The Sunday Sermon
22-6-19 Juneteenth Picnic Proper 7 Luke 8:26-39
This is Juneteenth, recognized as a state holiday in Texas since 1979, and just recognized as a federal holiday last year. It marks the day in 1865 when General Gordon Granger of the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, to read aloud the proclamation that “All slaves are free.”
All slaves are free. Now this was amazing news!
And also, it should not really have been news. Because June 19, 1865 was over two years after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and over two months after Lee’s surrender.
Slaveholders had been defying the law and not telling the people they were illegally holding in bondage.
But with the Juneteenth public announcement, Black people in Texas could finally and truly be free. The way the story goes, word spread from plantation to plantation and person to person of this great announcement. A recording of formerly enslaved man Felix Haywood recounts that “Hallelujah broke out.. Everyone was a-singin’. We was walking on golden clouds..We was free. Just like that we was free.”
Could that be how the man possessed by demons felt when Jesus healed him?
He had been tortured by his Legion of demons for some time, had been forced into chains and run into the wilds because of the torment. Suddenly, he was free, he was in his right mind, he was sitting calmly at Jesus’ feet. Hallelujah!
Now, we have reason to believe, from the very specific way that Luke describes this healing, different from the way Mark and Matthew tell it, that we are not just talking about mental illness or a feverish illness or personal demons, however we would define that, in this story.
We have reason to believe that Luke may be telling a story here about community demons, collective demons, stuff that enslaves a whole people and community and nation.
Luke has the possessed man say that his name is Legion. Legion, because many demons had a hold of him.
The thing that people in Jesus’ time and Luke’s time would have known, would have absolutely jumped out and hit them in the face, is that a Legion is a specific term for 5,000 Roman soldiers.
The other little detail that would not have escaped the original audience for this story is the swine. Jesus sends the 5,000 demon-troops into pigs, into non-kosher animals, animals considered by Jews to be, at the very least, not very high-class.
To pull off this part of the plot, Luke has to move the setting for Jesus’ healing of a possessed man to the Gerasenes, a different location than where the other two Gospel-writers put this story. Because the Gerasenes was an area mostly settled by non-Jewish people who would have raised and eaten swine, whereas in Galilee, a mostly Jewish area, there would be no swine to send the demons into.
So Luke has this Legion of demonic Roman soldiers get sent into the bodies of pigs and hurled off a cliff. Deeply symbolic, right? And very satisfying too. I mean, how many of our collective evils can we imagine hurling off a cliff, and how good would that feel?
I’d love to see white supremacy go off the cliff. I’d love to see the lies that led to January 6, lies that are still being told, go off a cliff. I’d love to see the piles and piles of semi automatic guns owned in this country go off a cliff.
Yes, heal us, Jesus!!! Send out our own Legions into swine, send them into the abyss!
And isn’t this just the perfect message for Juneteenth? Because that’s exactly what happened on that day, June 19, 1865, in Galveston, when General Granger informed enslaved people that they were free. Slavery was finally thrown off the cliff! Hallelujah!
What we know, though, from historians who have been working hard to correct the record, is that the Juneteenth story we always hear is a myth, it’s not how it really happened. We have this sad but cute story about how the poor slaves were so isolated, so ignorant, that they didn’t know they were free, and this Union General came to tell them, and lo, they walked out in freedom from that day. That the day is called Juneteenth suggests maybe these enslaved people didn’t even know exactly what day it was.
In reality, enslaved people knew about the Emancipation Proclamation. They knew that the war had ended. They knew what date it was. They knew, just as enslavers knew. Enslavers moved their human property to far-flung Texas as the war was ending, purposely, in order to be far enough removed from the seat of US government to evade the law for as long as possible. Enslavers knew what they were doing, and so did the humans they enslaved.
General Granger and the troops he brought with him did not need to read the proclamation that “All slaves are free” for the Black citizens of Galveston. They were reading it for the white people who were continuing to illegally hold people in bondage. They had come to enforce the law.
The name Juneteenth reflects what we know from the history that followed, Reconstruction and Jim Crow and mass incarceration and George Floyd, Black people were not so much free in that announcement, they were more like free-ish. The fight for freedom, the journey to freedom, has been a long and difficult one, it has needed reinforcement from allies all along the way. And it’s still not complete.
Because the Legions among us, the forces against freedom, are strong. And because sometimes we are afraid, we are afraid to truly let our Legions go.
Look at what happens in today’s Gospel. Of course, the swineherds are distressed by what Jesus has done. They have just lost their livelihood. And the people of the surrounding country too, the text tells us that “they were seized with great fear.”
Were they afraid that they would have no meat to eat? Were they afraid that their livelihood would be attacked as well? Were they afraid that the demons inside them would be noticed next, now that this obviously-possessed man had been healed? Maybe all of this.
Just like the swineherds and townspeople, we have our own fear of what might come with freedom. We have our own fear of losing our livelihood, of losing our privilege.
We say we want to throw all these collective demons, the racism, the violence and hate, the guns, off the cliff. But when we step back and think about it a bit, when it comes time to act, we often shrink back in fear.
We instead go back to our demons, because we are afraid of what we might have to let go, afraid of what we might have to give up, to be truly free. In our fear, we choose the demons that are killing all of us, no matter how privileged we are. COVID has taught us that the things that hurt the most vulnerable among us, make things unsafe for all of us. The gun problem now affects everyone, it has come literally to our own red Episcopal Church doors in Alabama.
We have to recognize that these collective demons, these Legions we see on our news and in our communities, these are our demons. We need to ask Jesus for healing, even if it terrifies us. We need to recognize that the fear is another demon, and ask for healing from the fear too. We need to keep stepping forward where we can, keep assisting God in our collective healing, as General Granger did on that first Juneteenth. We need to be willing to let go of our Legions, so that we can step out in wholeness, in holiness, and proclaim throughout the world how much Jesus has done for us. So that we can finally proclaim that freedom has come. So that we can say, finally and truly, freedom has come, Hallelujah! Freedom has come, Hallelujah! Amen.
--The Rev. Dr. Mary E. Barber
