Juneteenth 2025 Ask Me (Almost) Anything

This may be the last Juneteenth we get as a federal holiday 🥴

The Juneteenth flag!!!

Once a month, I publish a post where I encourage people to send in questions about just about anything. It can be sports related. Pop culture related. It can be about my opinions on food. We’ve covered a ton of ground! But often, I get questions about theology and the Bible. And I love those questions.

These posts are for the paying subscribers of The Son Do Move, as their generous support helps make a lot of my creative endeavors possible. However, I’m not ignorant as it pertains to the economic situations many of us are facing. I don’t want money to be the barrier to community. If you’d like to participate in these posts or take advantage of all of the other benefits of a full subscription to The Son Do Move (like accessing the full archive of posts), but a paid subscription isn’t for you right now: send a message to teamtrey05@gmail.com and we can get you plugged in.

Juneteenth (which is the only American Independence Day) I acknowledge is this week!

Don’t get me wrong, I still celebrate July 4. Just not as Independence Day. I celebrate it as a day to eat food, not go to work, and play with fire.

July 4 is a great day to commemorate that time we were British subjects and then decided we weren’t anymore. But that ain’t got too much to do with me.

On the other hand… Juneteenth is a reminder that liberty is not just something that can be declared or proclaimed. It must be delivered.

Brief history lesson:

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863.

The Proclamation is often lauded as the executive order that “freed the slaves,” but that’s only part of the story.

Lincoln’s Proclamation declared that all enslaved people in the Confederate States were free, and that enslaved peoples in rebel states were therefore contraband. The proclamation did not apply to slaves in slaveholding border states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri). To be “fair” to these border states, two of them (Maryland & Missouri) did eventually end up abolishing slavery in their states before the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December of 1865 forced them to. But this underscores that emancipation was largely a maneuver rooted in realpolitik.

By declaring enslaved people in states that were in open rebellion free, Lincoln issued a proclamation that could not really be enforced… unless invading troops made it so. The proclamation was issued to give Union troops warrant for crippling Confederate labor by declaring much of them “contraband.”

That two Union states legally enslaved people through the entirety of the Civil War (and two more for at least a year after the proclamation was issued) stresses how slow people are to realize freedom when they are not the ones in bondage.

Nevertheless, Juneteenth celebrates the date—June 19, 1865 (more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued)—when Union troops reached the island city of Galveston, TX to enforce the proclamation as it pertained to the last of the enslaved people in the (former) Confederate States.

This is holiday holds theological significance for me.

I’ve grown up in church traditions where it is not uncommon for people to remember the day they “got saved.”

But I’ve come to realize that that’s a bit misleading.

We were all saved on the same exact day.

On the day that Jesus’s tomb was discovered empty, our emancipation was proclaimed. However, being declared free does not make much of a tangible difference if you are powerless to live as though you are free.

And so the responsibility of an evangelist in The Way of Christ is not to preach people into a moment of decision, but to clear the way for them to live into the freedom that has already been secured for them.

Even after those enslaved in the American south were declared (and even set) free, the United States of America required a period of Reconstruction in order to realize freedom.

The work of Reconstruction was incomplete in that it was only required of the rebel states, despite the fact that these states all existed in cooperation for nearly eight decades before the war. And the work of Reconstruction was aborted in a political compromise a mere 12 years after it began.

Juneteenth serves as a reminder that freedom must be realized to be felt.

Liberty that is merely declared is immaterial. It must be embodied.

This Juneteenth, may we renew our commitment to the making of all things new.