Practice. It’s not a word people like much, is it? Practice.

Doing feels much better than practicing, right?

I heard an interview some years ago with Ray Charles on the occasion of his 67th birthday. He was releasing a 5 CD collection of his songs, celebrating his 50 years in the music business. The interviewer said, “Ray, do you still practice after all these years?”

Ray said, “I try to practice everyday.”

“What do you practice? The songs you’ll be playing in concert?”

“No. No. No. No. No. I practice scales and chords and movements. I practice to improve. I already know the songs I’m going to play in concert. I practice to be able to play the songs I’ll play someday.”

But that’s tough, isn’t it? We live in a society that wants things done now. People don’t want to have to spend all that time getting it right; they want satisfaction instantly. People would love to be marathoners, lose 30 pounds, learn a new language—but it’s the getting there that’s the tough part.

Wasting all that time getting it right. Come on. It’d be better if we were already excellent guitar players or sculptors or lawyers or accountants.

Wouldn’t it be nice to call ourselves those things, and have that be enough? Not have to practice?

Think about it, we have in this country an infatuation with antibiotics. Doctors are over-prescribing all sorts of drugs … but antibiotics in particular. People who have a cold or other viral infection demand antibiotics (even though antibiotics won’t touch viral infections).

(And don’t even get me started on Horse paste and malaria medicine.)

But because of this antibiotic obsession we’ve got problems: drug resistant bacteria from over-prescribing antibiotics. Instead of enduring some discomfort now, people would rather take a magic pill in the hopes that it will make all their ailments disappear. Instead of some Kleenex and chicken soup, people convince themselves that there must be a way of avoiding all the misery. Except it doesn’t work because antibiotics treat bacterial infections, not viruses. So, now we’ve got all kinds of problems that are going to be really difficult to fix.

But what do we expect in the land of Jiffy-Lubes and micro-wave ovens? We want what we want, and we want it now. Who wants to wait? Who wants to have to endure the drudgery of practice, and work?

People want what they want when they want it—all packaged and delivered with as little expenditure of their own energy as possible.

Christianity, which exists in this same culture, is often no exception. The idea of being Christian is still fairly popular—though much less so than even a few years ago—but the actual living of it isn’t nearly as appealing. James anticipates this. He begins his letter by saying, “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves” (James 1:22).

Which is to say, James isn’t impressed with the tendency to want our faith served to us in bite-sized, pre-digested nuggets that don’t put any strain on our gastrointestinal system.

Easy tips, helpful hints about how to be nicer people, how to hold back the darkness that inevitably descends on all of us. Worship that makes people feel better about lives filled with too much stuff and too little care for others.

Evangelism that seeks to swell the rolls and increases the budget, but doesn’t ask folks to commit to living as if God’s new creation and its commitment to peace and justice were already here.

Easy believe-ism that doesn’t ask people to repent of their racism, homophobia, misogyny, and xenophobia, but tells them that all they need to do is salute the flag, oppose gay wedding cakes, and avoid sleeping with the wrong people.

You wouldn’t believe the amount of email I get purporting to tell me how our church, without any real effort, can bring people through the doors in droves. A flashy web site here, a hip new program there, and pretty soon we’ll have people flocking to “find out what’s happening at Douglass Boulevard Christian Church.” If only we’d expand our parking, or retool the music, or serve lattes in the narthex, or make the sermons more “relevant,” we’d have so many people we wouldn’t know what to do with them all.