Juneteenth
Order of Service - Script
for Sunday: June 18, 2023
Juneteenth
June 19th commemorates the day in 1865 that the Emancipation Proclamation was first read in Galveston, the principal port and largest city in Texas at the time. This year Juneteenth, June 19th, is the day after Father’s Day.
NIUU, Pastor Fred
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Announcements and Welcome Hymn #188:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhDCXX5OUUc
Lighting the Chalice:
We light our chalice for fathers and for fatherhood
By Peter Friedrichs
For sleepless nights awaiting the curfew-breakers
For anxious hours as a driving instructor
For hours spent on sidelines, cheering
And watching school plays, sometimes “resting our eyes,”
For the pressures of bread-winning
And “wait ‘til your father gets home.”
For teaching moments and mentoring moments,
For making up answers when you just don’t know,
But are expected to because you know everything
For scrapes and boo-boo kisses and bandaids,
For hugs and kisses and silliness and play
For bedtime stories and early morning ice time
For all the after-shave and ties received as gifts
For handing over car keys and waves good-bye
For father-daughter wedding dances
And cradling grandchildren for the first time
For all the moments and all the meaning in the role of a lifetime,
We light our chalice for fathers and for fatherhood.
Opening Words:
Wild Emancipation for All of Us
By Rebekah Taussig
Excerpted (pp. 15-16) from Rebekah Taussig's Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body
When I was small and just learning how to do life in my body, I didn’t hesitate, didn’t hold back, didn’t worry how it would look, didn’t look for cues or ask for a line. My imagination ruled... I was entirely free to be, driven by the innovation my body inspired. This is the wild emancipation I wish for all of us—a world where we are all free to be, to move, to exist in our bodies without shame; a world that isn’t interested in making all of its humans operate in the exact same way; a world that instead strives to invite more, include more, imagine more.That world sees the humans existing on the margins and says, You have what we want! What barriers can we remove so we can have you around? What do you need? How can we make that happen?
Hymn #155: Circle Round for Freedom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAqh9IdA5XY
Covenant:
Love is the spirit of this church, and service its law
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek truth in love,
And to help one another.
Joys and Concerns (with lighting of candles of caring)
Story:
Wounds From Our Fathers
By Myke Johnson
Each of us has gifts and wounds from those who fathered us. This is inevitable; even the best fathers in the world disappoint their children sometimes. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to grow up. But I know that some wounds are deeper than others. Some people’s hearts have been broken by their fathers’ neglect or abuse, or by the absence of good fathering in their lives.
When Father’s Day comes along, while it may be a joyful day for some, it can bring up the pain others carry from painful relationships with their fathers. It can also trigger grief and sadness for those who have lost their fathers or whose fathers’ lives have been diminished from illness or old age. Let this be a day when we can honor our fathers, and also honor our fathering-wounds.
Jane Myers Drew, a psychologist whose father died when she was only a toddler, wrestled with the question of how to recover from fathering wounds. She offers some guidance for healing in her book, Where Were You When I Needed You, Dad? She says that first of all, we must increase our awareness of our father’s impact on us: we must define what we missed from our dad when we were young, and what we received from him. Then, we must get in touch with any hurt and anger we may be holding onto regarding our dad, and make room for expressing our feelings, mourning and letting go of our pain.
When we have honored our feelings, we are able to look again at our father, seeing him as a human being in his own right, and cultivating a deeper understanding of his situation. This will help us to say good-bye to the dad of our youth, and to release any expectations we have that can no longer be fulfilled. Then, we turn to healing the child within, reconnecting with that young part of ourselves who wanted to be nurtured and treasured by a tender father. We try to become our own good father, finding ways to fill in for the experiences we missed with our dad.
Fathering ourselves will be different for each of us. Each of us had unique childhood experiences, different gifts and wounds that we received. For some it may not be simple or easy to undo the damage of childhood. But even if we didn’t receive all the fathering we needed from our biological fathers, or other childhood caregivers, we can receive fathering from others even as adults.
All of us, as adults, can learn to parent ourselves and each other, to share the gifts we received from our fathers and to heal from the wounds of our childhoods. We can adopt father figures to help us learn what we didn’t learn from our own parents. Father figures are those who believe in us, who treat us like we’re special. It might be as simple as a neighbor who teaches us how to wash and wax the car. It might be an art teacher who encourages us to draw or paint, or a friend who listens to our struggles and confusion.
Part of growing up is realizing that our fathers are human beings with gifts and failings. Part of growing up is letting go of needing our fathers to be better than they were. This is easier to do if we realize that we can offer and receive fathering from others. When we can do this, we are also better able to honor the gifts and forgive the wounds we have received from our fathers.
Meditation:
Father's Day Meditation
By Rod Richards
On this Father’s Day, we recognize the vast spectrum of experience and the often-complicated feelings that surround such a celebration. We honor those fathers and father figures in our lives who have loved, supported, encouraged and instructed us, and we seek to share these gifts with others.
We mourn with those who mourn the loss of a father and fathers who mourn the loss of a child, whether separated by death or estrangement. We support those for whom this day brings pain and sorrow, who suffered abandonment, neglect or abuse.
We support and celebrate the fathers in our midst who give of themselves to their children, recognizing all the strength and wisdom and stamina and love and time and honest introspection that fatherhood requires. We support those men who choose not to have children, yet who are present in loving and supportive ways to children, youth and adults alike. And we seek to honor wherever we find ourselves today across this vast spectrum of experience and to feel the compassion that embraces us within this silence.
Hymn #159: This is my Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGurgjcWU_0
Sermon:
Happy Fathers’ Day to everyone!
We all get to celebrate this day because we all have had fathers.
Some of us have been blessed to have fathers who were worthy of being called, “Dad,” or “Daddy,” or other language forms such as “Papa.”
Many nations also have fathers, as the United States has George Washington, and Mexico has Fr. Miguel Hidalgo.
The spread of freedom in the U.S. also has a father, President Abraham Lincoln.
Tomorrow is June Nineteenth, also known as Juneteenth, and it’s a vitally important holiday to recognize, especially these days.
It’s a holiday because on June 19th, Juneteenth of 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation was first read in Galveston, Texas, freeing the slaves in that State.
Besides Fathers Day today and Juneteenth tomorrow, this Wednesday is also an important day on the calendar: the Summer Solstice marks the astronomical start of Summer, June 21 at 7:57 a.m. this year in our part of the world.
We begin our consideration of the events and celebrations of this week with Juneteenth.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war.
The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."
Lincoln himself spoke of the Proclamation:
“I never in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. . . .
If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”
The Emancipation Proclamation at first only applied to the states that had been in rebellion.
Partly because of that limited application, the Proclamation is often thought and spoken of as an act of war.
Until the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, six months after Juneteenth, the states of Kentucky and Delaware still had slavery and enslaved people.
Even so, by means of Juneteenth, President Lincoln became the Father of Emancipation, ultimately creating a link between Fathers’ Day and the freeing of the slaves “within the rebellious states.”
Again, the Emancipation Proclamation was originally published as an act of war against the Confederacy.
I suspect that the formerly enslaved persons who were freed did not really care very much about the motivation of the President who had freed them.
Juneteenth is an important day in my own family history.
My great-grandfather, Daniel Milton Carlton, was a planter in Georgia and an officer in the Confederate army.
When the Emancipation Proclamation was read in Elberton, GA, his enslaved people were set free.
I am not proud of this part of my family’s story, but I must own it because it really happened.
My Granny, Daniel Milton Carlton’s daughter, was one of the people I have loved most in my life.
She was able to own and accept this part of her heritage.
Her daughter, my mother, taught me a better way of understanding the equal value of every human being, and my own understanding is like hers, and like that of many of the people of the United States to this day.
I see Juneteenth, tomorrow, as a day for great celebrations, not only for African Americans, but for all of us, and so I am speaking about it today.
We especially celebrate Juneteenth because we are all in need of emancipation or liberation in some sense.
People who believe that others are inferior to them for some arbitrary reason like race are in need of liberation, too.
That kind of thinking can be disabling.
Whether the bondage we experience is personal or wider in scope, we are held back by forces that seem beyond our control.
The most important forces that hold us back involve our own thinking.
If we regard ourselves or others as inferior human beings for any reason we are holding ourselves back.
If we have power over others, and if we use that power to disable them for being the wrong color or having the wrong ethnicity, we are holding ourselves back from being the people we could be.
That kind of personal bondage is a force to be reckoned with in any gathering of people, whether as a nation, community, or church congregation.
Sadly, one of the worst sources of personal bondage is, in fact, religion.
There are many unhealthy forms of religious faith, and most of them are the result of attempts to control people and their behavior.
Unscrupulous political and religious leaders sometimes use religion to exploit people, their abilities, and their resources, including money.
I’m sorry to say that religion was used to justify slavery.
The concept existed (and can still be found) that the book of Genesis justifies slavery and white supremacy with the so-called mark of Cain.
Without going into the mythology too much, suffice it to say that the Bible says nothing at all to justify such a view of certain human beings.
The misuse of the view of some people as intrinsically inferior to others has resulted in a lot of human suffering.
The misuse of faith and scripture in this way is enough to justify consideration of the Marxist concept of religion as the Opiate of the People.
Speaking of religion as the opiate of the people simply means that religious faith is often used to lull people into submission, especially submission to those who want to exploit them.
Too many people, especially in parts of the world where slavery was common, have been deceived by the idea that some people are inherently more capable and intelligent because of their race and skin color.
Racism is the result of deception regarding skin color and racial differences, and it is the source of many social evils.
In reality, the whole concept of race is a mistake.
Humanity is not divided by racial differences, but enriched by them.
We are better because we are different from each other.
Yet too many people have been exploited, not only by slavery, but also by the prejudices against them, holding them back from higher education and better kinds of employment than they could otherwise have.
In reality, the false concept of race has very little to do with intelligence among human beings.
Some academic studies in recent years have tried to exaggerate the effect of racial differences on human abilities and intelligence.
A newer understanding of institutional racism has provided a better model to describe and explain differences in intelligence among humans.
Systemic, institutional racism involves a whole society or organization in policies that provide advantages for some individuals and treat others unfairly based on race.
Analyzing all these things from the point of view of relationships requires a lot of work.
It is not impossible, but it is not easy, either.
It is the relationships among people, not the differences in the color of their skin that make all the difference in a functioning society.
This occasion of Juneteenth and the celebration of emancipation along with Father’s Day can provide us with needed reminders of the importance of human relationships in all our lives.
As we treat each other with more respect and, yes, love, we can build a better society, a better nation, and a better world.
Amen
Let it be
Blessed be
Congregational Response
Offering Information
Charity of the Month:
YES
Youth Emergency Services
Please visit
yesteensupport.com
You can help!
YES serves homeless youth ages 12-24 in Pend Oreille County, WA. Young people have left home for any number of reasons and are struggling to exist on their own. Many live on the streets.
To provide critically needed housing, food, clothing and medical care, YES needs financial support. We also need donations of food, youth and young adult clothing, boots, shoes and gym shoes, school supplies, backpacks, and other things to distribute to the homeless teens in the area of Pend Oreille County and beyond.
Always Needed:
New Socks
New Underwear
Warm Clothes
Sleeping Bags
Towels
toiletries
Bedding
Shoes
School Supplies Needed:
Backpacks
Protractors
Mechanical pencils
Glue sticks
Pens
Pencils
Highlighters
Markers
Eraser
College ruled paper
Art Supplies
Non-scuff gym shoes of all sizes (6 to 13 for men and women)
Ways to Donate:
$30.00 will buy a backpack.
$50.00 will buy the school supplies to fill the backpack.
$35.00 will buy a pair of gym shoes.
$115.00 will cover the cost of a backpack filled with school supplies and a pair of gym shoes.
Directly at our office or via mail:
For financial donations, please make checks payable to Youth Emergency Services.
Our physical and mailing address is:
Youth Emergency Services of Pend Oreille County
229 N Calispel AVE
Newport, WA 99156
Hours: 9:00am – 4:30pm Monday – Thursday
Network for Good
Network for Good provides a secure, easy way to donate funds directly to YES.
Amazon
YES maintains a wish list on Amazon that can be viewed for ideas.
YES is also enrolled in the Amazon Smile program. This program will contribute .05% of all eligible purchases to YES.
Thank you for your support!
NIUU
P.O. Box 221
CDA ID 83816
Extinguishing the Chalice :
Tomorrow is Juneteenth, celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation. Wednesday is the Summer Solstice, when we celebrate the longest day, the shining of our Daystar, the Sun, for the longest time of the whole year. Likewise, the light of our UU faith shines out, in season and out, for the good of all, not only ourselves, calling all people to look at our own histories, whether national or personal, recognizing the good things and enjoying the prospect of improvement in the things that need it.
Closing words:
After
By Max A Coots, altered by Pastor Fred
After the words, a quiet; after the songs, a silence; after the crowd only the memory recalls the gathering. Peace and justice have need of you after the words, the music, and the gathering. May you have the depth for dedication to justice. May you have the will to be an apostle of peace.
Amen.
So let it be.
Blessed be.
Closing Circle
posted by pastorfred at 5:40 AM
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