out of our anger for what has occurred far from here?
White supremacism seeks to restrict our living, our lives, and even our holy understanding of who we are. But we are not restricted in loving, in caring, in uplifting our community. We are not restricted from visioning a whole world in and with God. We are not restricted in living who God has created us to be because some folks are struggling to love us, because they are struggling to understand and love themselves because they’re struggling to understand what God’s love truly is, and how it exists for them—that it then exists for their neighbor as themselves.
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Sokale…
Mbabu…
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The Benediction
The final words in this song, Beyonce’s ‘Otherside,’ translate into something along the lines of “Lord in the morning,” “ancestors in the Sky.”
I invite us to receive in our soul, in our spirits, and in our living that our prayer every morning—every moment that we see the Holy Spirit opening us into invitation beyond where human actions and behaviors and mindsets that would try to limit us—that we ask of God and we ask with God to remember who we are and Whose we are.
Beyond and above how others would try to shape and cast us in their image, when we are in fact created of God’s.
I invite us to receive in our souls, in our spirits, and in our living, that the Otherside is not the afterlife, but is in fact the Otherside of revisioning, believing, and living in this life who we truly are.
May we be always in the knowledge that we are, and also live as, beloved creations of God.
May it be so.
Amen & axé.
I was invited to give this talk as the keynote address for Clark Memorial UMC's 2020 Juneteenth Commemoration, "We Got The Whistle! Our Response? Black to the Future."
Beloved|Community page image | Rone Ferreira
Beyonce’s ‘Otherside,’ | Lyrics
‘Powered by the Black Women Before Me’ T-Shirt | Know.Definition