Sacrifice or Surrender: Expanding into the One Love (07/04/05)

Sacrifice or Surrender: Expanding into the One Love (07/04/05)

Rev Debi Brady

OldTimeGrissmillTN

When the Ark of the Covenant was placed into its special place, in the most holy place of which the tribes of Israel could create, it was recorded that so many sheep and cattle were sacrificed that there number could not be counted.  What a way to revere the Almighty!  In those days, animal sacrifice was a way of honoring God.  The thought being that God demanded sacrifice, namely giving up food which could not then be consumed by humans, as proof of our love of the Divine One.  Today, that would be absurd.  Instead, the words and meanings of "love" and "sacrifice" are still bound together, whether it be in God's name or for those who we hold closest to us.

The issue most of us have with the word...and meaning...and love is that it implies sacrifice in one way or another.  Not in the old meaning of giving up our food by way of animal sacrifice (most people would probably see that as cruel and even evil).  Yet, to love does mean to sacrifice, at least to some degree, our selfish ways to be in service to another...whether that other be God or someone else.  We may see this as a joyful occasion, as it was in the passage, and the very best that we could offer onto that other.

The term, Ultimate Sacrifice, has come to mean giving up one's own life to save another, as in a firefighter who made the ultimate sacrifice when he died rescuing a young child from a fire.  We may agree that through the heroics of one individual being of service to the other, a life was saved.  However, at what cost and is that a price that many of us would pay?  The Bible tells us that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to save us from our sins.  This would seem to also be a case of making the Ultimate Sacrifice.  But is it?  And, even if it is, what meaning does it have for us, today?

Perhaps the greatest sacrifice is our separateness from one another.  When we are told that we are One in the Spirit (as in the song that continues by saying, we are One in the Lord), that is a truism which cuts across all boundaries we have artificially created in our physical reality.  For most of us, that's a hard pill to swallow.  How can we be both One and unique?  It would seem to be a contradiction of terms.  But it's not.

One of my favorite passages from an anonymous writer is: As we learn to See the Oneness and to Be the Oneness, we Become the One.

There is but One Love.  We are the One, yet our various religions have always sought to find that Divine One which is (or so it would seem) separate from us.  Although teacher after teacher, including the Christ, has come to offer us a greater truth about ourselves, we haven't heard the message.  There is no need to make the Ultimate Sacrifice.  We have to realize that deep within us we are already One with all of the universe.  This is our core and our nature.  In a deeply profound way, we have but to expand into the One-Love to fully experience ourselves as the divine creatures we were always meant to be.

From the ancient teacher, Melchizedek, he put it this way: You are a multi-universal being...the universal initiations focus primarily on the topic of your greatness.

So, as we choose to be expansive in our beingness, we can begin to accept that we one with all other things...seen and unseen.  Love need not be a sacrifice that we are willing to give to one another.  Let us reframe that misbegotten idea and transform it into the knowingness that we are one in love: One-Love.  The Old Testament was written for those who lived in a very harsh and mundane reality of sacrifices.  That was long ago and far away. 

We can now see ourselves not as separate from each other...and from God...but bound together in same way in which the One-Love that binds the stars and the universe, the weak and the small, the mighty and divine to each other.  Nothing needs to be lost...sacrificed...to attain this state.  We only need to recognize and live it for ourselves.

It is in the surrender...not sacrifice...of our individual selves that we can expand to fill the Universe with One-Love.  We are, each of us, symbolically, the Ark of the Covenant, placed in our Most Holy Place and under the watch of angels.  We sing, as with one voice, giving thanks to the One from which we came to know ourselves.  And, praising that same source, for we know that it is all goodness and love...forever.  Life without end.