More than Walls
Exodus 14:5-9, 21-25
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
June 20, 2021
“Juneteenth is everybody’s holiday.” Rev. Dr. J. Anthony Lloyd, pastor of Greater Framingham Community Church, spoke these words at the conclusion of “Uncovering our Untold History.” The virtual panel discussion, held this past Thursday evening, was hosted by Framingham State University, Mass Bay Community College, Greater Framingham Community Church, and the city of Framingham. Dr. Lloyd reminded us that Juneteenth does not replace holidays like the 4th of July; rather, he said, “It completes the story.”
His words echo those of Boston Globe columnist Renee Graham, who wrote about Juneteenth in a column last year: “Though it will always have special meaning for black people, it is a quintessentially American observation. Juneteenth is a testament to the perseverance that defines the American spirit. It honors the long and still-unfinished road to freedom and self-determination for all.”
Her colleague Adrian Walker, in a Globe column around the same time, highlighted the unfinished nature of that road to freedom and self-determination: “As much as anything, Juneteenth is an observance of promises still waiting to be delivered. The absence of those promises is hitting us with full force….If the Fourth of July is a day to celebrate our dreams of freedom and equality (“All men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, in words he never meant literally), then this Juneteenth holds up a mirror to our far less idyllic reality….Americans stand on the shoulders of idealists, but are grounded in the realities of the oppressed. Juneteenth, from its beginning, has been a monument to that tension.”
I have been living and breathing Juneteenth this past week. It was wonderful to see friends and neighbors at the Juneteenthfest on the Framingham Centre Common yesterday, and powerful to attend Thursday night’s webinar. In the days before those events, I had been asked to lead a program introducing Juneteenth at a senior center and then at an independent living center. I did some research to try to understand the holiday more fully—watching last year’s virtual celebration at the Museum of Fine Arts, reading a book and a variety of articles. Then I read General Orders #3—the proclamation delivered by General Gordon Granger of the Union Army at the Port of Galveston on June 19, 1865, declaring to the people of Texas that all slaves were now free. It prompted me to go back further—to the Declaration of Independence, then to a speech by Frederick Douglass on Independence Day in 1852, then to the Emancipation Proclamation, 2-1/2 years before the Juneteenth declaration. I cut and pasted excerpts from them into a document and made copies for my programs.
With two groups of thoughtful older adults, I read each of the excerpts aloud and invited their responses. We talked about the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence—“All men are created equal”—and how these words were written by men who owned slaves. We marveled at Frederick Douglass’s scathing indictment of our national hypocrisy and how he wove it together with his expression of profound hope for our nation. We reflected on the power and limitations of the Emancipation Proclamation and expressed our outrage that 2-1/2 years after it took effect, African-Americans in Texas were still held in bondage. We cringed at the last two lines of the Juneteenth Proclamation, which began with a declaration of complete equality and then warned enslaved people to stay where they were, work for their former masters, and not gather near military posts. I felt the deep truth of Adrian Walker’s words—how we “stand on the shoulders of idealists, but are grounded in the realities of the oppressed,” how the holiday we celebrated yesterday was “an observance of promises still waiting to be delivered.”
I felt something else as well, something more disturbing—an acute awareness of how hard-hearted human beings can be, an acute awareness of our potential for cruelty when we allow our hearts to harden. For our founding fathers to write such lofty words while they treated human beings who lived right beside them as sub-human surely required hardening some part of their hearts. The documents we read illuminate a short, 89-year, segment of a long history of injustices enabled by hardened hearts. The injustices and cruelties did not end on June 19, 1865; they changed shape.
While the 13th amendment abolished slavery, it included a clause that enabled a system of convict labor, which essentially returned many former slaves back to slavery. Jim Crow laws enforced a separate and unequal society. Lynchings and cross-burnings created an atmosphere of terror. Red-lining limited the ability of African-Americans to build equity in homes, making it harder to grow generational wealth. Highways were built through thriving black neighborhoods. In our own time we see renewed efforts to gut voting rights. Cruelty and injustice take many different forms.
My reflections led me to the foundational biblical story of slavery and freedom—the Exodus. The passage we read today is a small snippet of a much larger story. It is a story of the perseverance of extraordinarily ordinary human beings—Moses the stutterer who goes back again and again to demand freedom for his people. It is a story of the persistence of forces that harden human hearts: Pharaoh begins with a hard heart; he relents when fear compels him to do so, and then he returns with an even harder heart. It is also the story of God’s yearning for human freedom and dignity, and God’s Spirit at work in the service of justice.
As we read this powerful story, it’s important to wrestle with the parts of it that are disturbing. The first is the plagues. Did God really send plagues to destroy the Egyptian people? In my modern-day efforts to make sense of this story, I reimagine the plagues as metaphors for the natural consequences of allowing our hearts to harden—perhaps not as dramatic but every bit as destructive as locusts and boils. Then, in today’s passage, there’s this line: “The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh.” Why would God do that? Isn’t God in the business of softening hearts? Biblical scholars have puzzled over this line, which appears numerous times in the larger story. The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that a later editor, who felt a need to show that God was in control of everything, revised the story with this added overlay of God’s agency hardening Pharaoh’s heart. If we remove the overlay, we have an all-too-familiar story of a powerful man whose heart is hardened over and over as he tries to hold on to his power.
Our worship theme for last Sunday and today is “the Spirit tears down walls.” The more I read about the history illuminated by Juneteenth, the less satisfied I became with our theme. It seems too narrow. We talk a lot about walls of ignorance and fear that keep us apart. Racism is surely about ignorance and fear, and it is also about power and greed, about intentional, hard-hearted efforts to hold on to a brutal system of slave labor and then to hold on to the economic and social benefits left over from it.
We need a Spirit who can tear down walls, and we need more. We need a Spirit powerful enough to break through ceilings, especially ceilings built to keep people down. We need a Spirit perceptive enough to see the unjust structures that have been there so long some of us don’t see them– and strong enough to dismantle them. We need a Spirit creative enough to inspire us to new ways of being community. We need a Spirit forceful enough to shatter hardened hearts and gentle enough to heal them so we can live into our human capacity for compassion and courage. We need the Spirit to do so much more than tear down walls.
Thanks be to God, the Holy Spirit can do all these things, and more. The Spirit can—and does—tear down walls, break open ceilings, perceive and dismantle injustice, and inspire creativity. The Spirit can—and does—transform hardened hearts into hearts capable of love and hope.
The story of Juneteenth is a story of the power and persistence of hardened hearts. It is also the story of the power and persistence of hope. From Frederick Douglass who believed in our nation’s potential in spite of the hypocrisy he saw, to African-Americans Union soldier that came into Galveston in June 1865; from civil rights leaders and community activists to people of all races and backgrounds fighting for racial justice today—the Spirit is moving through them all. The Spirit is at work—awakening dreams, emboldening activists, strengthening coalitions, transforming hearts.
There is so much to be done. With the Spirit’s power to bring us together and give us courage, we can do it. That is cause for great celebration. Happy Juneteenth! Amen.