07/22/2026
The Illusion of Control and the Roots of Our Habits
Robert Shannon Conaway
Genesis 25:19-34; Psalm 119:105-112; Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23;
If you pay close attention to how we move through the world, you will notice that our daily lives are sprinkled with little rituals.
You make a hopeful statement about the future—"I think I’m finally over this cold," or "The car has been running great lately"—and without even thinking, you reach out and knock on a wooden table. A friend sneezes, and instinctively, you say, "Bless you." You are walking down the sidewalk, see a ladder leaning against a building, and subtly adjust your path to walk around it rather than underneath it. You hope for a good outcome, so you cross your fingers behind your back.
We call these superstitions. We treat them as harmless quirks of human behavior. But what many people do not realize is that nearly all of these common superstitions have their roots deeply embedded in early Christianity.
When you say "God bless you" after a sneeze, you are echoing an edict from Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century. During an outbreak of the bubonic plague, sneezing was often the first symptom that someone had fallen ill. The Pope ordered Christians to immediately bless the sneezer to ward off the disease and commend their soul to God.
When you knock on wood, you are practicing a distilled, watered-down version of an ancient Christian habit of touching the wood of the True Cross for miraculous protection.
When you avoid walking under a ladder, you are observing an early church teaching. A ladder leaning against a wall forms a triangle—a symbol of the Holy Trinity. To walk through that triangle was considered an act of defiance, breaking the sacred symbol and inviting the presence of evil.
When you cross your fingers for good luck, you are mimicking the secret signals used by early Christians facing severe persecution under the Roman Empire. When believers met in secret, they would cross their index fingers with one another to form the sign of the cross—a hidden handshake of solidarity, safety, and shared faith.
And why do buildings often skip the 13th floor, or why do we fear having thirteen people at a dinner table? Because there were thirteen people sitting at the Last Supper, and the thirteenth to arrive was Judas Iscariot.
These behaviors started as expressions of faith, solidarity, and a desperate plea for divine protection in a terrifying, unpredictable world. But over the centuries, they lost their theological roots. They became disconnected from the God they originally pointed toward. They turned into magic. They became shortcuts—little spells we cast to give ourselves an illusion of control over a future we cannot predict.
And that human desire—the craving for a quick fix, an immediate guarantee, a magical shortcut to security—is exactly what our scriptures address today.
In the Book of Genesis, we encounter two brothers who are fundamentally at odds with one another: Jacob and Esau. Esau is a hunter, a man of the outdoors, someone who lives entirely in the physical reality of the present moment. Jacob is quiet, dwelling in tents, calculating and forward-thinking.
The story in Genesis 25 captures the tragedy of living only for the immediate. Esau comes in from the open country, famished. He is tired, he is hungry, and his physical discomfort overwhelms all sense of perspective. He sees Jacob cooking a pot of lentil stew and demands some.
Jacob, ever the opportunist, says, "First sell me your birthright."
The birthright was no small thing. It was the spiritual and material inheritance of the family. It carried the covenant promise of Abraham—the promise that through this family, the entire world would be blessed. It was a profound, eternal, generational weight.
But Esau cannot see the eternal. He is blinded by his immediate hunger. He says, "Look, I am about to die! What use is the birthright to me?"
Esau exaggerates his peril. He wasn't actually going to drop dead on the spot from skipping one meal. But his anxiety, his discomfort, and his physical craving created a tunnel vision. He wanted an immediate solution. He traded an eternal, sacred legacy for a bowl of red stew.
How often do we do the exact same thing? We trade the deep, slow, steady work of faith for the quick fix of superstition. We trade the long-term cultivation of spiritual roots for the immediate gratification of whatever "stew" the world is offering us today—be it wealth, status, momentary distraction, or the illusion of safety. We knock on wood because it’s easier than getting down on our knees and surrendering our anxieties to God. We cross our fingers because hoping for "luck" requires less of us than cultivating genuine, resilient hope.
Esau’s tragedy was a tragedy of blindness. He could not see what truly mattered.
Jesus understands this human condition perfectly. In Matthew 13, he steps into a boat, pushes out from the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and teaches the crowds using the Parable of the Sower.
He speaks of a farmer scattering seed. Some falls on the path and is snatched away by birds. Some falls on rocky ground, springs up quickly, but wilts under the scorching sun because it has no root. Some falls among thorns, and the w**ds choke the life out of it. And finally, some falls on good soil, producing a massive harvest.
Later, Jesus explains the parable to his disciples. He tells them that the seed is the word of the kingdom.
Notice what happens to the seed on the rocky ground. Jesus says this is the person who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy. But they have no root in themselves. When trouble or persecution comes along, they quickly fall away. This is the "quick fix" faith. This is the faith of superstitions and crossed fingers. It wants the immediate joy, the quick blessing, the magical protection—but it refuses to do the hard, unseen work of growing roots into the dark earth. When the sun beats down—when the cancer diagnosis comes, when the job is lost, when a relationship fractures—a shallow, superstitious faith withers.
Then consider the seed sown among thorns. Jesus says this is the person who hears the word, "but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing."
The thorns are the modern equivalents of Esau’s red stew. They are the immediate, screaming demands of our present lives that blind us to our spiritual birthright. The "cares of the world" convince us, just as Esau was convinced, that we are "about to die" if we don't get what we want right now. The lure of wealth, the pursuit of status, the relentless 24-hour news cycle of outrage—these are the thorns that choke out our ability to hear God. We become so consumed by the anxieties of the moment that the eternal word cannot breathe in us.
If superstitions are our attempt to magically control the dark, and if the thorns are the anxieties that blind us, what is the antidote? How do we become the "good soil"?
We find the answer in Psalm 119. The psalmist writes: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path."
This is one of the most famous verses in all of scripture, but we often misunderstand it. We want God’s word to be a floodlight. We want it to illuminate the next twenty years of our lives. We want to see the destination, the pitfalls, the timeline, and the guaranteed outcome. We want certainty.
But God does not offer a floodlight; God offers a lamp.
In the ancient Near East, a lamp was a small clay vessel filled with oil, holding a tiny, flickering wick. If you held it down by your feet on a pitch-black night, it cast just enough light to show you your next step. It did not illuminate the forest. It did not show you the wolves hiding in the brush three miles away. It only showed you where to place your foot right now so you would not stumble.
Superstition demands to control the future. Faith is the willingness to take the next step in the dark, trusting only in the small, flickering light of God’s word.
To walk with a lamp requires you to move slowly. It requires you to be present. It requires you to pay attention. You cannot sprint through the dark with a clay lamp. You must walk deliberately, deeply rooted in the present moment, listening to the voice of God. This is the good soil. Jesus says the good soil is the one who "hears the word and understands it."
Understanding does not happen by accident. We must actively ask God to remove our blindness. We must ask God to help us look past the red stew and the choking thorns.
In 1895, a music teacher from Illinois named Clara H. Scott wrote a hymn that perfectly captures this necessary prayer. The lyrics are a quiet, desperate plea for spiritual clarity:
Open my eyes, that I may see Glimpses of truth thou hast for me; Place in my hands the wonderful key That shall unclasp and set me free. Silently now I wait for thee, Ready, my God, thy will to see; Open my eyes, illumine me, Spirit divine!
Clara Scott understood what Esau did not. She understood what the rocky ground and the thorny ground lacked. She understood that we are naturally blind to the things of the Spirit, and that we need divine illumination to see properly.
When we pray, "Open my eyes," we are asking God to break us out of our petty, superstitious need for control. We are asking God to show us the deep soil of our own hearts. We are asking for the wonderful key of understanding that unlocks the seed of the Gospel, allowing it to finally take root and bear fruit.
Faith is not about avoiding ladders. It is not about keeping thirteen people away from your table—Jesus intentionally sat down with thirteen, knowing full well it would cost him his life, because his love was greater than any omen of bad luck. Faith is not crossing your fingers behind your back; it is opening your hands, palms facing upward, ready to receive whatever God is pouring out.
The next time you find yourself knocking on wood to ward off a bad outcome, stop. Let that wooden table remind you of the wood of the cross. Let it remind you that you do not need to cast a spell to be safe. You are already held by the God who conquered death on that wood.
The next time you are tempted, like Esau, to trade your deep spiritual peace for the immediate gratification of a quick fix, pause. Wait silently for God. Ask the Spirit divine to open your eyes.
Let us leave the magic to the marketplace. Let us leave the shallow soil behind. Let us pick up the lamp of the Word, trusting it to illuminate our very next step, and walk boldly into the dark, our eyes wide open to the truth of God’s redeeming love.
Amen.
