“Have you heard the
news?! Have you heard the news?!” We prick up our ears when someone says that!
“Have you heard the news?!” When you hear that, you know that some good news is
on the way! Someone might have just become engaged. Someone might have found
out that they will be welcoming a new child into their family – or a new
grandchild. Or someone is coming home from the hospital after a long, difficult
stay. Whatever it is, “Have you heard the news?!” almost always means that you
have something to celebrate. Just 155 years ago last Friday, the slaves who
lived in Galveston, Texas must have said that over and over and over again. “Have
you heard the news?!” Their news was much more exciting than an engagement or a
pregnancy, though. The news that they shared over and over again was that they
were free; and that the Union soldiers who had just landed on Galveston Island
were going to make sure that they were treated as the free people that they
were!
I want to give you a
little history about that day just in case it isn’t familiar to you. It would
be an understatement to say that life in Texas during the Civil War was unpleasant.
Slaveholders from the deep South fled to Texas to avoid the carnage of the war,
and they took their slaves with them. Texas soon became famous for its
lawlessness, especially its treatment of the black slaves who had been brought
there by their owners. Union Army General Philip Sheridan once commented, “If I
owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.” In June of 1865,
Union General Gordon Granger landed on Galveston Island with 2,000 troops. He
was appalled to find that 2½ years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,
and more than 2 months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered
at Appomattox Courthouse, slaves were still being held in Galveston. A group of
black Union soldiers under his command approached him and said bluntly, “Either
you do something about this or we will.” A few days later, on June 19th
– on what we now call Juneteenth – General Granger stood on the porch of a local
mansion and read five General Orders that were issued by the federal
government. The third of those orders began, “"The people of Texas are
informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the
United States, all slaves are free." Those orders were read in three
locations around the city and published in the local newspaper; but they were
most effectively spread by word of mouth. “Have you heard the news?! We’re
FREE!” Men threw their hats in the air, women danced, and complete strangers
embraced. People who had enjoyed no choice in what their work would be, where
they would live, or even who they would marry were now able to go wherever they
wanted, choose their own occupations, and even buy land of their own. And on
June 19 of the next year, people celebrated again; but this time, they
celebrated the anniversary of their freedom.
Freedom is no small
thing! I celebrate when I finally pay off my car and have a few hundred extra
dollars each month. I can only begin to imagine the celebrations of slaves who
were given back not a few hundred dollars, but their very lives! Of course, the
legal freedom that those former slaves had wasn’t realized to its fullest the
moment that Union troops arrived in town. Their former owners resented their freedom,
and did everything that they could to make their lives more difficult. You all
know what happened in the years following 1865: segregation, Jim Crow laws, the
KKK, lynching, bombings, shootings… and much of it is still going on today.
It’s true that segregation and Jim Crow laws are now illegal; but
African-Americans are still mistrusted and marginalized by many in the white
community. Although they are legally free, in many respects they still feel
like slaves.
That last statement
applies to us Christians, too. Although we are legally free, in many respects
we still feel like slaves. Oh, you probably don’t think much about it, but it’s
absolutely true. But even though Christ freed us from sin and death by his
death and resurrection, all too often we live like we are still slaves. That
has been true ever since the very beginnings of the Christian Church. Paul
wrote to his congregation in Galatia (Galatians 5:1) reminding them, “Christ
has set us free for freedom! Don’t go back to slavery!” Paul was talking about
the slavery of the Jewish law, with all its rules and regulations. We
Christians don’t worry about the Jewish law today; but Paul’s advice still applies
to us. We are slaves to all kinds of things that dictate how we live our lives:
things like fear of the future, the thirst for revenge, the greed for things
and for power, and intolerance towards our fellow human beings. But Jesus
doesn’t want us to be slaves to anything! Jesus came to set us free from
everything that holds us prisoner. In the very first sermon that he gave, Jesus
quoted Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord… has sent me to proclaim freedom for the
prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, and to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:16-21) Freedom is what Jesus is
all about. In his sermon, Jesus was saying ““in accordance with a proclamation
by the creator of the universe, all slaves are free!” By his death and
resurrection, Jesus has already set us free to live our lives the way that God
wants us to live them. The trouble is, though, that all too often, we don’t
live like we’re free. Those former slaves back in Texas may have been legally
free, but their society treated them like they were still slaves. We are free,
too; but our society insists that we behave like slaves.
Let’s look at an
example, just in case you’re not sure what I’m talking about. I want to focus
on the prejudice that keeps all of us in slavery. Prejudice claims that you
already know things that you don’t know at all! The word itself tells us what
it is: “pre”-“judge.” Prejudice assures us that we don’t have to listen to
people or reach out to them, we already know that they are lazy or stupid or
evil. Prejudice is the opinionated cousin who ruins Thanksgiving dinner with
his sweeping statements of condemnation against all kinds of people he doesn’t
like. And to make things worse, he brings his brothers and sisters along with
him: intolerance, fear, and anger. The four of them combine to make our lives
worse than Texas during the Civil War!
Now, some of you may
be thinking that you don’t have any prejudices. Sure you do; we all do. I know
I do, and I try my best to keep an open mind and an open heart! But our society
does its best to close my mind and harden my heart against people who aren’t
just like I am. The prejudice du jour
is, of course, racism: the conviction that African-Americans always behave a
certain way. Regardless of how you feel about the Black Lives Matter movement,
it has begun an important and long-overdue conversation about how whites are
racist and what we can do about it. But let’s focus on some other prejudices
that many of us carry. Are you a Republican? How do you feel about Democrats?
On the other hand, if you are a Democrat, how do you feel about Republicans?
Our country is polarized right now to the point that many of us not just
disagree with those of another political party, we are prejudiced against them.
Remember those three siblings of prejudice: intolerance, fear, and anger? Do
you feel any of those against the folks across the aisle? Yeah, I thought so.
It’s a terrible way to live, folks! And how do you feel about people who rely
on welfare to live? Are they lazy moochers who just sit at home eating Doritos
and watching TV instead of looking for a job while they spend our hard-earned
money? That’s prejudice, too, folks! There are as many reasons to need welfare
as there are people using it; but if we have already decided that welfare
recipients are lazy cheats, we don’t listen to anything that they have to say.
We all hold prejudices
of one kind or another, every one of us; and they cripple not only the lives of
the people we have prejudged, but our own lives, as well. Jesus wants to set us
free from all that. Jesus wants to free us from the anger that we feel when
someone expresses a different political opinion than the one we hold. Jesus
wants to free us from the fear that we feel when we approach a group of
African-American youth laughing loudly while they walk together on the
sidewalk. Jesus wants to free us from the intolerance of low-income families
who live in public housing, closing our hearts to their very real needs. The
love of Jesus has no place for that! Jesus has set us free so that we can live
the richest, fullest lives possible – lives full of forgiveness,
reconciliation, and love! Prejudice and its brothers and sisters intolerance,
fear, and anger won’t let those things in. When prejudice gets a foothold in
our lives, it wants to take over!
On this Juneteenth
weekend, maybe we could celebrate the freedom that Jesus has given to all of us
– the freedom to love, to listen, and to forgive. Maybe we could start to root
out all the old, stale prejudices from our lives. Maybe we could reach out to
someone who is very different than we are and listen to their experiences
instead of insisting that they listen to ours. Many of you remember when, on a
June day 33 years ago, President Ronald Reagan stood just 100 yards away from
the concrete barrier that divided East and West Berlin and demanded, “Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Jesus asks the same thing of us. He wants us
to tear down the wall that we have built between people who are like us and
people who aren’t like us. He wants us to tear down the wall of prejudice that
separates us. And when we do that, friends, all of us will finally be free!
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