Calling Balls and Strikes

Sermon for June 21, 2026, celebrating Juneteenth
Amos 5:18-24; Psalm 137:1-8; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 4:14-21

In addition to praying for fathers on this Father’s Day, we’re marking the Juneteenth holiday this morning.  As you probably know, it’s the anniversary of June 19, 1865, when the news of freedom finally came to enslaved people in Texas, the last formerly Confederate state to receive that good news.  I think there’s symbolic resonance in the fact that Juneteenth and Independence Day fall just 16 days apart.  To me, they seem like two acts of an unfolding drama, with Juneteenth being America’s second Independence Day.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of preparing for our nation’s birthday, I decided to watch the recent Ken Burns series on the Revolutionary War.  I’ve been a Ken Burns fan for a long time; and, of course, the production is fabulous.  But here’s what I especially appreciate about Ken Burns:  He works hard to capture the deep complexities and paradoxes of American history.  He told an interviewer that, on the wall in his editing room, there’s a neon sign that reads, “It’s complicated.  It means that, no matter how good that scene is,” Burns said, “if you learn new, complicating, destabilizing information, you are obligated to change [that scene].”  Ken Burns sees his role not as a historical judge but as one who tries to tell the whole story.  As he puts it, he strives to “call the balls and strikes for everyone involved.”¹

As we look toward our 250^th celebration of independence, we will rightly remember the nobility, even the holiness, of the modern world’s first experiment in self-governance.  As Abraham Lincoln famously framed it in his day, our founders brought forth “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”²

I think Ken Burns would say the key word in Lincoln’s reflection is this: “proposition” – the proposition that all people are created equal.  The American Revolution wasn’t fought to make everyone in the colonies politically equal.  Just ask a woman, or a Native person, or a Black person, or a poor person back in the day.  But the American Revolution rested on the proposition that all people should be politically equal.  It was the beginning of “a process story,” Ken Burns says.  “We are in pursuit of happiness.  We are for a more perfect union.”³ 

And his series on the Revolution recognizes this stunning disconnect: that our founders couched their arguments for liberty explicitly in contrast to slavery – in the sense that they refused to be England’s slaves.  On one hand, it’s deeply hypocritical for people who own other people to argue against the evils of being enslaved.  And, at the same time, as Ken Burns says, “that hypocrisy is the place in which we are, strangely enough, able to grow.”⁴  Here’s why:  Once the slaveholding founders could “articulate and distill a century of Enlightenment thinking into one remarkable [phrase], … that all men are created equal – it’s done,” Burns says.  “Slavery’s done.”⁵  Maybe so, but that ending takes two wars and 89 more years to come about.  The Juneteenth holiday reminds us that committing ourselves to a holy aspiration isn’t the same as accomplishing it.  The work keeps going – for our nation as a whole, for its individual citizens, and particularly for us – we Americans who strive to follow Jesus’ way of love.  As we try to walk that path faithfully, we benefit from the clear eyes of someone like Ken Burns – an umpire who calls the balls and strikes as fairly as he can.

I think our readings today do that, too – God’s Word calling balls and strikes on our work of faithful living.  We started with that reading from Amos – a spiritual wake-up call.  “So,” the prophet says to the leaders of Israel, “you think you want to see the Day of the Lord?  Really?  It might bring a message you don’t want to hear.  It might be like running from a lion only to find a bear waiting for you.”  The prophet says Yahweh isn’t looking for the kind of righteousness we usually offer – neither perfect church services nor national prayer meetings – if those observances don’t reflect our hearts and our lives.  “Don’t just sing me pretty songs,” Yahweh says.  “‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’” (Amos 5:24).  We can take that two ways, and both would be right.  Let the waters of justice and righteousness flow through you, Amos says, so that the way you live channels God’s Love.  And, Amos warns, if you don’t, then may the waters of justice and righteousness roll down on you in judgment.  As the divine umpire, Amos is calling a lot of balls here in a time when those who held power ignored the folks on the sidelines.  And, just as Israel failed to find the strike zone, so have we in our history, as our path toward liberty has wound through enslavement and lynchings and differential standards of justice … and the profound forgetting of those things.

Our psalm today, too, reminds us how God’s Word takes to task those who are unconcerned with the well-being of others.  The writer is reflecting on the Jewish people’s exile in Babylon – how they were carted off as spoils of war by the Babylonians and held in a foreign land, expected to sing happy songs for people who’d shipped them in as cheap labor.  The psalm asks God to remember this and to right the scales of justice.  And the psalm asks us to do the same now – to remember our history and live differently because of it.

Then we have the reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians.  It’s the source of a Gospel claim that reminds me of the fundamental claim in our Declaration of Independence.  In Galatians, Paul says that Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension have changed the game spiritually, rewriting the rules.  If you’ve been baptized, you’ve put on Christ as your identity, Paul says.  You’re no longer allied with the tribe you allied with before.  In this Christian way of living, no one ranks higher than anyone else.  “There is no longer Jew or Greek,” Paul says, “there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:28).  It’s a truth Paul holds to be self-evident – that all followers of Jesus are re-created equal.  If we let that sink in, it undoes every claim we want to make about our superiority, our especially beloved status in God’s eyes – for ourselves and for our nation.  There is no room for “God loves my tribe best” in the new world order Christ has begun.  And by naming it so clearly, Paul narrows the strike zone, making us work hard to land our pitches if we want to get the umpire’s call.

And then we have the reading from Luke – Jesus’ inaugural address for the reign and rule of God, his agenda for a heavenly country (Hebrews 11:16) in process.  In his hometown synagogue, alongside friends and neighbors who’d known him as a kid, Jesus unrolls the book of the prophet Isaiah and declares his Kingdom’s founding principles:  “‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’” (4:18-19)  Then Jesus rolls up the scroll, takes his seat, looks around, and brings those ancient words into people’s lived experience:  “Today,” he says, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21).  A new birth of freedom has come, he says.  Now, these words of the prophet aren’t new.  The Jewish leaders would have heard them and said, “Yeah, that’s how God sees us.  And because we’re specially blessed, God will restore us to the greatness we once knew.”  “Well, no,” Jesus says.  “You are people God loves, absolutely – and that means all of you, not just the folks at the top of the heap.  And when you love people the way God does, you want to lift up especially those who have the farthest to rise.  So, join me,” Jesus says.  “Don’t rest in your power.  Take Love on the road, blessing those who most need to be freed from all that holds them back.”  It’s inspiring … unless it cuts too close to the bone.  Just seven verses later, the hometown crowd is trying to throw Jesus off a cliff, literally.  They heard the umpire calling balls and strikes the way he saw them, and they wanted that umpire gone.

Our personal histories and our nation’s history are parallel paths.  As individual children of God and as the first nation founded on equality, we are beloved – but we aren’t complete.  There are times we glimpse the heart of God, and there are times we look away.  There are times we claim God’s Word as our own, and there are times we slander others as “less than.”  There are times we see that all people are created equal and that God wants us to help those at the bottom to rise – and there are times we see our blessing as a sign that, somehow, we deserve it more than “they” do.  Juneteenth is America’s other Independence Day because it helps us remember that true North isn’t where we are but where we’re going, the place we aspire to be.  We, and our nation, are works in process.  And we have to hold, in living memory, the complexity of that process – both the times we live God’s love and the times we try to throw Jesus off the cliff.  Neither the story of our nation nor the story of our salvation is an ESPN highlight reel.  We’ve got to call the balls and the strikes as they come if we want to leave the field with a win. 

1.      Tomasky, Michael. “‘A Story We Think We Know’: Ken Burns on The American Revolution.” The New Republic, Nov. 11, 2025. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/201497/ken-burns-american-revolution-documentary. Accessed June 19, 2026.

2.      Lincoln, Abraham. “Gettysburg address delivered at Gettysburg Pa. Nov. 19th, 1863.” Available at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.24404500/?st=text. Accessed June 19, 2026.

3.      Tomasky, op. cit.

4.      Gross, Terry. “Ken Burns’ ‘American Revolution’ series includes voices the founders overlooked.” Fresh Air, Oct. 20, 2025. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/20/nx-s1-5580245/ken-burns-american-revolution-series-includes-voices-the-founders-overlooked. Accessed June 19, 2026.

5.      Tomasky, op. cit.