Juneteenth

Prayer for the Day presented by Reverend Dr Rosa Hunt, minister of Tabernacl chapel in the city centre of Cardiff.

Hello. Today is Juneteenth – on this day in 1865 Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Texas, with Union troops announcing that all enslaved people in Texas were free.

That sounds great – but the timing wasn’t. Because in fact President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect two and a half years earlier. But a proclamation is only as good as the power to enforce it. Texas was the most remote part of the Confederacy. So roughly a quarter of a million enslaved people in Texas went on living in bondage. Juneteenth marks the day the reality finally caught up with the law. Five years ago, Juneteenth became the newest federal holiday in the United States

For me as a Christian minister, this gap between proclamation and lived reality is a familiar one. Day by day in my own life and in the life of the world I see messy reality with its mistakes and mess-ups, hatred and hurts. Yet week after week I proclaim the good news that in Jesus Christ God offers us life and hope. Every time the message of love is proclaimed in the face of enslavement to evil, the world experiences another Juneteenth.

Lord Jesus, many of your hearers were poor and oppressed, and yet they came to understand that in you and your teachings we do indeed find freedom and life. You are the light of the world. Teach us all to live in the light of your promises, even when the world within and without us seems a dark and dangerous place. Amen.