The previous post made the point that we will always have celebrities. It’s part of the human experience – some are more “famous” than others. So I see no point in trying to find ways to stop celebritism. Therefore, like with most things beyond our control, I’m more interested in how we respond.

But as usual, first a little context.
As mentioned in the About Page, among my interests, is the intersection of faith and culture. So I always have an eye on pop-culture.

Like most people, I scan the tabloids when I’m in line and a couple were featuring the latest on Lindsay Lohan. As usual, the picture they chose was well, let’s say it was one she would never use as her Facebook profile pic. It was not only intentionally non-glamorous but highlighted her anguish adding credibility to the headline. Like many celebrities, she was being objectified for the opposite reason of her success – her failure. I realized something I realized many times before but always quickly forget – she’s like anyone of us.

If she were a member of my youth group, I would have been heartbroken for her. If a friend was sharing about a some girl named Lindsay, I would have listened and been sympathetic, maybe even remembered in my prayers that evening. But this is was a character on a screen somewhere and now she was on a tabloid cover which I have been conditioned to understand “This is just entertainment to be consumed, it’s not real”.

Like I said, I have already thought through this but here’s what I’ve learned about our engagement of celebritism in line that day.

If we care too much and obsess and create “gods” out of the famous, we don’t actually deify them, we dehumanize and objectify them. Because in our minds, it’s still about us and what they do for us so to speak.

On the opposite end, if we villainize too much or are too apathetic, we dehumanize and objectify them in another way. Because still in our minds, it’s about us and what they don’t do for us. In short, they’re not deserving our honor or worth our concern.

We have the potential to do this with just about everyone from the marginalized and oppressed to the family member or coworker.

When we recognize that all have been created in the “image of God” and ask God for the eyes to see all people as He sees them, that’s when the man-made idea of “celebritism” not only becomes irrelevant but when we live in the better way that God intended.

More to come … hope you stay tuned.

Every so often I think about the idea of celebrity and what it does to us, to society and to the individual him/herself. Being a pastor, this eventually brings me to the idea of the “Christian celebrity”. Initially, I think the term is ridiculous but by the end of the thought, I find it somewhat normal, unavoidable, maybe even necessary.

In light of this year’s Mark Driscoll drama, last year’s Rob Bell hoopla and the countless others that have and will happened, we need to put “celebritism” in its place. This series of posts will hope to offer a perspective on that.

For the purpose of these posts, I am simply defining “celebrity” as a famous person; one that has recognition.

It happens on every level. At the summer camp I went to, I remember hearing someone saying, “John is like the ‘camp celebrity’ here”. Until then, I didn’t know we could simply create one. Though I never formally inquired, I figured there was paperwork involved and the signing of petitions, applications and a celebrity ordination council of some sort. Turns out, when enough people think it and say it and it affects social behavior, you become one.

Susan and I saw Jimmy Fallon walking through the Theater District in NYC and while neither of us are fans of his (Fever Pitch sucked!), it’s not every day you see a celebrity and we probably talked about it for a few minutes and told people when we got home that we saw Jimmy Fallon and muttered ‘hey’. “No, we don’t think he heard us.”

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I got excited about seeing certain people. You would probably be lying too. Maybe you can’t think of anyone in your “bored moment of life” right now but if you have ever been out in public and someone yells, “(insert name of prominence) is here!” Everyone, and I bet you included, everyone gets a bit excited and the dynamics of that place change.

Almost two years ago, a few friends and I threw ourselves on the hood of the vehicle carrying Tom Wright as a reenactment of those numerous pictures of teen-age girls chasing after the Beatles, “OMG It’s the Bishop! (sorry guys, I know I swore I wouldn’t mention that but …). Ok, maybe we didn’t do that and I’ll only speak for myself,but I was definitely excited to see him. I tend to get more excited about people who have influenced/informed my thinking. I have numerous examples.

Among the problems with “celebritism” is that it takes on a life of its own. Some are treated as “gods”. Some start thinking they are. Attention changes us. Imagine if suddenly everyone you walked past recognized you and wanted to strike up a conversation with you. Or if they ran up to you in “shock and awe and tears” and wrapped their limbs around you and screamed in your ears. It would change you.

Many like to say that they are against the idea of celebrity. They may say it’s ridiculous and unnecessary and talk about how awful our culture is. Some think that eventually they will go away. They won’t. And while there are many aspects of “celebritism” that are ridiculousness or disturbing, there are other aspects that simply point to the human experience – some humans are more well known than others. This is why the celerbity won’t go away.

There will always be famous people among us. Even in ancient times, there were celebrities. They are among the names that are talked about today. Moses, King David, Cleopatra, Confucius, Jesus to name a few. Prophet, warrior, royalty, teachers, and the second person of the Trinity have had their names celebrated in their lifetimes and remembered long after.

It’s not a recent phenomenon. Paparazzi (and tabloid culture, TMZ) is a more recent phenomena in human history but famous people, well again that’s normal. We will always have celebrities, now what?

Next we tackle our response to “celebritism” in society, in our church, and in our hearts.
Stay tuned, consider subscribing and see you around.

Two weeks ago, Monday was called, “Blue Monday”. When I heard that, I found it to be a bit offensive since it was Martin Luther King Day as well. But “Blue Monday” is described as the most depressing day of the year. The term is attributed to the the third Monday of the year. The credit card bills have come in, the resolutions have already been dismissed and the new year has well, lost its newness. Sadly, this day also contains stories of actions brought by depression, attempted suicides, drug abuse, violence and more. I thought it was appropriate that our church began it’s new year of Celebrate Recovery on “Blue Monday” and created a post-year resolution to pray for that ministry every Monday.

Then this past Monday, was the Chinese New Year. For those that don’t know, it’s the Year of the Dragon – which quite frankly sounds awesome. It also sounds a bit crazy but since seeing How To Train Your Dragon, I’m no longer scared of these creatures and should I encounter one, I’ll use the same techniques demonstrated in the movie. This would also be a tremendous aid in providing flights for the family, so I’m all for the Year of the Dragon. But I digress.

We have a Mandarin-speaking LIFE Community that meet at the church on a night where I am there so every so often, I like to drop-in. This week I knocked, they welcomed me, as they always do. I wished them a “Happy New Year”, they thanked me and I tried to make a joke about what do they drop to mark the new year. Crickets. I asked what was the significance of the Dragon and they laughed at that (Crickets in my mind yelling, “Clarify – it’s really a question.”). I eventually got some answers, the primary one begin it’s the “lucky year” and left the room wondering if it would be a good idea for Americans to do something similar. I mean we mark so many of our days, why not our years?

Later an older Chinese gentlemen at a coffee shop struck up a conversation with me about my mug (It’s pretty awesome, it’s made of porcelain and has a lid). I asked him where he got his iPad case, he said, “China.” I wished him a happy New Year – “I hear it’s the year of the dragon, what does that mean by the way?”

Between the two conversations I heard various thoughts. The dragon of course, is the Chinese national symbol. One person said some people want their babies born this year because it’s special. Another said, it’s just like any other year, really. These things are just part of the culture.

I couldn’t help but wonder if even on this luckiest of years, if I was a member of the Chinese population, would I really think it’s a lucky year? As a member of this population, I do and don’t really believe in “luck”. I think the human experience is based on probabilities, anomalies and divine providence that are true but mysterious and completely unpredictable. This helps me process the reality of tragedy, blessing and everything in between.

I thought about those who experience countless “Blue Mondays” throughout the year. I thought about the families in the Chinese population that are forced to give up/abort their babies because of the One Child Act. I thought of those trying to bring help, peace and hope like Celebrate Recovery and All Girls Allowed (I posted about earlier about them here).

Hope in the midst of pain.

I just finished co-teaching a class on the Psalms and among the gift of teaching is relearning and newly learning material that though you may not use in the next class, they help nurture your soul. Among the blessings, is that the reminder that many of the Psalms of praise to God were written in great distress.

I think of Psalm 31:24 “Be strong and courageous, all of you who put your hope in the Lord.”

Among my prayers today is that all would find the hope that God offers through Jesus. It’s not a “fingers-crossed”, “tails never fails” sorta thing. I believe hope is a type of confidence in the divine and I believe it’s found in the Lord’s presence. And among my prayers is that those who seek shall find.

May today be “Hope Monday” and may our year be filled by them.

I’ve fallen behind on blogging through our sermon journey but be assured – it’s not because they’ve been lacking in substance. What’s somewhat true of me is the more I like something, the more time it takes me to post about it. It’s part of the procrastinator-perfectionist nature thing that I self-diagnosed myself with back in college. (Never saw myself as a perfectionist and I don’t think it adequately describes me.  I barely care about speling and gramar and punctuation?  I’ll let you know when I find a set of terms that suffices ;)

In all truth, the message that began the year was very excellent. It was entitled, “Words of Wisdom” and focused on Ecclesiastes 3. My goal for these posts are not to summarize the message but more to offer a my personal reflection having received the message so after a few weeks of a thought or two rattling around here we go. But as always, you can listen to the message here.

I love Ecclesiastes 3 because it contains extremes and so much tension. It’s all about life and death, love and hate and so much in between. Bryan talking about the nature of time and how we interacted with it. He sprinkled lyrics of a few songs dedicated to various generations. The Boomer’s had “Turn, Turn, Turn” by The Byrds, The X’ers had Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Time” (such a good song) and the Millennials had song by Molly Cyrus (Lol – Go Hannah Montana!).

As the sermon went on, I remembered this line from a Mars Hill Audio Journal selection I heard a few years back (MHA is like a NPR style “audio journal” hosted by the very sharp, Ken Myers. Prior to seminary, this was one of the fixes that filled my nerdy appetite. One of my resolutions is to listen again, so far so good). I don’t remember who Ken was interviewing but someone said, “We need our pastors to be more like philosophers and theologians and our philosophers and theologians need to be more like our pastors.” As one who celebrates balance and paradox, this made a lot of sense to me.

Not only do our pastors need to think more like philosophers – I think all believers do. Especially because the definition of philosophy means “lover of wisdom”. Growing in wisdom is something we should all keep pursuing. This was among the reasons that I liked this message – it had a philosophical bent to it and it was delivered to the congregation.

What encouraged me was that so many others expressed their appreciation for the message. Just the other day, someone referenced it again to me. It’s odd because I find that many people tend to push things like philosophy away. “It’s boring, stuffy and I don’t like the old white guy’s cardigan” are among the reasons I’ve heard.

If it weren’t for Christianity, I may have majored in philosophy … and been unemployed – kidding, sort of. I find philosophy to be fun, interesting, a secondary but necessary discipline to compliment all facets of life. I just couldn’t imagine doing it as a vocation, I just don’t have the capacity for it (and I don’t wear cardigans, even though they are back in style). But I digress – I really think that we need to be more philosophical.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” said the original cardigan-wearer Socrates. I’d like to think that I’ve taken lines like that seriously. There is a tremendous need to examine life, chase down the doubts, question the answers, question the questions, study, discuss, pray, reflect and dig out the “splinters of the mind.” Since that message, I think I feel a little more vindicated for spending time on things like blogging (and thanks to those who have given so much encouragement over the years. You’ve been just as helpful to me).

So if I can offer a word or two of encouragement, continue to examine the aspects of life that need to be examined. You don’t have to wear a cardigan to be a philosopher of your life, we just ought to spend more time thinking about how we are living and what’s going on around us.

A year ago last week, Susan and I spent our anniversary weekend in Manhattan. Because we lived so close to the city, we never had the experience of staying over, so with her parents watching the boys, we decided that our birthday gifts (both of ours in December), Christmas and anniversary gifts would be a weekend in NYC. We loved it – the city, the weather, even Priceline was good to us.

We ended up having a conversation at one of our favorite restaurants, (Dos Caminos!) that would not only change the direction of our year, but introduce a new chapter of life. We talked about a number of things ranging from marriage and ministry to a possible third child to perhaps moving on from the life we enjoyed in Jersey. Being our anniversary, the conversation had more of a brainstorming-dreaming out loud feel but in looking back, it’s become a turning point and served as a springboard for what would happen next.

We enjoyed our time away, thanked and sent off my in-laws and started to settle back into the new year. But everything changed when later that week Susan took a pregnancy test and said, “You’re not going to believe this. That conversation we had speculating on whether we wanted a third child – well, I was already pregnant when we talked about it!” I was excited, that conversation honestly revealed how I felt – I was excited to have another child, provided that she would be a girl, able to secure a full scholarship at a desirable school and promise not to bring in country music into our home. Susan was also excited too, I imagine for different reasons though.

There’s nothing like the news of having a baby to get you moving off your butt. We needed to create a plan that could adapt to multiple possibilities. There was a bit to lose, our life in Jersey was fairly comfortable, though not sustainable in the long run. We loved our church, loved our friends, loved living outside one of the most exciting cities in the world but staying contained a different set of variables that we left us unsettled. For a while, I didn’t know if it was a lack of faith, wisdom, or diligence – soon we would be praying for all that and more.

There was a lot going on in my mind that I’ve been hoping to blog about. Many things I was loving were feeling that they might be coming to a close. For instance, I loved youth ministry, loved trying to invest in the lives of young believers and seekers but some of my other ideas were not going to work in youth ministry and I started to wonder what that meant in terms of my calling. A large part of me thought that I could stay in youth ministry for another season but through a series of conversations and events from trusted people, another voice emerged that said perhaps something different was happening. Maybe more on that another time.

Of course there were other factors going on, like the fear of living in parsonage for 10 years, not creating equity and then trying to move on (we had just crossed the 5 year mark) and things like health insurance realities and a few other uncertainties. These are the conversations that many ministry-types are having. Many wonder of the goodness and difficulties of being bi-vocational, seminary-trained, the sustainability of small, mid-size and large churches. Indeed, so many people in so many vocations are having similar discussions – may God give us wisdom.

In all honesty, I was finding myself a bit overwhelmed. My prayer-life took a different direction around then. I even started fasting weekly and this would include different types of fasts: meals, technology and other forms of consumption. I know that sounds really spiritual and wonderful so let me also say that many times, the stress and frustration would get the best of me. Many days, I would find myself angry and pre-occupied which highlighted the need to be in prayer.

It was in this tension that I believed that the Lord spoke to Susan and I in various forms including conversations with close ones, potential employers, career placement services, rejections, invitations and that hard-to-describe “inner voice” that eventually becomes direction. This season became one of the healthiest times we’ve had and were feeling pretty good about the home our boys were in and eventually a baby girl.

Of course, I didn’t realize it would be my last winter in Jersey, but these days as I pick out particular sweaters and click through pictures from last year, I have this thought, “Wow, a year ago, we were ….” And I guess that’s part of why I’ve been thinking about this post.

The other reason is that it’s just about every week that I talk to someone about life-change. And while there is no such thing as a perfect-life, we are very grateful to be where we are and where we were. It’s my hope that anyone reading this seeking change consider two things. One, to not be afraid of the possibilities and two, to prayerfully move forward. Feel free to message me if I can be of any help.