Change -- a Meditation on the Occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day

“One of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation desires. They end up sleeping through a revolution.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the phrase “change just for the sake of change” – almost always used as a negative, as in, “we don’t want change just for the sake of change” – because I’m coming to believe that is exactly what we need in order to develop the mental flexibility Dr. King was talking about in the quote above.
And we desperately need it – now more than ever. Our world is changing so fast it’s like our society is on a bullet train. Around 1900, Buckmeister Fuller noticed that the amount of knowledge in the world doubled about every century. By the end of World War II that had been cut to just 25 years.  Experts now say that on average it’s now about every 12 months! In some things like technology the pace of change is even faster. And other social changes are following a similar trajectory.
On a more personal, individual level the one constant really is change. Now firmly in “mid-life” this is more obvious to me. Our bodies change – sometimes it seems almost daily. Our family dynamics change as children become adults, have their own careers, their own children. And I notice I see things differently now than I did even a decade ago – including myself.  I once remarked that I went from being “Betty’s daughter” to “Jenny’s mom.” But it occurred to me recently that it is in this time of my life that I am better able to see just me. So not all the changes that come with age are bad.
But they are changes just the same. Sometimes exciting, something scary, often unsettling. And we have to deal with them. And I think too many of us don’t deal with them, or deal with them badly. We hold on to the old for so long that when we finally give in and accept the reality of the change – often that was happening without us – it is more traumatic, or causes more anger, or is just flat too late. Too late for us to catch up. Too late to find our way. We’ve been left behind. We look around and wonder where everyone else has gone.
It’s like, as Dr. King suggests above, we’ve been sleeping and awaken suddenly to find the revolution has happened without us. We’ve become disoriented, disconnected, obsolete. And those awakening sleepers who take a long time to open their eyes can cause a great deal of anguish and havoc as they reorient themselves to the new reality. We’re seeing this play out on a daily basis in our larger social and political sphere – take, for example, those who continue to fight with every weapon at their disposal against same-sex marriage, even though a majority of public option supports it and the courts are rapidly changing our laws to reflect that.
Adaptability to change is necessarily for our survival as a species, and for our success and happiness, if not also our survival, as individuals. But where and how do we learn that skill – dealing with change? It’s a practical issue; it’s a societal issue; it’s a spiritual issue.
I’m coming to believe that church is one place we can, and should, learn how to deal with change. That’s not a commonly held belief. Many people I talk to see the church as the one bulwark against change – the one place where in a changing world things will remain the same, remain familiar. That may be a comfortable view of the church, but it is not a realistic one. It is also a liability for the continued survival of the church. If the church sleeps through the revolutions happening all around, it will find itself irrelevant and obsolete.
        But I think that attitude is also a misunderstanding of Christianity – after all, Jesus was no advocate of the status quo. Jesus was all about change – changing our hearts, changing our minds, changing our ways (a.k.a. repentance), changing our world. Jesus didn’t call us to him, or to God, to escape the reality of the world, but to help us deal with it with compassion, challenge, and hope. Jesus waded right into the waters of change and stirred them up. Dr. King, acting out of his deep Christian faith, did the same. That’s not a peaceful or comfortable place to be, but it is living water, and no matter what, God is there.
        But there’s another aspect to this: When we are awake to the reality of change, we are also alive to it’s possibility. If we don’t experience life and society as constantly changing, we may not recognize that it can or should change. So when we see entrenched problems, we see injustice, we see need we just shake our heads, thinking: “That’s just the way it is.” No it’s not. That’s just the way it is now. It can be different tomorrow. We can make it different tomorrow.
         Or worse, we can label all change as bad, since it's not "the way it's always been" (which, of course, is usually not even true). The status quo, however illogical or unjust, can become enshrined under the heading of "tradition." So how we deal with change is also a social justice issue.
         The church already teaches about change in a number of ways. It's  the reality underlying the changing liturgical seasons: Advent gives way to Christmas, which changes to Epiphany, and so on. We teach it with the movement from death to new life in the resurrection. We teach it through scripture, which is full of lessons on change. But perhaps we can and should do more, should find new and different ways to share this lesson, and so help our congregations develop more mental and spiritual flexibility to weather the inevitable changes in their own lives and their world, and to be the instruments of that change where it is needed.
          Change just for the sake of change – yes – but for our own sake, and the world’s sake, as well.