Rev. McKinley L. Sims, M.Div.

*(manuscript from sermon given 1/14/18 at Bull Run Unitarian Universalist in Manassas, VA)

I work in a mental hospital. A supermax security facility, in Southeast DC near the Anacostia neighborhood, where the average resident is a 60 year old Black man committed their by DC criminal court.  Think about what that brings up in you. What do you imagine it might be like?

We have a lingo there, at Saint Elizabeths Hospital. We never use the word crazy. We talk about Individuals in care and recovery. Therapy and return to community and positive behavioral support. We also use the word bias and judgment in a clinical sense, and the most important thing to know is that every single human being has biases and judgments that color the way they see the world. Some of the IICs at St. Es see the world as full of bad spirits, some see themselves as the President of the United States and everyone else is working for them, some see me as a white man and call me God.

We have all these judgments and preconceptions and biases about mental health patients. Emotions are raised in thinking about “crazy people.” Fear, shock, the unknown, pity. One of the first things you learn is there’s not a difference between you and them, me and you. Sometimes are emotions and judgments tells us a story about other people, how they’re different and dangerous and it’s best that they be kept locked away in a black part of town. Our emotions and words, and sometimes our world leaders tell us a story about “the other”…. but they’re really telling us a story about ourselves. Telling us what we fear, what’s unknown to us. Misruling over us. I say misruling, because those stories are lying to us when they say that mental health patients are fundamentally different from us. That’s the thing you learn, is that i am a patient of St. Elizabeths hospital. I’m the one being healed. I’m the one in recovery. We’re all patients. We’re all in recovery. Here’s what I mean.

This past Christmas, my sister asked for an Ancestry.com kit to determine where our family is from. You? Anybody here done that? My friend Jonathan did this too, and he found out where his family was from. The reactions could not have been different. For me and my sister it was confirmation about what we could’ve already guessed…we’re super white. It’s harder for some black folks like Jonathan, thanks to our country’s horrific legacy of enslaving and separating African families. This country is not innocent, and it hasn’t done a great job of making up for it. Unfortunately, the church is not innocent either. Our Christian ancestors were on both sides of the debate over America’s peculiar institution. Our Unitarian ancestors too, witness Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun. A legacy of black and white and refusing to see yourself in another, to try and hide your eyes from the problem looking back at you through the eyes of another human being. You see that legacy when you walk into St. Es, an institution that started during the Civil War and who’s patient list tracked the changes of Washington DC’s SE neighborhood. As slavery fades away and Jim Crow rises and the immigration of European Jews and the white flight from cities and the rise of Chocolate City to the gentrification and economic segregation of today…you see it in the history of St. Es. The legacy is staring you in the face, reminding me that the sickness of this country is not hidden away by St. Es…it’s made clear how our biases and judgments and legacies of oppression that we thought were hidden away have been misruling us for a long time.

And We’re all in recovery.

Black Theologian James Cone once wrote “Indeed our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived by the people. If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to appropriate it, for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.”

― James H. Cone

That’s the truth. That the legacy of faith and whiteness is one of oppression, and we are not yet healed. Truth is liberating, healing…we are looking for that truth, and We are still in recovery.

For black folks in America, recovery looked like a Jesus parable come to life. Flipping it on it’s head to make a deeper point about how humans are to be with one another.

That legacy of the church being used to further oppress and enslave eventually gave rise to a specific counter-theology exemplified in the story of the Israelites coming out of Egypt and entering the promised land, like in our reading today. It’s called black liberation theology

Black liberation theology is the idea of God flipped on its head, that God brought you from across the seas through a horror show, but into a new land, a good and plentiful land and god is with you if you choose to follow and trust the promise of the covenant

I’ve studied it but I can’t live it, not like our Individuals in Care. Not like the Freedom Riders. Not like the Black Lives Matter movement. They’re in a recovery from a system of oppression. I’m in recovery from that system, too…but it’s not even close to being the same.

But Our liberation is bound up together- the idea of covenant that’s not just between God and humanity, but between humanity, too

The covenant- a promise that is forever reaching, unbreakable, bound to you in your very skin

Walking through the doors of St. Elizabeths, the truth of our failing to live up to that covenant stares you in the face. Prisons are full of mentally ill folks. Homelessness, poverty, chronic trauma, healthcare injustice…it’s all staring at you. Reminding you of your covenantal obligations, and reminding you that you’re in recovery because you live in America, a country that needs liberation.

At St. E’s, we say that liberation and recovery are the same thing, and they’re a long term process.  You might be wandering in the Exodus for a long time, just like the Israelites of our reading. But the first reading provides the juice for that journey.

Starts with Choosing wisdom, choose to learn the truth, and letting that truth lead you out into the wilderness of your own self, your own history, your own legacy, your own bias and judgments…..you’re free to not choose that path, but as they say, as for me and my house, wanting to know the truth

the road to liberation- long process, don’t think short term. Don’t get caught up in comments of a president. Condemn him, and call out anyone who agrees with him, because they’re showing their biases and judgments, and they’ve not learned the first thing about it….they’re from a shithole, too. They’re in recovery, they just won’t admit they’re ill…..which is super common where I work. So please, fret, tweet, call your representatives, demand more from him and them…but demand more from yourself, too. I am in recovery, not just for my prejudice and bias against people with mental illnesses, but for my prejudice and bias against anyone different from me. Where I grew up in Texas, racism was so common we didn’t even know how racist we were. I didn’t realize my own racism until I was in seminary, and I had had years of calling myself a liberal and studying the civil rights movement and committing to never laugh at jokes about the n-word and how life was in the “ghetto.” I didn’t know I was a racist in recovery until a black classmate pointed it out to me, let me know the truth. That started me on a personal exodus, that I’m still wandering on. I’m a racist in recovery, because how could I not be? So I’m working on it, trying not to let my judgments and biases Misrule me. To seek the truth, and let it lead me on an exodus that ends somewhere better, a promised land. That’s why St. Es has been such a good place to do ministry, because I’m not the one doing the ministering.

The only way to know if you’ve got a problem is to see the truth of it by following Bryan Stevenson’s advice from GA in NOLA- get proximate to suffering, because walking to St. Es will tell you what your biases are. I encourage you to find a way to get proximate to suffering, to educate yourself, to volunteer tomorrow for MLK day, to venture outside your comfort zone and encounter the other in a real and honest way…because you’re going to encounter yourself along the way. That’s the ministry

Here’s the hard part: wanting to hear the truth requires going through the stage of those folks who support 45. They’re safe and comfortable. They don’t want to go on an exodus through the desert for 40 years. They don’t want to feel unmoored and uncertain. It’s scary to face the fact that you’re sick, and you need healing. I’ve been there. I am there. To reach the promised land though, the beloved community MLK spoke of, you have to wander through the desert…together. And you have to make the decision to honor the covenant, to look past your judgments and biases, and see yourself in the other, to see God of your own understanding and to see it in the other. You have to start the road to recovery together. Decide together. Act together.

Because once you realize that liberation is bound together with the other, you look into the shitholes of the world and don’t see the crimes or the mental illness or the bad stuff…you see the humanity, and you see yourself in them. And God is there.

Because Liberation is bound up together, so be woke, stay woke.

Tell your story, the story of your racism, of your recovery, the story of the people to the children and the grandchildren, to all generations – a promise of recovery and communal healing, that starts with wanting to be taught the truth, searching for wisdom, starts with an exodus and it ends with a Kingdom…a beloved community. May it be so.