A Weekly Juneteenth

I admit I didn’t know much about Juneteenth until a couple of years ago when my dad wore a T-shirt with the words inscribed on it. Even then I wasn’t too interested in my dad’s history lesson. On Thursday, suddenly this seemingly obscure celebration became a federal holiday when the U.S. Senate voted unanimously for the Juneteenth holiday and very few in the House voted against it, when just last year attempts to make it a holiday had failed. President Biden knelt down to greet the 94-year-old “grandmother” of Juneteenth and gave her one of the pens he signed the law with. It seems like a pretty big deal that almost everyone agrees with.

However…

Despite the overwhelming support for the holiday, there are some justifiably mixed feelings. Message magazine’s Claudia Allen tweeted on June 16, 2021, “Feeling super conflicted about Juneteenth becoming a national holiday. Like, who cares if Juneteenth is a national holiday when Black people are still stuck on prison plantations, still don’t have voting protections, and are still being killed in the streets by cops.”

Ally Henny, VP of The Witness BCC (another African American Christian magazine) tweeted a challenge on June 17, 2021, “White people: If your Juneteenth observance doesn’t include lament for this nation’s mistreatment of Black people, reparations paid to Black people, and service to Black communities, you can take it back to the same plantation it came from. And that’s on Harriet Tubman.”

Dr. Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism, has been advocating for Juneteenth to be a federal holiday for years. Yet, he too, wrote with a mixture of celebration and caution in this week’s Boston Globe article, “The unintended consequences of making Juneteenth a national holiday.”

He feels that it is important to celebrate Juneteenth as it was the culmination of the Civil War, “the nation’s bloodiest war,” bringing slavery to an end. However, he lists several potential problems. As other people outside of the Black community celebrate this date, “it may lose some of its specific focus on Black people in exchange for a colorblind story of American triumph.” It could lead to the reality of the past being whitewashed, and lead to people believing that all of America’s past issues with race are no longer a present concern.

So What…

Should we think about it? How should we celebrate it? Juneteenth has already been celebrated for over 150 years by African Americans in Texas and has spread to several other states, with many of them declaring it to be a state holiday since 1980. Every generation that’s celebrated it has had to struggle with racial oppression and yet they still celebrated. Celebrating the partial victory of 1865 gave them hope and perseverance. While we celebrate our victories, this day should also include fighting for continued justice.

A weekly Juneteenth?

Juneteenth kind of reminds me of the biblical holiday, Passover. This is the celebration of Hebrew deliverance from Egyptian slavery. When successive generations celebrated it, their traditions would cause the young to ask the elders what the meaning of it was. This celebratory teaching helped keep the generations connected to each other, and remember their history and how far they had come. They learned to appreciate their cultural identity and drew closer to the God of their deliverance.

These principles were so important that they actually celebrated them weekly, according to Deuteronomy 5:15: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.” (NIV).

God instructed the people to celebrate a weekly holiday, the Sabbath: as a day to remember how He emancipated them from Egypt. This made the Sabbath like a mini, weekly Passover.

In a poetic twist, this first ever federal Juneteenth is held on the Sabbath, rendering it a two-fold blessing. In the same spirit of the Hebrews, African Americans can celebrate God’s past deliverance and ongoing guidance on this Juneteenth, as well as every weekly Sabbath. Every seventh day can be a miniature Juneteenth until we celebrate it again next year!

We not only have a legacy of slavery, like the Hebrews, but have been cut off from our origins. The Sabbath takes us back to when we were created in the image of God (Exodus 20:8-11) and is a memorial of our deliverance (Deut 5:12-15). This gives us cause to celebrate both our freedom and belonging. We belong to the family of God and are made in his image.

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