Until we all get free

 

Revelation 21: 1-6
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 18, 2025

Photo of someone carrying a protest sign that reads "Cherish or perish".

This morning, I want to talk about mental health in a more general sense. I recently came across these wise words: “You are not yourself when you are triggered. Instead, you become who you think you need to be to survive. If we remain in environments that trigger our fight or flight mode, our identity starts to slip away because our values and personalities are being constantly hijacked by thoughts of fear, panic, and survival.” (Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle)



Our entire nation has become an environment that triggers our fight or flight mode. Our identity as a nation has been gradually slipping away because our values and our personalities are being constantly hijacked by thoughts of fear, panic, and survival. For hundreds of years the vulnerable people of this country—LGBTQIA+ folx, people of color, Indigenous peoples, the immigrant, the unhoused and homeless, the poor, the disabled, neurodivergent people—have always lived in that environment. Imagine every waking moment questioning your right to belong, your right to exist. That’s how White supremacists, Christian nationalists, those with privilege and power, want “the other” to feel—to strip them of their values and their identities—to keep their mental health on edge. That’s how a minority thinks they can control what they fear will soon become a majority.



Only now have we moderate and liberal Whites with privilege become triggered ourselves, because we too are now threatened. Now our values and personalities are being constantly hijacked by fear, panic, and survival. Now we’re losing our jobs, our retirement savings, our healthcare, our housing, or we fear we will. It is one of the reasons why we are facing a mental health crisis in this nation. We are constantly on edge.



The early churches of the first and second centuries to whom John was writing his Revelation were also constantly living in an environment that triggered their fight or flight mode, that environment known as the Roman Empire. John was deeply troubled because their identity as Christians was starting to slip away, because their values, their personalities as communities of faith were constantly being hijacked by fear, panic, and survival and rightly so. But they were allowing it to affect their worship, what they valued as of ultimate importance. Eugene Peterson in his introduction to the book of Revelation writes, “Worship shapes the human community in response to the living God. If worship is neglected or perverted, our communities fall into chaos or under tyranny.” Which is what was happening in these early churches living in the shadow of empire.



To these churches John writes forcefully, words like, “I see your hard work, your refusal to quit. …But you walked away from your first love—why? Turn back! No time to waste!” And “I can see your pain and poverty, but I also see your wealth. Don’t quit, even if it costs you your life.” “You’re neither hot nor cold, you’re stale, stagnant.” In essence, he wants these churches to remember who they are and whose they are. They are followers of Jesus and as such their worship, indeed all that they do, is to be done in remembrance of Jesus.



But it is also what could get them killed. So, when you don’t want to show up on empire’s radar, when you want to avoid being put on a list of subversives, you water down your Christianity or you align it with power. You subvert your values to your survival and live in your lizard brain. After a while, after generations of trauma, maybe you even create “fight or flight” environments because that’s all you know.



Bodies hold tension, anxiety, and trauma. It’s one of the reasons we appreciate stand-up comedy, because the comedian creates tension, manages it for us, and then releases it in the punchline. I don’t have a joke to tell, but let’s take a minute to ease some of our tension with a moment of worship.



(Invite everyone to sing “Spirit of the Living God” quietly and gently.)



Okay, because here comes the tension again. We Christians say that nothing can separate us from the love of God, but we then do things to separate people from the love of others and from love of self. We can’t tackle mental health or any other social crisis in this country if we don’t have a covenant of the minimum basic responsibility we have for each other. Yesterday at the Chesapeake Association meeting, our new Associate Conference Minister, the Rev. Holly Jackson said, “Our mission is never our individual survival.” The earth, the world has evolved in such a way that we must share and create community for our collective survival.



So, when I hear John’s words, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” what I hear is, “things need to change”. And not just change or tweaked or reformed but revolution. And yet it’s those words “passed away”. Given the apocalyptic language and events in the book of Revelation, we can conjure images of brutal destruction, a world gone up in flames, violent revolution. The Greek word used is better translated as “departed”, as if old heaven and old earth got on a train, and that still feels too tame for the change we are longing for.



Organizer and educator Mariame Kaba writes, “Our imagination of what a different world can be is limited because we are deeply entangled in the very systems we are organizing to change.” Which is why the word “abolish” is more fitting. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had been abolished.” We say that slavery was abolished, when in truth it was reformed into poverty, racial profiling, incarceration, and human trafficking. To those who do the oppressing, abolition sounds like revenge. But abolition is what we need—not as revenge but as a revolution in our actions and our values.



In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”



If there is to be a new heaven and a new earth, the old heaven and the old earth must be abolished. We must become a person-oriented society, especially a vulnerable-person-oriented society, liberating those who have been intentionally marginalized. Which is why we still need our imperfect faith communities and non-profits, because we’re the ones dragging the needle away from profit motives and property rights toward human beings. We do this by holding hands with one another, forming coalitions and mutual aid groups, sharing our resources like those churches of old, creating environments, communities of safety where people are not triggered, but respected, cared for, and loved. We keep doing this, we keep doing this, we keep doing this until we all get free. Amen.

Benediction – Mental Health Network of the UCC

May the grace that says “you are not alone” encourage you.
May the mercy that says “you are enough” comfort you.
May the love that says “you are loved” embrace you and bring you peace. 

Amen.