I was honored to participate in Santa Monica’s 33rd Annual Juneteenth celebration at Virginia Avenue Park on Saturday, June 14th, along with fellow members of the Santa Monica Area Interfaith Council. It was a joyful day of celebrating freedom and liberation, but also full of potent reminders of the struggle that still lies ahead of us as we work together to achieve justice for Black Americans, and for all people.
After attending the No Kings protest in downtown LA in the morning, I took the metro across town to deliver the Juneteenth invocation along with Rev. Carolyn Baskin-Bell of First AME Santa Monica, Rev. Nikysha D. Gilliam of Amos Memorial CME Church, Rev. Eric Strickland of Calvary Baptist Church, President of the Native American Veterans Association and Commissioner of the LA Native American Indian Commission Ted Tenorio, and SMAIC President Rev. Kathleen Benjamin. It was an honor to represent our community in the company of these hardworking and distinguished colleagues, whose prayers spoke to gratitude for the struggles and sacrifices of our ancestors, the urgent need for justice in our community, our interconnectedness with all forms of life on earth, and the power our faith gives us to keep striving forward despite the obstacles in our way.
My portion of the invocation referenced Jesus’s words from the book of Luke, where Jesus is himself quoting from the prophet Isaiah. It’s one of my favorite New Testament stories – Jesus declares the purpose of his mission in Nazareth, and receives a great response from his hometown crowd – until he explains that his mission of compassion and liberation extends not only to his own people, but also to those outside of their religious and cultural in-group. The crowd then quickly turns against him and attempts to run him off the edge of a cliff.
It’s a great story to keep in mind for those of us doing interfaith work and faith-based activism.
We are often pressured to “stay in our lane” and limit our concerns to the purely spiritual matters of our own particular sect. But the members of SMAIC, diverse in our specific theological beliefs, are united in understanding that justice is a spiritual matter, and that we are called to seek justice for all, not just some. It was an honor to stand united with them on Juneteenth!
My name is Jessica TenHave-Place, and I serve as Director of Multigenerational Religious Education at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Monica, where I teach a diverse group of young people about our shared values of justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence, generosity, and above all, love.
The Unitarian Universalist church is a community of many paths – Humanists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and many others. We model how community is enriched by diversity, and celebrate the many ways that the spirit speaks with a prophetic voice, calling us to co-create a more just world.
In our congregation we say that service is our prayer, and I hope these words will call all of us to serve in the cause of freedom for all people:
In this moment, I call on the source of all life to enliven our people, as the spirit did on the recently celebrated day of Pentecost, lighting a fire in our hearts and empowering us to proclaim good news to the poor, proclaim freedom to the prisoners, proclaim recovery of sight for those who have been blinded by the lies of warmongering, greed, and white supremacy, and to set all of the oppressed free.
As we joyfully celebrate freedom today, remind us that we are not truly free until all people are free, from Sudan to Ukraine to Palestine. Remind us that the image of the divine is reflected in the face of each person, from the incarcerated person to the undocumented person to the unhoused person, and call us to extend empathy and love to all.
Empower us to stand in solidarity with the powerless, to stand up against the powerful. Help us to reject both apathy and fear. Awaken us to the fact that we are one human family, one interconnected web of life, and one in our struggle against injustice.
Amen, and May It Be So.
