I am a star-gazing, Christian champion of creative love following the Jesus tradition and seeking to honor the Christ power found in all members of the interdependent web of existence. God is my depth of being, Jesus is my greatest teacher, and the Holy Spirit flows throughout the interconnected web of the universe from my tiny point of view.
As such, I believe in a God of light and grace and beauty and compassion and creativity and progress and love and joy and care and being. A God that is. I believe in a God that calls all people everywhere into a relationship with one another to enjoy the incredible blessing of love and friendship and playing catch in the yard and sharing a meal and jamming on guitars.
I believe in a God that is the source of all meaning, the depth of all being, and the ultimate concern of all life in the universe.
I believe in a God of justice and compassion and creative transformation. I believe God spoke to Jesus in the way that God has spoken to many people throughout our history, in the way God continues to speak today. I believe God called Jesus to be the Christ as a bearer of cosmic power and spiritual energy that wills the universe towards progress and equality and love and justice and goodness and grace and compassion and hanging out with buddies fishing.
I believe that when we feel pulled towards progress and love like an unexplainable gravitational directive, we hear God speaking to us. That voice comes in many different styles, calling us forward to love and care for others as we care for ourselves, to honor the image of the Holy in every single being in the universe, to work for the betterment of all creation not because it is good, but because it is, as the Hebrew prophets noted, VERY GOOD to be alive and to be human in all our infinite beauty, fragility, and flaws. As such, I’m comfortable with a wide variety of theological language and I love to challenge my own beliefs in concert with singing the songs of my fellow people of faith, be they Humanist, Buddhist, Seeker, Mystic, or None. The beautiful complexity of religious pluralism provides us with a way to walk in covenant together to love alike even if we don’t pray alike. This is the heart of Jesus tradition and the heart of the Unitarian-Universalist commitment to uphold the interconnectedness of our Seven Principles. Walking together down different paths that head towards the same beloved community can only happen if we honor each other’s traditions and make room for authentic expression of our spiritual identities. As such, I’m comfortable with a wide variety of theological language, and because of my background in chaplaincy, I love to let other voices fill in the spaces of when I would use the word “God.” Being together means singing each other’s songs and honoring the beautiful differences among us. I’m so excited to be a part of that rainbow-flavored spiritual fabric.
Rev. McKinley L. Sims, M.Div. 