June 19th is Juneteenth, a newly recognized federal holiday that has been celebrated by many since 1866. Juneteenth recognizes the final delivery of the news of the Confederacy’s surrender to the Union Army at Appomattox Court House on April 9th 1865. There’s no doubt that you can read some dissonance in the timeline. News, even the biggest news in the western hemisphere that year traveled slowly, and so, the freed peoples of Texas were given the news on June 19th 1865.
In honesty, Juneteenth is outside my cultural experience, but as the call to love others compels me to seek to empathize with people who have had different life experiences than myself, I still understand that even if I tried my hardest and interviewed countless African-Americans about their experiences in our country and of the freedom that Juneteenth celebrates, I would be woefully dismal in communicating the depth of experience they shared with me. Because understanding and knowledge do not hold the weight of lived experience.
This moved me not towards more information, but towards reflecting on a freedom experience of my own. I see some parallels in my story, and I believe, though no one’s experience is the same, that we each can feel something deeply when thinking of a freedom experience of our own. Mine could have happened when I was five at a Backyard Bible Club two streets away from my childhood hood home. That’s when I accepted Jesus into my heart because I was certain he loved me and I was certain I didn’t want to go to hell. But that’s not where my experience of freedom happened.
Through the years, I picked up lies about my self-worth from bullies and well meaning adults. I picked up a pornography addiction that isolated me, crippling my relationships with the people around me. My freedom experience happened at 32, the morning after I drank to forget my feelings of loss and sadness for the first time. Overcome by shame and regret, I cried and ran to the only place I knew I could go. I prayed. I asked God, “How can you love me?” The answer I received was “Because I do.” My freedom was found in my experience of God’s grace. Not the knowledge of His qualities, but the experience of His faithfulness and love in spite of my failure, in my time of need. This changed the trajectory of my life. Freedom was made possible through the Holy Spirit’s power working within me and bringing me to God’s love, then sobriety, and to an ever deepening desire for more of God in my life.
My freedom was only possible through the surrender of Christ on the cross, his resurrection, and my surrender and continuing surrender to him. Everyone alive today has been given that gift of being born after Christ’s victory over death and sin. The battle is long since won. But, like the slaves still in Texas on June 18th 1865, we are waiting to experience ultimate freedom in actuality.
Are you still waiting on word of his freedom? Are we as a church understanding our call to go on the highways and byways to proclaim the good news of this freedom so that all may know?
Some are still waiting. They are desperately in need of those sweet whispers of freedom from the aches of shame, addiction, failure or lust for success.
Some wait in silence. Still shackled, trafficked, exploited, and starved. In need of humanity to partner together, with the Holy Spirit, in their emancipations.
So as we celebrate Juneteenth, and celebrate a day our nation better lived up to its founders’ promises, we can recognize that this is just one branch of freedom’s story, and can we wait in anticipation, knowing, for now, the world is not as it will be. When Jesus returns he will make all things new. He will lift the lowly, feed the hungry, and establish his kingdom, bringing an ultimate freedom to his creation, and banishing the powers of darkness forever.
- John Combs