Celebrate Juneteenth and how Jesus brings ultimate freedom
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.
+ 2 Corinthians 3:17; Galatians 5:1, 13; Luke 4:18
Derek Rishmawy's essay, "The Cross Between the World and Me," continues to help me celebrate even more the power of justice and mercy, forgiveness and freedom as we get ready for Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration of the end of slavery in the United States that began on June 19, 1865. Now a national holiday, many more are learning of what happened in Galveston, Texas when slaves learned of the Emancipation Proclamation on June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the initial announcement by President Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862.
If you want to learn more about Juneteenth, watch this powerful documentary:
+ Juneteenth: Faith & Freedom | A Documentary (75+ Minutes)
In this 2022 film, you will learn how Scripture inspired the faith of enslaved people, travel to the church where America’s first Juneteenth celebration took place, and uncover why newly liberated men and women credited God for their freedom. With special guests Ms. Opal Lee, Lecrae, and more, you’ll journey to Galveston, Texas to discover a faith stronger than suffering.
Sho Baraka songs are featured throughout the documentary, including "Their Eyes Were Watching" and "Myhood, U.S.A., 1937".
Complementing the Juneteenth: Faith & Freedom documentary, Rishmawy's "The Cross Between the World and Me" introduced me to more connections between faith and freedom by telling more of the story behind the cover of Fleming Rutledge's The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.
How does faith help lead to freedom? How do justice and mercy meet? How does forgiveness transform into freedom for the forgiver and the forgiven?
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| The Wales Window given to 16th Street Baptist Church |
Look at the powerful stained glass above. Then seep in some of Rishmawy's potent words from below.
The artwork above is the stained glass image of the "Wales Window" given to the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was donated as a gift from the people of Wales after the 1963 Klan bombing that rocked the church and robbed the life of the four little black girls in their Sunday best, a horrific scene captured in the recent 2014 film, "Selma."
The stained glass is striking. In it, we see Christ, arms outstretched. According to the artist, the two arms outstretched are doing different things. The one is thrust out, stiff-arming the powers of death and injustice, while the other reaches out, offering forgiveness for the world.
The central mystery of the Christian gospel is the Holy God who out of the fullness of His own perfect life stooped, became incarnate, identifying Himself with the whole of humanity, and, as the Creed has it, suffered under Pontius Pilate.
The Savior is the Divine Son who knew no suffering, yet assumed human flesh, a Body in midst of a dominated people to suffer on our behalf and rise again. God became a gendered, embodied Jew in the 1st Century, heir to hundreds of years of political oppression at the hands of colonizing invaders (Babylonian, Persian, Greek), mostly recently of an empire, Rome, that stood as the chief political, economic, social, and religious power the world had ever seen. He grew up under the eye of the soldiers of a people who prided themselves as superior to every other people; a people who used subject nations and cultures to prop up their own; a people who threatened anyone who crossed that system with torture and death. And eventually it was under the administration of their laws, their justice, that His body hung naked, exposed, broken, shamed on a cross, tossed on the garbage heap of history, scorned even by the elite of His own people.
I cannot do justice to the multifaceted character of Christ’s death, but the thing we must say is that the death He died, He died willingly for sin. He died in order to wipe us clean from the sins we commit as well as deliver us from the Sin we are enslaved to. He died in order to atone and liberate. He died to do justice, to ensure that forgiveness is not offered on the cheap. But for Christians, death is not the concluding word, and in His resurrection, Jesus actively and powerfully breaks the power of Sin, the World, and Death, by showing that despite appearances to the contrary, it does not have the final say of things.
Jesus is the Resurrected One! Hope for reconciliation, both personal and cultural comes after we’ve truly reckoned with the nature of the rupture of the Cross, confessed, and repented. This is one of what I take to be the glories of the Christian Gospel: it forces you to see the truth about the world, about yourself, about your neighbor—both the grime and the glory—and it is precisely there where the God with a broken body meets us and resurrects us. Soli Deo Gloria!
+ Derek Rishmawy, "The Cross Between the World and Me"
God continues to free people across time and across continents to reconcile with each through the revelation that Jesus is for all of us as our Repairer of Broken Bridges (see Isaiah 58:6-12), our Liberator and King of justice and peace.
Christ is all,
Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan
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