Worshiping the wrong thing is a
longstanding human tradition. Whether it was the Israelites worshiping a calf
made of gold, Lystrian people worshiping Paul and Barnabas for their healing as
we read today, or the modern hero worship of celebrities, athletes, and the like
that we all participate in we love to worship people. We’re always making these
people into symbols—unreachable, perfect symbols.
Just think about celebrities. How long
will we be fascinated with a person? Only as long as they’re dating a
Kardashian, or only as long as they are attractive, or only as long as they can
dunk a basketball, or until Twitter stops caring about them. Then it’s over.
Maybe we reminisce about how awesome so-and-so used to be, but mostly we move
on to the next thing. This doesn’t trouble us, and why should it? These people
are only characters. We don’t know them. We wouldn’t know what to do with
ourselves if we met them. And, on the one hand, this is nothing new—there have
always been celebrities, natioinal heroes, religious leaders, etc.—but, on the
other hand, there are more people idolized today for many different reasons
than at any other time in history. Everybody has their niche person to idolize.
Celebrities are today what religious
healers were once upon a time. People loved them for their healing works and
for the blessings they reigned upon them; then they shunned them whenever they
tried to point to something greater than themselves. They shunned them all the
more when they had the audacity to suggest they were not God. People have
always wanted to worship people; not God.
We do this for really natural reasons,
because worshiping people allows us to keep believing deep within us that we
are God ourselves. If we can idolize a person, then we are only one step away
from being that person who others will idolize. This is tricky territory,
because it’s definitely OK to look up to positive role models. It’s OK to want
to be a great person, like so-and-so. But if we raise up a person on too high a
podium we tend to forget they are a human being, and then we are shocked when
they fail to live up to the impossible standards we have created. When that
happens our great heroes become villains because we can’t deal with our own
disappointment at their humanity.
We do this because we default to being moral
absolutists, by which I mean we are people who believe that a person can only
be good and right if they are always that way. If and when a person fails to be
perfect we discredit every part of them. We fail to separate the ideas, the
wisdom, and the entertainment from the flawed person behind it. And we do this
because it helps us feel morally superior. This way we can always turn on
celebrities and heroes and leaders of all kinds, because they always have some flaw. We know we would never say or do what they said
or did in their situation!
We live in a reality TV world where we
assume that everybody is a character playing a game; that everybody is
one-dimensional and we can understand them at a single glance. We tend to
operate like Hollywood
is the real world; like famous authors and screenwriters are the ones telling the
real stories; and our lives are only
important when they interact with the stories other people are telling us. This
is no way to live. The people we worship are a combination of good and bad;
people on TV and the movies start out no different from us; but what we do with
them tends to corrupt them as well as us. People are fallible. All of them. The
irony of people wanting to make Paul into a god in our reading from Acts is
that this is the guy who murdered Christians. Murdered. Christians. Let me
state that again: This is a guy whose entire life’s purpose for many years was
dedicated to killing innocent people because of their beliefs. Is this God
material? Do you really want a god who spent the better part of his adult life
committing genocide?
We make gods of TERRIBLE people, because
all of us have the capacity to be terrible. The best of us are sometimes at our
worst. It’s not that Paul was a completely wrong person who became completely
right when he converted to Christianity. Rather, he was a person who made
terrible choices who was confronted dramatically with the reality that he
himself was not god, and that the God of the universe works through weakness
and the road of the cross rather than the culture of celebrity and idol-making
that human beings so fancy.
When Paul and Barnabas cry out to the crowds,
saying, "Friends, why are you doing this? We are mortals just like you,”
they are like a whisper in the wind. The cult of celebrity is strong, but the
wise understand that it only ever lets us down. Fame is a beast that must be
eternally fed, and it eats away at people until they die to it.
This is why Christianity so matters in
this world. No religion that I know of rejects fame and momentary glory in the
way Christianity does. Of course that message gets corrupted by televangelists
in big stadiums telling you that God wants you to have a lot of money; it gets
corrupted by people claiming that God blesses people with long lives and good
things because of their faith; it gets corrupted by all of us from time to
time. But the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ remains the same: We were
dead in sin, but in Christ we are made a new creation. And we don’t get a
little better and a little better day after day. We die every day, and rise
again, because there is a part of us that is irretrievably corrupted. That’s
why we needed Jesus; it’s why we still need Jesus.
So, every time you worship at the cult
of celebrity—whether it’s an actor or an athlete, a pastor or an author, a
politician or a blogger, a news anchor or a satirist, a musician or a
producer—you run the risk of spiraling into a world that says we need no god
but them; that they are unapproachably wonderful; that the world is
black-and-white, and that godliness is achieved through fame. That is the
surest way to lose your faith, because there is no room for Jesus Christ in
that world. Jesus Christ bids disciples to come and die. No celebrity asks you
to do that, because it would cost them a Twitter follower.
I could end there, but I worry that what
you’ll take away from this is that celebrities are bad. What I mean to say
instead is that we are bad. At our core all of us are. We all want to be God,
and the only difference between you and me and Taylor Swift is that she has
enough people following her that she can fool herself into believing it’s true.
The fault is not hers alone but also the millions of devoted followers who can
no longer see the humanity in her.
This is what happens with preachers and
prophets, as surely as singers and athletes. Simply, this is what happens to
human beings. There is no difference between you and a celebrity, except you
are lucky enough to not have so many people so interested in making you
something you are not. You are free instead to be broken and the only public
apology you will have to make it for it is with this community each week when
you confess. None of us are perfect. We all make others into gods. In their
place, we’d gladly take the role of God our self. We are not so different—you,
and me, and Kim Kardashian. Just, some of us are lucky enough to not be famous.
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