SERMON ARCHIVE: September 7, 2008 at Northern Hills Fellowship

Refrigerator Rights               

by Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

Life on this planet cannot survive without water, nor can life flourish without the spirit of community that flows around and through us all.  The water communion symbolizes how we have come together this morning from different places to form a spiritually diverse but united religious community.

Every member here has a different story of how she or he came to be a Unitarian Universalist.  A few were brought up as UUs, but most people come into Unitarian Universalism as adults.  Some came after they were ostracized by their families or community because of their sexual orientation.  Some came while in the middle of a personal crisis or family emergency.  Some marry into Unitarian Universalism.  Sometimes two people with different religious backgrounds find the best place to honor both is a Unitarian Universalist church.  Our routes here are different, and our spiritual journeys are typically not straight lines; they are more like meandering streams.
My spiritual journey has been like the Ohio River – one with many curves in it.  My religious wanderings took me from being an ardent Southern Baptist to not attending church at all through my college and Navy years, then to the Disciples of Christ, and finally the Presbyterians before I came to Unitarian Universalism.  After years of religious seeking, when I came ashore at the UU Church of Chattanooga and found a supportive and loving community, I knew almost immediately I had found a church home.

People come into Unitarian Universalism from all kinds of life circumstances and from a variety of religious backgrounds.  UUs tend to be spiritual explorers.  We are a diverse group of people who ended up here this morning thru many routes.  It seems a little odd, doesn’t it, that this group of people, who hold a variety of theological beliefs, come together?  What do think makes that happen?
                  
I’m pretty sure I have the answer.  In my first year as minister here so many people have talked to me about one thing they value; the people of Northern Hills Fellowship come here for its caring, inclusive community.  Whatever brought us here, to this church, we would not stay if we didn’t find a community that accepted us.  Everyone needs a community where people care for each other and where differences are accepted and even celebrated. Unitarian Universalists pride ourselves for our willingness to welcome a diversity of people into our fellowship.  We bring our diversity together and try to make it into cohesive church community.
Some churches attempt to provide members a secure identity thru a set of doctrines and prescribed behaviors that allow the members to feel part of the in-group.  Unitarian Universalism doesn’t do it that way.   We don’t have to profess to believe like everyone else in order to be part of this religious community.   Northern Hills Fellowship is a welcoming church which recognizes each individual’s unique personality.  Each person can contribute her or his different talents and knowledge to this liberal faith community.

However, being accepted for who we are is only part of what we want from a church community.  To feel truly included in a community we must form real friendships there.  A generally accepted principle of membership growth says that if newcomers don’t make six friends in their first year they usually don’t stick with a church.  And that’s just the beginning.  The kind of friendships we want are the ones that go beyond the surface level.  We want and need friends we trust with whom we can share what’s really going on inside us.   We want Northern Hills to be the kind of place where we can create those deep relationships that carry with us through the stresses and the celebrations of our lives.

Are you creating close relationships with people here, the kind where people have refrigerator rights at your home?  The refrigerator may give you a clue about the quality of relationships in your life.  Take this little test to see what I mean.  Imagine this scene with me.  Some church people come to your home for a committee meeting and are sitting around the kitchen table.  A new member, a person you never met before this evening goes to the refrigerator, pulls out several items and starts making a sandwich.

Are you a little annoyed? Now, imagine that your brother is visiting, and you are gabbing away in the kitchen.  He reaches into the fridge and starts poking around.  Are you upset?  Probably not.  People really close to us have refrigerator rights, strangers do not.
Refrigerator rights are at the heart of the challenge of building relationships in a church community.  Northern Hills Fellowship provides newcomers many companions almost immediately after they arrive here, and that’s nice.   But it can’t stop there.  We want more than that, we need friends who go deep and who stick close.  When we grant another person refrigerator rights we know we have moved from a surface friendship to more authentic relationship. 

Deep relationships – does that sound like the church community you want?  I hope you feel you have those kinds of relationships here.  If you don’t, what keeps you from having them?  Maybe you never had a really good a relationship.  On the other hand, maybe you had a close one that ended up requiring way too much responsibility.  At work and school, you may encounter relationships that are high on accountability and low on fun.  If your relational life has been full of bosses peering over your shoulder, you might avoid close-in relationships.                 
When we join a church we expect loving and supportive relationships, friendships that go beyond casual connection.  We want to mean something to someone and for them to mean something to us.  True community requires deep relationships.

How do we create authentic relationships?  How do we move from surface friendships to rich relationships?  Authentic relationships are a mixture of friendship and accountability.  Relationships, built on trust and love, take us beyond superficial conversations to where we can discuss questions of the heart.

In the beginning of a relationship, when we are just getting acquainted, we start the process of knowing and being known by another person.  We tell stories that are pretty safe.  If we choose to go beyond this surface level and disclose more about ourselves, we will inevitably find out something that we don’t like about the other person.  If we choose to love them in spite of our discomfort, we begin to move toward authentic relationship.  In a men’s Covenant Group I was in, a friend told us, “I need to talk about my struggles with infidelity here in this group.  I need to feel the group is a safe place to talk.  I need you to support me and to help me resist temptation.  This is a hard area for me, and I need some guys to walk with me.”

How we respond when someone is in need or in time of crisis is a real indicator of the power of a relationship.  What we told our friend was if he would be honest with us we could accept him for who he was, and we would remain his friends.  We told him this would be true even if his temptations continued to challenge him.  We also told him that we believed that it was possible for him to change.  Later, he said having us accept him and believe in him gave him remarkable strength to battle his demon.

Ah, I can hear some of you sending me darts right now.  You might be thinking, “Oh that’s just like a bunch of men.  They circled the wagons around that guy when he was not treating his wife like he should.”  Well, you’d only be partially right, our friend was thinking about doing something he shouldn’t, but he hadn’t done it.  But you are right in pointing out that friends don’t let friends hurt themselves or others – at least if they can do something about it.  Friends can often see things in us that we can’t see ourselves.  It can be scary to ask for feedback, but it is enormously helpful for our growth to have someone who knows us well who will tell us what they see.  It can take courage to give feedback, but if we advise a friend about a problematic behavior or attitude, we can help him or her grow.  We must remember that in order for a friend to be able to accept encouragement or advice we must do it with grace, tact and emotional intelligence.  Our words must be rooted in truth and be delivered with patience, or they will feel like criticism or faultfinding.  Our motive must be to help our friend.

As friendships deepen there are many opportunities for affirmation.  The goal is building up others, saying only what is helpful.  That may be easy to say, but it can be hard to do.  I encourage you to keep at it though.  Affirming each other can be surprisingly powerful.  Once when my work section gave one of the engineers a birthday party, we were surprised to see him cry.  I had heard we engineers weren’t supposed to have emotions.  He said it was the first time his colleagues had ever recognized him as a person who was more than just a number cruncher.  After that day, he began to go to lunch with people in our small group.  I think he must have felt pretty lonely before then.  The small things we do for friends and for strangers make a difference, like steppingstones helping them across their own streams.  By affirming our friends with kind words or a helping hand, we let them know we are for them, first and foremost.

“Self disclosure, acceptance, mutual support, truth telling, and affirmation put [us] on the path to authentic relationship.”  The emphasis should be on friendship, but friendship should be balanced with comfortable accountability, built on trust and love.  Building deep relationships turns casual connections into true community.
:::                
“Every drop of water we brought to the ceremony today has been on amazing adventures.  Most of the earth is covered by water.  Every day, the sun shines on the water and tiny molecules of water rise up into the clouds.  Eventually the clouds fill up and become so heavy that the water comes down as rain.”  Water is transformed by its environment - so are we.  Real community is transformative.

Northern Hills Fellowship is an intentionally diverse religious community.  Authentic relationships with those who are different from us are especially likely to help us grow.  People who are different from us help us to think about things in new ways, to be open to new possibilities.  They prevent us from thinking everyone is like us, which helps us understand and accept the inherent worth of those who act differently than we do.  That's the beauty of creating intimate, authentic relationships with a diversity of people.

Unitarian Universalists are different ages, races and sexual orientations.  They hold diverse theologies, worldviews and political orientations.  The desire to be in a vigorous and healthy community that respects differences holds Unitarian Universalists together.  UUs who desire spiritual growth need a community that will both support and challenge them.  Today we have connected our community using water, one of the most basic elements of the interdependent web of life.  Just as water is necessary for life to thrive, community is necessary for our spirits to be vibrant.  May the spirit of love and compassion from today’s water communion flow through each of us.  May we come together from all our different spiritual places to form a united, diverse community.   May Unitarian Universalists be an example of how unity in diversity can create a more loving world.