Juneteenth 2026 – Based on Matthew 5:13-17
June 20, 2026
There’s a reason we are gathering today rather than on April 9, which was when the Civil War ended in 1865. It took more than two months after General Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant for word to travel to Texas. On June 19th, Union troops arrived in Galveston with the news that the Civil War was over, and that enslaved people were free. Their freedom had actually been granted on January 1, 1863 with the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln, but since the Confederacy did not recognize the Union or Lincoln as legitimate, it took the ending of the Civil War and the march to Texas for the word to reach all those impacted. So June 19th—Juneteenth—became Freedom Day. A day of celebration and joy and dancing and singing for those formerly enslaved people.
Twenty-two years ago, I was ordained as a transitional deacon on Juneteenth, though we didn’t know the significance then. “We” of course being the white Episcopalians who put the service together and who were ordained, and, we had no inkling of the importance of the date. With no saint on the calendar either in 2004, the texts specified for an ordination were chosen, and the sermon for the four of us being ordained wasn’t terribly memorable. It’s too bad, really. Tying in Juneteenth—and it’s message of hope and joy of those who had been made free—with the call to serve those whom society now marginalizes would have been a fabulous diaconal call, especially if given by an African American deacon. But alas.
It is with a slight bit of trepidation that I enter this pulpit on this day to bring the good news as we commemorate Juneteenth—now a nationally recognized holiday—aware of the privilege I embody. When I was asked to preach by Canon Carla and Rev. Beverly (aka “Revvy”), I inquired on more than one occasion if there shouldn’t be someone else. I was simply assured that they wanted me to proclaim the good news, and Revvy said to me, “There are many different forms of oppression that need liberation.” She is not wrong.
In February 1969, still in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin wrote, “I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long.” Dr. Robert P. Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, one-time Southern Baptist and a white man, used Baldwin’s quotation for the epigraph of his book titled White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. While Baldwin’s words sting for those of us who are white, Dr. Jones’ work suggests that they are true. Through detailed surveys and analysis, and exploring the legacy of white churches in the United States, Jones enumerates the lingering impact of chattel slavery on American Christians.
While we as Episcopalians like to pat ourselves on the back for our more refined and progressive understandings, the reality shown through Prof. Jones’ research suggests that this might be primarily virtue signaling. 62% of white mainline Protestants—not including white Evangelicals, mind you—disagree with the following statement: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” Again, more than 60% of white mainline Protestants think that the conditions that make it difficult for blacks to succeed in our society are simply of their own making and not connected with systemic racism. Further, an equal percentage of white mainline Christians also believe that “the American way of life needs protecting from foreign influence.” Jones writes, “This attitude puts them strongly at odds with religiously unaffiliated whites and with African American Protestants, among whom less than half perceive such a cultural threat.” His research includes many more questions about racist attitudes by Americans and then breaking them down based on religious identities.
Where all this leads—and I highly commend his book White Too Long to you—is what Jones calls the Racism Index Score, a multivariate regression model, which seeks to answer the question, “Does holding more racist attitudes increase the likelihood of identifying as a white Christian?” Even Jones was surprised by the result of a 60% surge. He writes, “The models reveal that, in the United States today, the more racist attitudes a person holds, the more likely [they] are to identify as a white Christian. And when [controlled] for a range of other attributes, this relationship exists not just among white evangelical Protestants, but also equally strong among white mainline Protestants and white Catholics.” He continues “There is also a telling corollary: this relationship with racist attitudes has little hold among white religiously unaffiliated Americans; if anything, the relationship is negative.” In other words, if a white person holds racist views, they are much more likely to identify as a Christian than not, and if they don’t hold racist views, they likely aren’t religious at all. Jones concludes, “Whatever Christian formation and discipleship is happening, it is not impacting the white supremacist attitudes that are deeply embedded in white Christian institutions of all types.”
Which is a lot to take in, so let’s turn to Jesus. In the lesson we heard, our Savior proclaims, “You are the salt of the earth…. You are the light of the word.” With each metaphor, Jesus commends his disciples to remain true to who they are in him, to be salty and to shine brightly. As you likely know, salt doesn’t lose its saltiness unless it gets diluted or so mixed in with other elements that it becomes impure. This is a warning, then, to remain true to the way of Jesus. Additionally, if you have a candle but then put a basket on top of it, there’s no real point for the flame. Lamps allow things to be seen clearly in the dark, and the disciples were called to shine brightly with the truth of Jesus and show things for what they really are. Doing this would allow others to, as Jesus puts it, “see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”
Perhaps then there is a conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation for those of us who are white after all, if we could just allow the light to help us see more clearly into the interiors of our own lives and that salt to tenderize our souls. However, while Jesus tells us that we are that salt and light, we also know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves, so we must turn to God. In John’s gospel, Jesus tells us he is the light of the world, and also that he is the vine and we are the branches. The only chance we have of seeing our way forward is through that light of Christ. The only hope any of us have of salvation is by being fully connected to him.
Today we heard poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Maya Angelou describe the songs of a caged bird. As Dunbar proclaims, they are not songs of glee or joy, but rather a fearful trill as Angelou hauntingly describes them. Songs brought about with bruising and pain, prayers offering a plea to the Almighty to experience freedom. Those songs from caged birds certainly reflect the cries of black and African American people who have prayed to God for generations. Their words echo those of the Babylonian exiles who were asked by their captors to sing songs of joy. Psalm 137 details their response: “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion. As for our harps, we hung them up on the trees in the midst of that land. For those who led us away captive asked us for a song, and our oppressors called for mirth: How shall we sing the Lord’s song upon an alien soil? … Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, O Jerusalem.”
It wasn’t just slavery that brought about those songs for African Americans, but also in the short time afterward when the 13th Amendment made slavery and involuntary servitude illegal except, and I quote, “as a punishment for crime.” All sorts of crimes were ginned up during the Reconstruction Era with its Jim Crow laws forcing segregation which got upheld by the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson and lasting well into the 1960s. The prison industrial complex of our own day—in a direct line from the slavery—thrives on the backs of both black and brown skinned people whom our nation can legally force into bondage, and who face incarceration at significantly higher rates than whites. With recent Supreme Court rulings gutting the Voting Rights Act, those caged birds still sing and cry out to the Almighty, and God always hears the prayers of the oppressed.
But it isn’t just people of color who are oppressed. As Revvy said, there are many forms of oppression. And interestingly, those who are Black can see how the insidiousness of racism impacts those of us who are white. I turn to another James Baldwin quote that Dr. Jones utilizes in his book. Jones writes, “One of the reasons African Americans, on the whole, had felt so little hatred toward white Americans, compared with what history might suggest was due, was that they perceive white Americans to be stuck in a form of madness that prevented them from coming into full human maturity.” Jones continues, “Baldwin described this insight in this way:
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace. That Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors…. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing. One watched the lives they led. One could not be fooled about that; one watched the things they did and the excuses that they gave themselves, and if a white man was really in trouble, deep trouble, it was to the Negro’s door that he came. And one felt that if one had had that white man’s worldly advantages, one would never have become as bewildered and as joyless and as thoughtlessly cruel as he.”
In other words, systemic racism and white supremacy oppresses all of us; some of us just don’t know it. We need to be reminded of Jesus’ teaching when he said quite emphatically, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Facing the truth, even when it’s hard, can lead to freedom for us all.
However, the ways of the world and of our culture are crafty and treacherous and they seek to keep all of us in shackles of one kind or another. In the belief of white superiority and disregarding the dignity of every human being, or in refusing to trust in the declaration from God that all human of us are beloved children. Maybe that shackle is believing that we aren’t impacted by racism, or don’t have any interior work to do, or in settling for a freedom that’s only partial at best rather than seeking the complete freedom that can only be found in Christ.
St. Paul describes what that freedom looks like in his letter to the Galatians. He writes, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. … For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Gal. 5:1, 13-14). It is through that act of love that we become servants of each other. And when we do that, when “we serve one another in love; that is how freedom grows.” (Message Bible)
Melissa and I like to sleep with our bedroom windows open as much as possible. When we do, in the pre-dawn coolness, I often hear the birds who nest along the creek behind our home. Their chirps and warbles and cooing and calls drift in and out and mix with the sound of my beloved breathing softly beside me. Those sounds meld with the warmth of our blankets and the softness of our bed, and I know in those moments that I am loved and held and cared for and even free. The songs of the uncaged birds help bring me to that place, and I suspect that they understand all of these things so much better than me.
Their songs echo the ones given voice by the Israelites after they returned from exile. Those formerly enslaved people joyously sang: “Hallelujah! How good it is to sing praises to our God! how pleasant it is to honor [God] with praise! The Lord rebuilds Jerusalem; he gathers the exiles of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. … The Lord lifts up the lowly … Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving; make music to our God upon the harp.” (Psalm 147) On this day, let us delight in the announcement of the freedom for those formerly enslaved people in Texas. Let us sing and dance and celebrate with one another for the freedom we have in Christ. And let us hear more fully Jesus’ opening proclamation—his first recorded song of hope—in that synagogue at Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Today, these words are fulfilled in our presence.
Amen.
The Rt. Rev. Phil LaBelle