Category: Uncategorized
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Berit….It means I’m bound to you
(*written originally in May 2011) A little more than a year ago today, I walked across the gorgeous campus of the College of William & Mary with my closest friends. It was easily one of the greatest days of my life, but it belayed a dark underlining of fear and doubt. Amidst the gleeful shouts…
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A Very UU Advent
Advent reminds me of a high school basketball tournament back home. I can still feel the excitement in the air. I can smell the expectation. I can taste the adrenaline-fueled energy of the inside of the basketball stadium as the electric heat amplified by each and every member of the 30,000 + people jammed into…
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Ancestry
I’ve been doing some genealogical research this month. It wasn’t my first choice of how to spend my free time, but my mother, the inimitable Frankie B., put me onto it because she’s been having scary dreams about the future of our country. She claims that her great-grandmother, my great-great-grandmother, is encouraging her to “stay…
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#Bumpingintoblackness, Vol. 4 – Systemic Racism
I didn’t know I was racist. That was the big revelation. The piano falling on my head. Notice, I didn’t say that I didn’t know I was a racist. It’s not a noun, where I was a guy yelling slurs and making crude jokes and refusing to serve black and brown people. Plenty of…
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#bumpingintoblackness, Vol 3
My first year of teaching, I was in a 5th grade classroom in New Haven, CT. Every child in my class had brown skin. I do not. I doubt I was the first white teacher they had ever had. I doubt I was the first male teacher they’d ever had in class. I don’t doubt…
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Bumping into blackness, Vol. 2
Culture encompasses a lot of things: music, food, history, art, dance, and language. Language encompasses a lot of things: words, gestures, expressions, interpretations. Black culture and history were made accessible to me through the television screen and through the pages of Texas-printed history books, some of which implicated that “state’s rights” was the primary cause…
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Bumping into Blackness, Vol. 1
From a friend: “I encourage anyone else who feels like getting involved to do share what they feel comfortable sharing, either in the form of comments or your own posts. Even (read: ESPECIALLY) if you’re not black , your interactions with black culture (or lack thereof) are important for everyone to hear about. If Black…
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Holy Spaces
Okay….so I’ve finished my first month as a chaplain at St. Elizabeths Behavioral Health Hospital in D.C. It’s one of the oldest mental health facilities in the nation, and Dorothea Dix is a prominent fixture in the wall of fame that lines the administrative office hallway near my office. After a few weeks of getting…
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With the Beginning, We Make the World Anew
Note: This is the homily I preached to enter into Preliminary Fellowship on a September weekend in Boston. I’m honored, humbled, and excited to share it and this journey with you. I am excited to be welcomed to the group, and welcomed to the work. There is Light by Eric Williams (adapted) In the beginning There…
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Wake Up and Go For It
Wake, now my vision of ministry clear; brighten my pathway with radiance here; mingle my calling with all who who will share; work toward a planet transformed by our care. There was a moment in my life, a very, VERY, brief moment in time- between my phases of wanting to be an astronaut, a test…
Rev. McKinley L. Sims, M.Div. 