August 15, 2021: Positioned for Blessing
Positioned for Blessing
Luke 2:22-38
Rev. Rhonda Blevins
August 15, 2021
When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord”), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.”
Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying,
“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
And the child’s father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.
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Do you have any bad habits you’d like to break?
I’m not interested in sharing any of my bad habits with you, but let me tell you about my husband’s bad habits . . . just kidding! (He’s perfect, of course. J)
What if I told you I’ve learned the secret not only of breaking bad habits, but also of positioning ourselves for blessings, or what psychologists call “positive results?” Would you be interested? Yes? Well, let’s go!
Let’s start with bad habits, first by naming what I mean by “bad habits.” Habits, whether good or bad, are simply behaviors that we repeat until they become routine. They are mental shortcuts—things we do without engaging conscious thought.
Here’s an example: one time I was going somewhere on Island Estates, but I am in the habit of driving from my home in Palm Harbor to the church here on the beach, that my mind is often on “auto-pilot” making that drive. So guess what I did? I passed right by Island Way Drive and guess where I “got to” turn around? The dreaded roundabout!
Habits are behaviors we repeat until they become mental shortcuts—conscious thought no longer needed.
Bad habits, then, are behaviors we repeat that yield negative results. Eating doughnuts in the breakroom everyday may yield the positive outcome of a temporary delight to the tastebuds, but a long-term negative outcome of weight gain and all the fun medical issues that result from obesity. Bad habits prevent us from living into the fullness of who God created us to be—they’re barriers to being the best version of ourselves.
Good habits, on the other hand, can position us for positive outcomes, or to use more religious vernacular, blessings. Good habits like saving a little money every month means there’s a nest egg for retirement. Good habits like brushing your teeth and flossing means you’ll have teeth and friends when you retire. You get the drift.
Take Anna for example, the prophet mentioned in Luke 2. Anna was an 84-year-old widow. We’re told that Anna “never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day.” That was her habit, her ritual. Going to the Temple was a behavior Anna repeated so often that she didn’t even have to think about it. Some may have found that practice odd, but what we know, reading her story some 2,000 years later, is that her habit of going to the Temple every single day positioned Anna to be in the right place at the right time with the right spiritual awareness for the blessing of a lifetime.
Consider your patterns, your rituals, your habits for a moment. Are all your habits the best practices for the outcomes you want? Do all your behaviors, both conscious and unconscious, serve God’s kingdom to maximum effectiveness?
The answer is “no” (sorry, narcissists). All of us have bad habits that miss the mark (the very definition of sin). All of us have habits that undermine our health, our happiness, our God-given purpose. All of us have habits that yield negative results.
Why don’t we just stop?
Social scientists have discovered that bad habits are often as hard to break as addiction. English poet, John Dryden, once observed, “We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.”
If bad habits are as difficult to break as addiction, is there any hope? The answer is “yes,” but not in the way we normally think.
We have this notion that willpower is the answer to breaking bad habits. But researcher Wendy Wood, professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California and author of Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes that Stick, says that willpower just doesn’t work. Dr. Wood suggests that when you exert willpower and control your behavior, what you are doing is thinking about the thing you don’t want to do, and in doing so, you give it power. She says there’s a self-defeating aspect to willpower. Willpower, counterintuitively, gets in our way. [1]
So if willpower doesn’t work, what can we do to successfully tame our bad habits? The answer is that we need to be working smarter not harder. Wood’s research shows that physiologically, good habits and bad habits work the same way—there’s a three-part pathway to forming any new habit whether “good” (yields positive outcomes or blessings) or “bad” (yields negative or deleterious outcomes). Here’s the three-part pathway to habit formation:
1. The reward. Our minds, the reward centers in our brains, notice behaviors that make us feel good or that achieve some outcome. Our brains remember the yumminess of the doughnut, the reduced boredom after checking our phones, the endorphins after exercise. Habits require reward at the end.
2. The routine. Because there was a reward, our brains log into memory the specific sequence of actions that led us to the reward. Science shows that a specific routine is critical to habit formation. When your brain experiences something wonderful, it drops everything to remember the exact sequence of whatever you just did to get that reward. It stores the whole sequence of behaviors as a single, solitary routine, what researchers call “chunking.” This “chunking” is why I drove past Island Way Drive, the drive across the causeway is part of the “chunk” that yields the positive outcome of arrive at the church. I had to use a different part of my brain, the active, thinking part, to turn right on Island Way Drive. That mental shortcut, or habit, is great when trying to get to the church; not so great when going to Island Estates! Once behaviors become habitual, they don’t require any more work. That can be a good thing if it’s a “good” habit, or . . . not so much.
3. The context. This third part of the pathway to habit formation is just as critical in the habit loop. Context is any situation or environment that cues our behavior. The context of me missing the right turn to Island Estates Drive, was being in my car, driving over the causeway. Habit kicked in, and the next thing I know I’m in the roundabout wondering how I got there. Context can be the people you’re with (like every time you see a certain friend, you drink beer), the mood you’re in (when you find yourself a little bored you check your cell phone), or the place (like driving over the causeway). When our brains notice a context, one that goes with a particular habit or routine connected to a reward, we get a strong urge to enact the behavior that led to the reward—whether the behavior is useful or detrimental. Cues can illicit behavior, even when the rewards from those behaviors aren’t even there anymore.
Wood and her colleagues performed a study about this. They wanted to study if people would perform habitual behaviors even if the behavior wasn’t rewarding. So they set up movie trailer screenings: one set of participants watched the trailers on computers in the lab; anther set watched them in the theater (remember, they’re testing whether context was an important trigger for behavior). In both settings, half of the participants received stale popcorn, while the other half received delicious, fresh popcorn. What the researchers observed is that very few of the participants in the lab ate the gross popcorn. But of those in cinema who had a movie theater popcorn habit, participants with stale popcorn ate the same amount as those with fresh popcorn. They acknowledged that they hated the stale popcorn, but they ate it anyway.
When our brains observe a cue associated with a habitual behavior, we can’t help but execute that behavior even when that behavior is no longer rewarding.
What have we learned so far? 1. Willpower is an ineffective tool for changing behavior and can even work against us. 2. The habit pathway begins with a reward, our brains lock in the routine that results in the reward, and the context cues the habit loop.
The key to stopping bad habits and starting good ones is in that last piece of information. The key is this: we can use our conscious minds to exert some control over the context we find ourselves in. The research shows if we change our context, we can change our behavior.
Back to Anna, the 84-year-old prophet from the Gospel of Luke. What if her habit, instead of going to the Temple every day (her context), had been to sit at home watching soap operas or cable news or HGTV all day? She would have missed out on the blessing of a lifetime, and we would never have heard of her. But Anna formed a habit that positioned her for a blessing. Her context (the Temple) positioned her to be receptive to the whispers of God. And because she was receptive to God’s whispers, Anna received the ultimate blessing of seeing and recognizing the Christ child, and because she received the ultimate blessing, she blessed the world around her by telling others about the child that she met at the Temple.
Do you see how context matters?
A quote often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.
What’s your “destiny”? Are your habits, your ritualized behaviors, serving your life and God’s purposes well? Or are there some changes you’d like to make, some habits you’d like to break? Are you positioning yourself for maximum blessing? If not, here’s your assignment:
Make small changes in your environment, changes that will cue you to adopt new behaviors, that over time, will become new habits.
These could be simple changes, like deleting the app that sucks away your time, keeping the television remote in the laundry room to make it a little harder to waste away your time in front of the TV, buying and taking raw veggies to munch on at work instead of hanging out by the doughnuts in the break room, listening to music that soothes instead of talk radio that enrages. Small changes like these . . . well they could . . .
. . . become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.
Be blessed, Chapel by the Sea! Position your lives for positive outcomes and be blessed!
[1] Much of the inspiration and content for this sermon is from Episode 7 of the “Happiness Lab” podcast “How to Kick Bad Habits (and Start Good Ones)” by Dr. Laurie Santos which includes an interview with Dr. Wendy Wood.