Celebrity worship

Who do you follow?  Who’s life would you give anything to have?  Listen to what Tim Keller says in his book the King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus.

Christina Kelly was a very successful editor of young women’s magazines; over a period of several years she was on the staff of Elle Girl, YM Jane and Sassy.  Some years back she wrote a confessional piece in which she asked:

Why do we crave celebrities?  Here’s my theory.  To be human is to feel inconsequential.  So we worship celebrities and we seek to look like them.  All the great things they have done we identify with in order to escape our own inconsequential lives.  But it’s so dumb.  With this stream of perfectly airbrushed, implanted, liposuctioned stars, you would have to be an absolute powerhouse of self-esteem already not to feel totally inferior before them.  So we worship them because we feel inconsequential, but doing it makes us feel even worse.  We make them stars, but then their fame makes us feel insignificant.  I am part of this whole process as an editor.  No wonder I feel soiled at the end of the day.

…To be human is to feel inconsequential.  Every one of us has at some time or other felt this kind of inexplicable sense of inconsequentiality, that we’re unclean, that we need to prove ourselves.  Popular culture says to us, “Ah, here’s a way to be clean:  Be pretty.  Have flawless skin.  Change your look.  Get thin.  Look like a celebrity.”  But Christina Kelly says the celebrities themselves are incredibly unsuccessful in dealing with their sense of inconsequentiality through their beauty, while the rest of us feel worse because we can’t even come close to them.

To an imperfect, flawed, inconsequential and incredibly self conscious world, the righteousness of God was revealed. To those who were riddled with guilt and shame, who were stained, marred and irreparably damaged the righteousness of God was revealed.  To those who would never be good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, or ever have enough the righteousness of God was revealed.

In Jesus God showed the world what it meant to be righteous, faithful and good.  In Jesus God demonstrated what true power, intellegence and security looked like.  Jesus modeled every glorious and beautiful virtue we look to when we celebrate the lives of celebrities.  But he did so without the help of airbrushes, photoshop or a publicist.  And most importantly he did so because we could not.  Not to prove to us that it could be done, somehow making us  feel even more inaedequate or inconsequential.  He did it FOR us.  He did it not to prove it, He did it to give it.

The rightousness of God was revealed so that we who were unrighteous would be the righteousness of God.  Because of this Jesus’ fame will not make you feel insignificant; it will never at the end of the day make you feel soiled.  It will give you significance and at the end of the day give you a new song.