Most of us learned a version of American history with a lot of gaps in it. This sermon is a personal reckoning with one of the most important: Juneteenth — what it actually was, what it means, and why its story is still unfolding. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston with news that had been true for two and a half years: you are free. You've been free. Those in power had simply refused to say so.

The sermon moves through what Juneteenth teaches us about truth and its relationship to liberation — not just as a historical fact, but as a theological claim. The gospel, as theologian James Cone spent his life arguing, is not only about the saving of souls but about the liberation of the oppressed in all its forms. The cross stands not in comfortable sanctuaries of the powerful, but in solidarity with those who suffer. Jesus of Nazareth, standing in his own hometown synagogue, quoted Isaiah — good news to the poor, freedom for the captive — and said: this is what I'm here to do.

The sermon wrestles honestly with where the church has failed — including our own Methodist tradition's complicated history — and what it looks like to do the ongoing work. Drawing on the framework of White Fragility and the broader racial justice literature, this isn't a lecture from the outside. It's a testimony from the inside: here is what I didn't know, here is what I've had to unlearn, here is what I'm still learning. The invitation isn't guilt — it's honesty. And honesty, the gospel teaches us, is where freedom begins.

VBS Sunday

What does it mean to be fully, courageously yourself — and what does the first poem in scripture have to say about it? On the first Sunday of Pride Month, we explore the audacious claim at the heart of Genesis 1: that all of humanity — across the infinite spectrum of who we are — is created in the image of God, and called very good. But first, Deuteronomy warns us: don't shrink God into an idol in the shape of a man or a woman, because God is bigger than all of that. The same God who transcends our categories is the God who blesses every variation within them. Drawing on the Hebrew poetic tradition of dualisms — day and night, water and land, male and female — we discover that the most life-giving places are always at the shoreline, at the sunset, where things meet and mix and become something new. That's not a departure from the image of God. That is the image of God. Woven through the exegesis is a personal story: what Jonathan learned about being his truest self — a boy who didn't fit in every locker room but fit perfectly in his own skin — from siblings who modeled the courage to be exactly who they were. What happens when the people closest to us have the courage to be themselves? They give us permission to do the same. And when the whole community of creation shows up as its truest self, we finally get to see the full image of the God who made us all very good.