We’re habituated to thinking and acting and believing in certain ways. We move in patterns worn into our subconscious. Through repetition, we are creatures of habit. A clock runs clockwise. That’s pretty much by definition. Once you’ve learned how to read a clock, you recognize that all clocks run the same direction. We read a clock expecting the numbers to start at the top and go clockwise around the circle. We don’t have to think about it. There are lots of clocks and watches that don’t even have any numbers on them, because it’s such second nature for us to know how to read a clock. There are lots of things we do without having to think about them. Have you ever been driving a familiar route back home, and your mind wanders, and suddenly you find that you’ve driven all the way home completely by habit. When we’ve traveled the same route over and over again, our eyes become habituated to look for that one way of going. Our hands are trained to turn the wheel of the car in all the same places. We stop at all the right spots without having to actually notice that there are stop signs there. We all have routes that are imprinted in our subconscious. We all have routines in our lives. We have certain rituals and idiosyncrasies that we simply do out of habit. And if we’re asked why we do something in just that way, often the only answer is “just because.” It’s the way we do things. That’s just the way we do it. Often there isn’t any good reason for how we do things other than that’s what we’re used to, that’s how we’re habituated, that’s just the way we do it.
Sometimes it’s difficult to break out of our habits. It’s hard work to chart a different course. When we’ve trained ourselves to head one direction, it can be disorienting to try to go another way. Just last week I was planning on driving to the grocery store on my way home from downtown. But as I drove, my mind wandered, and before I knew it, I was pulling up and parking in my garage at home. I was so habituated to drive home that even when I wanted to go somewhere else, my auto-pilot took me back home. In our spiritual lives it can be the same way. We can easily turn on the auto-pilot and not even think about what we’re doing. We can follow the route we’ve taken each week out of habit. It’s only when we find that we want to go a different direction that we discover how ingrained is our usual way of doing things. Almost all of you who are regulars here in worship sit in about the same place every week. Why do you do that? I suspect many of you don’t even think about where you sit. You just sit where you’ve always sat. We all have our accustomed places, and routes, and manners of speaking and circles of relationships. We most often live in the comforting place of the familiar. We move in patterns and stick to routines. And it takes deliberate, sometimes difficult effort to break out of our typical way of doing things.
It’s only when something makes us conscious of our actions that we recognize the routines that we’ve become accustomed to. Only when something shakes us out of our habits do we realize we’ve got old habits. In the contemplative Buddhist tradition there’s a thing called a Bodhisatva. A Bodhisatva can be just about anything that shakes you out of your routine and reminds you to take a look at things from the broader perspective. In Buddhist monasteries, they often ring a bell at random intervals during the day. When you hear the bell ring, you’re to stop what you’re doing. You’re to set aside whatever tasks or thoughts you were working on, and you’re to mediate on the meaning of life. The sound of the bell is the Bodhisatva, calling you to set aside this moment. Any sound or smell or picture that startles you out of this moment and helps you to take a step back and get a wider perspective is a Bodhisatva. In the movie “The Five Senses,” there’s a man who’s been told that he’ll lose his hearing within a few months. The news that he’s about to lose his hearing makes him suddenly realize that there are precious sounds to be heard. And so he writes down a list of all the sounds that he wants to hear and intentionally listen to and soak in before he goes deaf. Things that he took for granted - like children laughing or birds singing or water splashing in a fountain - suddenly become full of meaning for this man. He quits his job, realizing that there are more important things than his work. He sets aside all the things that kept him busy and distracted from appreciated the world of sound. We sometimes need a wake-up call to put into perspective the things that we count as important. We need a Bodhisatva that reminds us to set down what we’re working on and take a look at the big picture. Trivia and worries tend to fill up our days. We sometimes need something to help us step back from the trivia, to step out of the worries, and appreciate the world we live in.
Some of the things we take for granted need to be challenged. Our old habits sometimes deserve to be reexamined. For decades, people in this country took for granted that African-Americans drank from different water fountains, and rode in separate train cars and ate at different lunch counters and were educated at schools only for them. We discriminated and segregated ourselves by race because, well, that’s just the way we did it. People justified racial segregation based on all sorts of arguments, but the power that kept institutional discrimination in place was deeply ingrained habit. It’s what children were taught to expect. Like looking at a clock and seeing it run clockwise, racial segregation was simply the way things worked. It took people like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to sound the bell and announce the wake-up call. It took people like Malcolm X to shock our nation out of the ingrained patterns of racism, which had become our second nature. And it was tough to change directions. People like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and hundreds of others were killed for sounding the wake up call of civil rights. Most people today would be shocked by the idea that black people should drink out of different water fountains. But the only reason that we’re shocked by that idea today is because we’ve come to learn to expect something different. Our children are taught something different. The only reason that such blatant racism seems absurd to us today is because we were forced to snap out of some of the racist habits of our past. It’s not the things that seem absurd that we really need to challenge today. I don’t think we should spend a whole lot of our time and energy fighting the Klansmen and the white supremacists these days. Their racism is obvious and almost a parody of itself. The things that we need to confront are the things that we don’t even think about. The habits of injustice and prejudice that are really tough to confront are the ones that we have to be shocked into even recognizing. When I started working at a rural Kentucky church as youth director, I experienced a little bit of culture shock. One day I was driving some of the youth home, and one of them said something about their dad “nigger-rigging” some farm equipment. I was astonished. My mouth fell open, and I almost had to pull over. I asked, “What did you just say?!” And the kids frowned at me and repeated it and looked at one another. I’d never heard that term before, and I told them I was deeply offended by it. They told me it’s just a way of speaking. They told me it isn’t a racist thing to say. Everyone says that, they told me. About five years later I was working with a suburban youth group here in Washington. One night at youth group we were playing a game and suddenly I heard one of the boys shout out, “Get off me you faggot!” My mouth fell open. I stopped what we were doing and asked, “What did you say!?” They repeated it. When I told them how offensive that was, they answered that they weren’t trying to say anything about gay people. It was just an expression that kids use today, they told me. It’s not that we think there’s anything wrong with being gay, they said. They were as astonished at my reaction as I was at their words. And these aren’t just problems that children and teenagers have today. These are the problems of a society that has been lulled to complacency by decades and centuries of racism, sexism and homophobia. The most profound places of injustice in our society are the ones that we don’t take the time to even recognize that we’re doing. The most terrible injustices are the ones that we don’t even realize we’re teaching our children to expect.
I think Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was originally intended to be an ongoing reminder of the struggle for civil rights. Unfortunately, three-day weekends all begin to feel alike. We’ve traveled this route so often that we don’t even have to think about where going or what we’re doing. What we need is a Bodhisatva, ringing in our ears. We need something to startle us out of our patterns of discrimination and oppression that we take for granted. What we need is a clock running counter-clockwise, that forces us to question what we see and what we expect to see. Woven in and throughout the Christian witness is a wake up call for us to question our assumptions and expectations of the world. God is calling us to snap out of it, telling us that the way things are isn’t the way things have to be. The way things are isn’t necessarily the way things were meant to be. There’s a better way, if we choose to take a different direction. There’s a better way, where people aren’t judged by the color of their skin, or the labels we place upon them, but by the content of their hearts. May God give us the strength and the faith to see that day arrive. Amen.