Thursday on the Michael Medved radio show is Disagreement Day. On Thursdays, he sets an hour aside specifically for people to tell him he’s wrong about homosexuality, tax policy, and George Bush’s culpability in blowing up the World Trade Center.
Today, he had a call from a young man who wanted to disagree with him on the legalization of drugs. This caller said he smoked pot every day, and it wasn’t doing him any harm. He mentioned, as an aside, that he was a “born-again Christian.” Medved, who is Jewish but who knows quite a lot about our beliefs, questioned him more closely on that point. It turned out that he did not go to church at all, and had recently moved into his first house “with my girlfriend.”
I suppose there’s an element of Pharisaism in my response to that call. Certainly I fail to live up to the standards of Christianity in many areas of my life, not least in my cowardly flight from almost all personal interaction with other humans. But I think I can claim (at a minimum) that I know I’m doing wrong, and that I acknowledge that I ought to do better. I’ve been given grace to feel some guilt. I’m afraid that Michael Medved’s young caller is representative of many people who claim Christian faith in our country today. He didn’t seem to be aware that a Christian is called to live in any way that’s at all different from his neighbors.
I don’t know for a fact that this is true of the caller, but I think a lot of people claim Christianity purely as a nostrum for their own spiritual aches and pains. “Try Jesus! Now in Extra Strength! He’ll have you feeling better in no time!”
In point of fact, genuine Christianity often makes a person much less comfortable in life. We have been promised persecutions and tribulations, and to be reviled for Jesus’ sake. The joys and consolations of Christian faith have absolutely no necessary connection with comfort.
Lutherans like me have a complicated relationship with the book of James, where it says, “Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” (James 2:17) We don’t interpret that to mean that faith and works are equal partners in the operation of grace. We reject absolutely the idea that any effort of our own can contribute to our salvation.
But, as we read it, works are the sign and byproduct of grace. You can tell a genuine faith from a false faith by looking at its fruits. If someone is living no differently than he did before his “conversion,” it’s probably not a genuine one. Someone has paraphrased Luther as saying, “We are not saved by faith and works, but by faith that works.”
