Text Box: Interfaith Celebration Gathering Sunday, September 10, 2000 Interfaith Celebration Gathering Service Service agenda: Opening Prayer Readings Message OPENING PRAYER: Dear Mother, Father, Great Spirit, God, please hear my prayer. Most gracious God, thank you for the gift of free will. I offer it on Your altar daily as my gift back to You. Guide and direct my life as You will. Use me in whatever way You see fit. Please help me to open my heart to Your love so that I may discern Your true nature. Help me to accept Your abundant love into my life so that I can live in faith instead of fear. I ask this knowing that all I need do is ask and it is granted. AMEN READINGS: Psalms 36 How abundant is thy lovingkindness, O God! Therefore the children of men take refuge under the shadow of thy wings. For they shall flourish with the richness of they house; and thou shalt give them to drink of the pleasant water of your spring. For with thee is the fountain of life; in they light shall we see the light. 2 Corinthians 5:7 We walk by faith, not by sight. MESSAGE: Opening to Abundance So often I hear people talking with fear in their voices about their financial circumstances. I was talking with a friend just this week who is on Social Security Disability due to a life-threatening illness. He shared his fears that his Disability income would be withdrawn before he is physically ready to go back to work. That is a concern of many folks who have been forced by illness to seek disability income. When we feel these fears, we have to ask ourselves and answer honestly, what is causing us to have this fear? Whatever our initial answers might be, the bottom line is that the fear is serving a purpose in our lives, or we would not create it. We also would not use it to terrorize ourselves day after day. So, first we have to uncover what it is that fuels our need to stay in fear. Are we addicted to excitement such that when things get too calm in our lives, we have to stir something up? What purpose is the fear serving? Fear has been described as False Evidence Appearing Real. My favorite description of it, however, is, “Fear is not faith, and faith has no room for fear.” So, ‘faith’ is our ticket out of fear—if we want out, that is. If the fear serves a very useful purpose in our lives, then we will continue to create it. (Lest someone take umbrage with my saying that we create fear, please remember that we create all our emotions. When we are fully in charge of our lives, we do not give away our power to others. We take responsibility for our own emotions. This means we choose to feel angry, sad, happy, fearful, and any other emotion in our emotional repertory. No one makes us feel any of these things.) If faith is our ticket out of fear, then how do we cash in this ticket? Insofar as faith is concerned, we first need to understand what God is and what God is not. Most simply said, God is love. God is not vengeful. God is not punishing. God offers unconditional love, unconditional grace, unconditional acceptance, and unconditional forgiveness. Back when I walked through the valley of the shadow of death after pesticide poisoning, I struggled with why it had happened. Was God punishing me for times I had erred? Why had God not intervened in my life to keep these horrible things from happening to me? This was an opportunity for God to lead me deeper into faith, to help me understand His true nature. During this time I wrestled with all sorts of faith-related questions. Here are some of the answers God shared with me. The concept of free will kept coming back into my consciousness to help me understand some of the ‘why’ questions. God gives us free will. I was poisoned because other children of God used their free will in a way that harmed me. God did not create the problem and God did not intervene in the problem. Free will would not be free will if God had intervened in any way, whether in my pesticide poisoning or in Christ’s crucifixion . Of course, we always have the choice of asking for help, and the God of love always provides that help when asked. The help that is provided is always exactly the thing we need, too. The other concept that was shared with me when I asked for answers was that believing that God is love is totally contradictory with believing that God punishes us or is wrathful with us. Many people use the concept of God as Father or parent to sustain them in their beliefs. While re-creating God in the human image as a parent may help people feel closer to God, seeing God as a parent may also contain some pitfalls. Any time we attribute human motives to God, we risk straying from what God really is. We end up creating God in our image rather than realizing we are created in God’s image. Creating God in our image unfortunately helps people accept the illogical assumption that God punishes us for our errors and mistakes. I have often heard folks assert that parents punish children for their own good, and to teach them, therefore God does the same. God is love, completely accepting, completely loving, completely forgiving. A loving God does not mete out punishments for errors that are forgiven before they are even committed. So, the first step in using faith instead of fear is understanding the true nature of God. Faith in the God of love is much easier than trying to place faith in a God of wrath and punishment, isn’t it? Faith conquers fear when we let it. Faith also helps us open to the knowledge that there are abundant resources out there for each of us. If we have faith that our needs will be met, they will be met. If we instead do not believe that our needs will be met, and prefer to live in fear that we will not have what we need, then guess what—we will not have what we need. Our loving God has abundantly provided for our needs. If we believe in God’s love, then we must also believe in the abundance that has been provided for us. But, unless we truly believe in that abundance, we will not see it in our lives. God is love. In that love lies true abundance for each of us. All we ever have to do to claim that abundance is have faith that it is there. We must substitute faith for fear on every level of our thinking. God is love. Claim God’s love and abundance in your life this very moment, and it is yours. Believe you will see abundance in your life and you will. God is love. I deserve God’s love. I welcome God’s love into my life. I allow God’s love to flow through my being into every cell. I feel God’s love in me. I deserve abundance in my life. I welcome abundance in my life. All things come to me in the perfect time. I allow God’s abundant love into my life. With it all my needs are met. May God add a blessing to these humble words. AMEN © 2000 Rev. S. Suzanne Fisher