Holy Habits (Part 1)

Let us pray. God, as we approach Your Word, make

our spirits quiet, make our minds attentive,

make our hearts open so that You might make our

lives fruitful. Amen. Our second reading is from

1 Timothy chapter 4, starting with verse 6. Let

1 Timothy 4 · chapter mention

us listen together for God's Word to us. If you

put these instructions before the brothers and

sisters, you will be a good servant of Christ

Jesus, nourished on the words of the faith and

of the sound teaching that you have followed.

Have nothing to do with profane and foolish tales.

Train yourself in godliness. For while physical

training is of some value, godliness is valuable

in every way, holding promise for both the present

life and the life to come. The saying is sure

and worthy of full acceptance. For to this end

we toil and suffer reproach, because we have

our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior

of all people, especially of those who believe.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. About

10 or 12 years ago, I started to do the responsible

thing and see my primary care physician once

a year for an annual checkup. I started doing

this not because I am especially responsible

or health conscious, but because doing so lowered

my insurance premiums. And so ever since then,

I've been making that annual visit, and each

time it's more or less the same. There's the

full interview, the full inspection, the full

blood work, a few pats on the back if I'm lucky,

but always a checklist. Maybe there's a different

lifestyle choice I need to consider. perhaps

a new medication to try, a little more of this,

a little less of this, and we're going to keep

an eye on this. This might feel familiar to you,

I imagine. We know that better health today most

likely means better health tomorrow, and so many

of us do. visit our doctor once a year and do

these kinds of things to ensure, as best as is

in our power, a healthy future, knowing that

today's habits go a long way to determining tomorrow's

outcomes. We understand what is at stake, and

we know that even if we choose not to follow

the doctor's orders, that we are inviting possibly

negative consequences down the road. And we do

this in full knowledge. And this is just the

tip of the iceberg. These annual visits, just

the tip of the iceberg of the health and wellness

industrial complex that exists in the world today.

Of course, there are all of the diets and all

of the fitness clubs. There's the newest superfood

that we should be eating and the latest thing

that we have been eating. that now we're learning

is slowly killing us. And there are books and

trends and gimmicks all to keep the body healthy.

But we are more than our bodies, right? We are

more than just an accident of evolution, more

than living machines wired together with tissue

and neurons. If that's the case, if we are more

than our bodies, if there is a spark of something

within us that transcends our biology, if what

it means to be me is more than just my physiology,

then there is more to our health than what a

doctor can diagnose and prescribe. There's more

to our well -being than diet and exercise and

turmeric. A couple of years ago, during our Lenten

sermon series, I worked from a book called The

Life We're Looking For by Andy Crouch. And one

of the central ideas of that book is that we

as humans are what he calls heart, soul, mind,

and strength complexes made to love. That is

what we are as human beings. This, of course,

is building off of the words we heard from Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

chapter 6, which is one of the most famous and

often repeated prayers in the Jewish tradition.

It's called the Shema. Hear, O Israel, the Lord

is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the

Lord your God with all your heart and with all

your soul and with all your might. And when Jesus

is asked, what is the greatest commandment? He

quotes this one. He throws in the mind as well,

and he also says, love your neighbor as yourself.

We are not just a body, and we know that. We

know that about ourselves. We know there's more

to us than that. To be human is to possess these

capacities, heart, soul, mind, strength, and

not only to possess these capacities, but to

choose how we direct these capacities. So a few

weeks ago, I heard a podcast in which Andy Crouch

was interviewed, which is what got me thinking

about this book. And he was being interviewed

about artificial intelligence. And he was describing

the technological age that we have been living

in and the one that we seem to be entering into.

And as he was reflecting on it, he presented

an interesting analogy that never would have

occurred to me, but he likened it to metabolic

syndrome. Metabolic syndrome in the medical world

is a kind of a catch -all diagnosis that represents

a constellation of negative health effects that

arise mostly out of inactivity. If we look back

through recent history to the Industrial Revolution,

and the invention of all kinds of labor -saving

machines, we can see that we, as humans, are

working a lot less hard than we used to. We're

not toiling out in the fields for our bread to

put food on the table. We have machines that

do that for us now. We subject our bodies to

far less stress at a population level. than we

ever have before. We live more sedentary lives,

even when we're active, more sedentary lives

than throughout the rest of human history. And

as a result, we experience higher weight, higher

blood pressure, higher blood sugar, higher cholesterol.

And 90 % of the United States population, 90

% has at least one of these markers of metabolic

syndrome. which means that a person can be quite

healthy by today's standards and still be dealing

with one of these issues. I'm grateful for machines.

I'm grateful I'm not working out in the fields

every day. Human society has developed in wonderful

ways because of these advances, and most of us

no longer bear that daily burden of hard labor.

But there are very real consequences when we

cease to use the core capacity of our physical

strength. Ten years ago, I had surgery to repair

a torn tendon in my ankle. And through this process,

I learned that tendons heal very slowly. And

so while I was given a boot that was designed

to be walked in, I was not allowed to put weight

on it for eight weeks. Two months without being

able to put any weight on my left foot. So I

got one of those knee scooters, which are not

as fun as they look. And every door and every

stairway was an insurmountable challenge for

me for eight weeks. Over the course of that time,

at one point, I remember looking at my upper

legs and realizing that five or six weeks in,

my left leg, which wasn't that strong to begin

with, had grown very weak compared to my right.

In just that short amount of time, the atrophy

in my leg muscles was visible, and a good deal

of the physical therapy I had to do afterwards

was not just to get my ankle working again, was

to get my whole leg working again. Atrophy is

what happens when we don't use our capacities,

when we don't cultivate our capacities. And if

our strength is not our only human capacity,

then the body is not the only thing that can

atrophy. Andy Crouch said in this podcast interview,

we are living through a 100 -year -long atrophy

of the four things we are meant to love with,

heart, soul, mind, and strength. The machines

have allowed our strength to apathy. Computers

and digital technology have allowed our minds

to apathy, and artificial intelligence, a technology

that mimics thought and creativity and even relationship,

may just take care of the rest and allow our

heart and our soul to atrophy as well. And this

is, to my mind, one of the great dangers of this

age that we are now entering into, and it raises

one of the great questions that we have to ask

ourselves, and that is, what will prevent the

atrophy of our heart, our soul, our mind? Now,

the way I have framed this in the context of

Modern technology makes it sound like a relatively

new problem, and maybe it is a relatively new

problem, but the solution is very old. The solution

is the intentional cultivation of all of our

God -given capacities, our heart, our soul, our

mind, our strength. The solution is to engage

in habits and practices that draw our whole being

into the pursuit of the sacred dimensions of

life. And lucky for us, the Christian tradition,

over its 2 ,000 -year history, has developed

a wide range of disciplines that are designed

to do just that. So for the next several weeks,

we will be looking at these disciplines, what

I'm calling holy habits. But today I think it's

worth making the case for discipline itself.

Discipline sounds harsh. It sounds unpleasant.

It calls to mind punishment. It makes us think

of being constrained or limited. And in a culture

that values individuality and absolute freedom,

the very idea of discipline feels backwards and

even detrimental. When I was in middle school,

I think I was participating probably in the last

gasp of an older era of public education because

in eighth grade, I was able to take... two wonderful

classes one of them being home economics in which

we got to bake cookies and eat them and make

cinnamon rolls and eat them and yes we had to

learn table manners and stuff along the way but

we got to eat cookies at school and the other

class was what we called industrial arts or shop

class right and so i was in eighth grade and

i was in shop class and one of the things that

we learned in this class was the process of manufacturing,

right? And the techniques that are used to mass

produce something. And we were going to mass

produce wooden clocks where you take a piece

of wood, flat piece of wood, no bigger than a

sheet of paper. And, you know, you round off

the corners and you drill a big hole at the top

and bottom to create a kind of a decorative look.

And then you drill a hole right in the center.

That's where the hands of the clock will go.

And so we were receiving the instructions for

this, and we eighth graders just assumed that

we'd get our piece of wood, and we'd get our

set of directions, and then we would be sent

off to do our work. But that actually is not

how it happened. We set the blocks of wood aside,

and the first thing that we had to do was construct

jigs for each step of the process. A jig is a

device, or it can itself be a kind of process,

that allows you to do a repeated action over

and over again exactly the same way every time.

So, for instance, for this project, on the drill

press, which we were going to use to drill that

hole in the perfect center of our lovely clocks,

we had to create from scrap wood a simple jig,

affix it to the table of the drill press. so

that when it came time to drill, all we had to

do was slide the wood into place, move our hand

out of the way, drop the lever, and every single

time, a hole in the perfect center, and they

all look the same. The jig, in a sense, took

away our freedom as craftsmen in eighth grade.

We did not have the choice, sadly, to put that

hole wherever we wanted. Maybe I and my great

artistry wanted a hole that was off -center for

my clock, but instead we were putting them all

in the same place. So, it did limit our freedom

and our individuality. Certain options were just

not available to us, but it also guided our effort,

and it guided our effort toward a particular

end, a desired end, a clock that mom would actually

want to put on the wall. And it allowed us to

do it so that we didn't have to sweat each step,

each and every time, measuring both dimensions,

lining it up just right, holding it in place,

and then getting close enough but holding one

up to the next and realizing that everyone is

now different. The jig reduced my freedom, but

it also reduced the burden of the task. It stabilized

and it directed my effort. In his book, The World

Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford takes this

idea of a jig from shop class and extends it

out to the world as we experience it, and he

calls it a cultural jig. an aspect or an institution

or a norm out there in the world that constrains

the way we act and the way we live. An example

he uses is the Protestant work ethic that governed

so much of the culture of early colonial life

in certain parts of our nation. It was a jig

that encouraged industriousness, hard work, frugality,

so that these things didn't really have to be

literally taught to children. Instead, they were

just accepted as part of the world that we live

in. The culture was itself a kind of jig, which

of course now is long gone with consumer debt

and all of those things that now govern our financial

lives. Another example might be marriage. Marriage

is a formal set of rules. It's also a set of

informal norms. But marriage functions like a

cultural jig through these rules and through

these norms. It facilitates family formation.

It solidifies and it preserves economic stability.

It promotes virtues of love and sacrifice and

empathy and care. The family dinner table could

be a jig of sorts. It is a routine, a ritual

that brings the family together, that fosters

connection and communication and unity and eye

-rolling. Both of these examples limit freedom,

right? Young men will sometimes derisively speak

of marriage as being tied down. And our teenagers,

They would rather be out with their friends than

stuck, and they would use that word, stuck at

the table with dear old mom and dad and little

brother. But these constraints help direct us

toward higher goals, toward higher goods than

we in our total freedom and autonomy and independence

would probably be likely to choose. And even

if we did in our freedom choose them, We may

not have any idea how to achieve them or where

even to begin. And this, I think, is how spiritual

disciplines work. They're like jigs for the heart,

for the soul, for the mind, even for the body.

Routine practices that constrain us in a way

that lifts the burden of having to choose in

each moment how to reach life's highest goals.

how to make contact with life's deepest mysteries,

how to discover the presence of God in a confusing

and noisy and distracting world. Worship, for

instance, is a jig that gives us sanctuary from

the world, a language to articulate and to practice

our faith, and then sends us back out into the

world with renewed compassion and even hope.

Prayer. is a jig, a routine practice that opens

our eyes to things that cannot be seen, that

opens our stubborn hearts little by little to

transformation. Christian community is a jig

that cultivates honesty, humility, and vulnerability.

It promotes service and sacrifice and support.

Spiritual disciplines do constrain us. But they

also free us. They free us from having to make

every single measurement for every single cut,

from wandering aimlessly from one strategy to

the next, from being pulled this way and that

by the latest trends. We know when it comes to

our bodies that the choices we make today will

have consequences for our health tomorrow. So

why would the heart be any different? Why would

the mind or the soul be any different? In 1 Timothy,

it says, train yourselves in godliness. For while

physical training is of some value, godliness

is valuable in every way, holding promise for

both the present life and the life to come. Each

and every day, we are being shaped. We're being

formed by the choices that we make. by the habits

that we choose to adopt, by the practices that

we pour our energies into. And if we are opting

for freedom from constraints, freedom from discipline,

then we are still being shaped. We're just letting

ourselves be shaped by the default settings of

the world, the currents, the incentives of the

marketplace, the ever -shifting norms of our

culture. but we're still being shaped. We are

heart, soul, mind, and strength. These are our

God -given capacities given to us to tend, to

cultivate, and to put to good, fruitful, faithful

use. So let's not let them atrophy. Let's use

them and cultivate them, and let's direct them

toward what is good and true and right, toward

love. Let us pray. God, form in us the habits

that will shape us into the people You've called

us to be and to become, that our lives might

bear witness to Your love for this world. In

Jesus' name we pray. Amen.