Celebrity Worship
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
In the US, we have a celebrity problem with our politicians. And I don’t mean, necessarily, that our politicians are famous or capable of drawing crowds. What I mean is that we have started to believe and vote more and more in line with the idea that the best politician is one who has reached celebrity status. We treat them like celebrities. We align who we are with who they are.
If someone says something critical about a politician we vote for, we are at a point where that is taken extremely personally. It feels like an attack on us directly. We might not see the person we voted for as a deity, but I think we have an issue with our “worship” of them.
And we worship other celebrities, too. Don’t get me started on Taylor Swift fans. But this entire dynamic feels really creepy to this Pastor. Because now, since we are so personally aligned with the politician we voted for then when the politician we are aligned with creates an enemy for themselves, that enemy becomes our enemy, too.
And that is where we lose the plot as Christians. Because in our country, there is a vast subset of American Christianity that has a celebrity worship problem with our current president who has made enemies out of immigrants, people who disagree with him, people who rely on public benefits like SNAP, and whole countries like Venezuela and Nigeria.
But no matter who we vote for, or how we align in our politics, we don’t have the luxury of saying that our neighbor is our enemy. We can disagree with one another. We can strive againts one another’s competing agendas. We can have adversaries as Christians, but we cannot have enemies. And if others claim us as enemies despite that, we hearken to the words of Jesus to pray for those who persecute us.
It’s easier to worship a celebrity than it is to worship God, isn’t it? It’s easier to worship the politician who is appealing to the way we see the world and the future we imagine. It’s easier to worship the person who is trying to get us to like them and vote for them!
It can be hard to worship God when God calls us to an ethic of life that can sometimes be difficult. Because it is difficult to forgive people who hurt us. It is difficult to pray for our enemy. It is difficult to treat the foreigner as if they were a citizen. It is difficult to pray for people whom we vehemently dislike. (It is hard to remember that vengeance is God and not ours!)
But that is a primary call on our lives as Christians: to worship God, even when worshipping something or someone else is easier. Worshipping money, power, and status is easier than worshipping God who condemns the unscrupulous pursuit of money, who gave up power and became Emmanuel, God with us, and whose status on this earth was an itinerant homeless rabbi.
Worshiping God involves the difficult embrace of transformation: of becoming fully who God meant us to be and not remaining the person we are in a given moment.
Celebrity worship is easy because it demands very little of us while offering us nothing in return. Worshiping God is challenging while offering us a full life of purpose and connecting to the divine presence of the one who loves us and is love.
