What Is Your Name? | A Sermon for Juneteenth
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on The Second Sunday after Pentecost (C), June 19, 2022.
Luke 8:26-39
He haunts the places of the dead. Every night, the townspeople hear him, shrieking among the tombs. When they’re quick enough, they catch him, wrap his wrists and ankles in chains, and haul his naked body –securely shackled –back to town. But there’s no containing [him]; he escapes each time. Trailing broken chains behind him, he wanders the wilds, tearing at his skin until it bleeds, trading one kind of pain for another. If he has a name, no one knows it. If he has a history, no one remembers it. If he has a soul worth saving inside his living corpse, no one sees it. No one looks.
Until Jesus does. [1]
Told in the words of Debie Thomas, this is the story of the one often referred to as the Gerasene demoniac. I prefer instead to call him the enslaved one. Because whether you believe he was filled with demons or suffering a mental health crisis or simply cast out of polite society as too eccentric, what matters is that he was enslaved. Imprisoned. Whether by external or internal forces or some combination of both, we can see the consequences of his enslavement: separation from community, lack of autonomy, disassociation from his true name, his truest self.
In his novel The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss chronicles a discussion between a mentor and mentee about the nature of words, the power of names. He writes:
Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.” [2]
Today we commemorate one of the most important anniversaries in our nation’s history. It goes by many names. Emancipation Day. Freedom Day. Second Independence Day. Juneteenth.
It was a hundred and fifty-seven years ago that U.S. Army General Gordon Granger announced to the people of Galveston, Texas, that slavery was over. This announcement coming in 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Juneteenth gets its name from combining “June” and “nineteenth” and yet in many ways Juneteenth is less a name and more a word, powerful, yes, but insufficient to fully capture what happened in that moment and what is happening still.
But there are other ways to understanding.
Felix Haywood, a former slave, recalled: “Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes. Just like that, we were free.” [3] Free.
Juneteenth. A word. A painting of a fire.
Freedom. A name. The fire itself.
In the 1930s, Martin Jackson, formerly enslaved, explained why he chose his last name after his emancipation. In his own words:
The master’s name was usually adopted by a slave after he was set free. This was done more because it was the logical thing to do and the easiest way to be identified than it was through affection for the master. Also, the government seemed to be in an almighty hurry to have us get names. We had to register as someone, so we could be citizens. Well, I got to thinking about all us slaves that was going to take the name Fitzpatrick. I made up my mind I’d find me a different one. One of my grandfathers in Africa was called Jeaceo, and so I decided to be Jackson. [4]
Jackson. A word. A painting of a fire.
The freedom to choose one’s own name. To claim it. To connect it to one’s ancestors and to speak it into being. That’s a name. The fire itself.
Our Gospel this morning speaks to the power of naming—the power of seeing and being seen.
“If he has a name, no one knows it. If he has a history, no one remembers it. If he has a soul worth saving inside his living corpse, no one sees it. No one looks. Until Jesus does.” [5]
Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him (Luke 8:30).
What is your name?
Jesus, approached by this enslaved man, a man who, remember, was actively trying to push Jesus away, to scare him away. Possibly aggressive and hysterical, certainly alone, but Jesus does not turn away. Instead, he asks for his name, and I’ve got to believe in the power of that moment.
Love incarnate, vulnerability made power, issuing an invitation to this enslaved one, this forgotten one, to name himself. To light a fire that will recall him to himself, to his identity as a beloved child of God.
What is your name?
A question striking at the very heart, looking past everything else –the labels placed upon us, the freedoms taken from us, the power given to us, the fears and anxieties and shame within us, all of it. Mere words, powerful, yes. But no match for a name.
What is your name? Who are you, really?
Imagine if we approached every human being we encountered with that question on our lips and with our hearts open to truly receiving the truth of another person’s identity.
Notice now that the enslaved one gave the name “Legion.” A name acknowledging the myriad demons working their best to keep him enslaved.
As if he could not get to his true name without letting go of all the false ones.
Many of us might dismiss the idea of demon possession as one of those things we don’t believe in. Not really. And yet, we are all tormented by “many demons,” are we not?
For some it is addiction, for others apathy, for still others, despair. Certainly, the idolization of politics, power, or money grip so very many of us. If we understand possession and demons as separation from God than there are endless enemies within and without.
To name them can be tricky, and yet to name them, or to search ourselves and our society as deeply as we can so that we might come close to naming them, that’s the work, the stuff of an active faith.
What is your name?
“Legion.” A word. A painting of a fire.
But “I am seen.” Seen. The fire itself.
Yes, there is distance between them, and yet we are moving in the right direction when we can name our sins, corporate and individual, to God and when we seek to truly see and to be seen.
Juneteenth calls this to mind. Juneteenth, in the words of one historian, is “a day to celebrate, to educate, and to agitate.” [6]
Because even as we celebrate, we must name how we got here. We must educate. And to start, we must name the contradiction sewn into the very fabric of our society.
The Reverend Carla Robinson, preaching at Saint Mark’s, Seattle, notes:
When you stop and think about the practice of slavery in America, it should have you stop and scratch your head before you even get going. Think about it this way: I got a bunch of people over here who want to cross the Atlantic Ocean, get to a new place, because they want to experience freedom, a new start. Write all kinds of stuff about it and ready to brave all kinds of dangers for it.
Then I got a set of folks over here who are taken and pulled across that same ocean, brought to the same place, and told: you can’t have freedom. This isn’t for you.
That’s not just a little contradiction. [7]
And yet we didn’t stop there, she says. We built upon it, creating a practice where the contradiction became so prevalent and happened so often that people begin to think it normal. “This is what systems can do. They can lead us to believe that what is wrong is actually right.” [8]
We may have not built this system. Our parents may have not built this system. And we all have varying degrees of power and privilege within the system. And yet, we cannot afford to deny the existence of the system or to see the very real impact of the system on our common life.
Slavery in one form may be over, but there are many ways to enslave and to be enslaved.
Remember that the Emancipation Proclamation meant little to nothing to the people who hadn’t yet heard about it. And for some, it meant little to nothing long after, as those with power sought to keep “drawing the same old lines, building the same old boxes, and using the same old names.” [9]
Perhaps that’s a message Juneteenth imparts to us now: that it takes time, work, commitment, and consistency for liberation joy to spread even where liberation is already a reality.
In this way, we live in a perpetual Juneteenth if the meaning of Juneteenth is found, as Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker writes, “in the vast chasm between the concept of freedom inscribed on paper and the reality of freedom in our lives.” [10]
We live in a world where the reality of every human being’s freedom is not necessarily understood, acknowledged, or borne out. Where our truest names can go unknown and unused for so long that we too forget them.
And yet, our freedom is inscribed in the Gospel, our freedom was won on the hard wood of the cross, our freedom is carried and announced in the very being of Jesus and in his speaking of our truest name: beloved.
Beloveds. Our Gospel this morning is a story of our truest names and read this day on Juneteenth it reminds us of the power of words, the power of names; the power they have to enslave us, the power they have to set us free.
May we resist false names. May we live into the resurrection joy of true names. And may we always, always, seek our freedom at the feet of the one who, in the words of Thomas, “finds us naked among the tombs, clothes us with dignity, and scatters the demons to save our souls.”[11]
Amen.
*Image from Wikicommons
[1] Debie Thomas, “Legion,” Journey with Jesus, 16 June 2019, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2259-legion.
[2] Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (New York: DAW Books, 2008).
[3] Sharon Pruitt-Young, “Slavery Didn’t End on Juneteenth. What You Should Know About this Important Day,” NPR, 17 June 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1007315228/juneteenth-what-is-origin-observation.
[4] “Changing Names: Race in US History,” from The Reconstruction Era and the Fragility of Democracy, Facing History & Ourselves, https://www.facinghistory.org/reconstruction-era/changing-names.
[5] Thomas, “Legion.”
[6] Francoise Mouly, “Elizabeth Colomba’s ‘157 Years of Juneteenth,’” The New Yorker, 13 June 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story
[7] The Rev. Carla Robinson, “Freedom and Healing: A Juneteenth Sermon,” preached at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, 19 June 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8mB-6DPoNs.
[8] Ibid.
[9] A paraphrase of a quote from Akwaeke Emezi in “Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir,” (Riverhead Books, 2021).
[10] Mouly, “Elizabeth Colomba’s ‘157 Years of Juneteenth.’”
[11] Thomas, “Legion.”
