Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.
—Romans 12:2a (The Message)
Whatever the culture is, if we’re following Christ, we’re going to be walking counter to it to some degree. That’s just how it is, because cultures are made up of people, and people are sinful, and thus every culture is sinful—even the best of them. Sometimes, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can influence your culture and make that less so, as William Wilberforce and the rest of the Clapham Sect did; but no one has yet succeeded in turning even one earthly society into a miniature of the Kingdom of God, and no one will until Jesus comes again. Following Jesus is always going to put you at odds with the world in any number of ways, big and small.
As such, the depressing thing about so much of the church is that we’re so comfortable, and so predictable. We can always tell ourselves that we’re countercultural, that we’re standing up for truth, because we’re happy to stand up for the truths that matter to our particular in-group in the face of opposition from those whom we do not fear and whose good opinion we do not value; but that doesn’t answer the bill at all. Even the pagans do that. When it comes to making our own little corner of the world uncomfortable, to challenging the particular subculture (or subcultures) in which we move, we tend to be missing in action. Liberals do not question the validity of same-sex marriage, nor do conservatives try to move the American flag out of the sanctuary; it just isn’t done. Why, if you tried that, the next person mad at you might be somebody you actually care about—and while that might be just what that person needs, we don’t want to face it.
Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Are we that unpredictable, or that uncontrollable? Are we that independent of the conventional assumptions and conclusions of our culture, or our family, or our particular set of close friends? Not really, no; most of us tend to conform pretty closely to the expectations of those whose approval we desire most. That is not Christlike living, however moral we might be by our own preferred standards; that is no sign of the life of the Holy Spirit in us.
Rather, the Spirit of God is at work in the people of God to break that conformity, to renew and transform and grow us into people who can no longer be confined by it. Being a Christian, living out the life of Christ, is not a matter of simply following a bunch of “thou shalt”s and “thou shalt not”s, as if outward conformity to some particular standard was sufficient; but neither is it about some free-form idea of “love” and “grace” that makes concrete standards of behavior irrelevant. Rather, it’s about something far greater than either: it’s about learning to walk according to the Spirit, opening ourselves up to be changed by the Spirit, from the deepest wellsprings of our behavior on out, so that our lives will be set free from the world’s mold, to be conformed instead to the character and the holiness of God.
If we’re truly living Spirit-filled lives, we’re going to make people uncomfortable. In particular, we’re going to tick off people who, if it were up to us, we would try very, very hard not to tick off. We’re going to be countercultural, not in some cheap fashion, but in a way that truly costs us; we’re going to be reminded that we worship a Lord who said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” We’re going to realize that Jesus could just as well have said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own teachers and colleagues and close friends and best allies, yes, and even the community whose approval he most desires, he cannot be my disciple.”
That’s because Jesus doesn’t call us and the Holy Spirit doesn’t empower us to be counter someone else’s culture, but to be countercultural in our own, in the one in which we live and work and play. God isn’t satisfied for us to tear down the idols we don’t worship, he wants us to reject the ones we do, and the ones we’re tempted to worship, the ones before which our theological and ideological soulmates bow. He raises up conservatives to be labeled unpatriotic, and liberals to be questioned as anti-gay, for being unwilling to let sacred cows lie. He calls us to ask the questions we least want asked, and to be willing to accept—and to give—the answers we don’t want to hear. He commands us to speak the truth, in love, yes, but so clearly and unflinchingly that we risk being rejected by our own people. After all, we’ve been given the Spirit of Christ, and isn’t that what Jesus did?