Dear Sisters and Brothers at Christ Church,

This coming Sunday is Juneteenth, which the Episcopal Church will recognize as a feast day for the first time this year, while the United States will recognize it as a Federal Holiday for the first time. Juneteenth commemorates the communication of freedom to some of the last people to hear it after the Civil War: enslaved people in Galveston, TX. More generally, Juneteenth became a sort of Black independence day and a celebration of Black culture in America generally. Juneteenth poses a challenge for the Episcopal Church because Episcopalians have historically been among the ruling class, including slave-owners. This holiday is, in part, a celebration of freedom from people like Episcopalians. Commemorating it as a feast of a church that is only six percent black is tricky, because we risk appropriating the traditions, music and stories of another culture. Amidst this dynamic, what is the goal of celebrating Juneteenth at a place like Christ Church Alameda? 

There's no single answer, but I think two good reasons for celebrating Juneteenth at a mostly white church are: 1) To recognize the struggles and culture of some of our siblings in God's family. 2) To cultivate some self-awareness among those of us who come from the dominant culture about our own role in the caste system of the United States. So while we may sing hymns that come from the Black church, we need to do it with some nuance, knowing those songs were written by people whose experience may be very different from our own.

Fortunately, we have some practice with this. Our Bible was not written for us. The Old Testament is the story of enslaved, endangered people seeking freedom. The New Testament is the story of God coming to people on the margins of an overlapping empire and religious institution. The Bible was not written for us. It was written to liberate the poor, mourners, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, peacemakers and the persecuted, as Jesus put it in the Beatitudes. By looking from the bottom up, the Bible challenges us to change our own world. By celebrating the experience of Black Folk, Juneteenth challenges us to consider our own role, and fraught history, in God's great drama of setting people free.

Peace,

Stephen