American Idols – Fame

American Idols – Fame
Genesis 3
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
February 21, 2010

Note to reader: This is a manuscript and not a transcript.  While I prepare a manuscript, I don’t preach from it.  All the major points are here, but there are bound to be some small differences from the sermon as it was preached live.  Also, expect some “bonus” material that wasn’t in the live sermon.

Peace, Friends

What do you worship? That’s a question we may not ask ourselves, but the way we live our lives provides an answer. What most fully captures your attention and imagination? Money…power…sex? Through this series that we’re beginning we’ll be exploring six different idols that capture the attention and imagination of our American culture.  This series, like the last, Unpleasantville, will use the stories in the book of Genesis.  Today we begin with fame.  Let’s start with the scripture passage from Genesis chapter three.

Genesis 3 (NLT)

¹ Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the creatures the LORD God had made. “Really?” he asked the woman. “Did God really say you must not eat any of the fruit in the garden?” ² “Of course we may eat it,” the woman told him. ³ “It’s only the fruit from the tree at the center of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God says we must not eat it or even touch it, or we will die.” ⁴ “You won’t die!” the serpent hissed.

⁵ “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil.” ⁶ The woman was convinced. The fruit looked so fresh and delicious, and it would make her so wise! So she ate some of the fruit. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her. Then he ate it, too.

⁷ At that moment, their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they strung fig leaves together around their hips to cover themselves.

⁸ Toward evening they heard the LORD God walking about in the garden, so they hid themselves among the trees. ⁹ The LORD God called to Adam, “Where are you?” ¹⁰ He replied, “I heard you, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.” ¹¹ “Who told you that you were naked?” the LORD God asked. “Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?” ¹² “Yes,” Adam admitted, “but it was the woman you gave me who brought me the fruit, and I ate it.” ¹³ Then the LORD God asked the woman, “How could you do such a thing?” “The serpent tricked me,” she replied. “That’s why I ate it.” ¹⁴ So the LORD God said to the serpent,

“Because you have done this, you will be punished.
You are singled out
from all the domestic and wild animals of the whole earth to be cursed.
You will grovel in the dust as long as you live,
crawling along on your belly.

¹⁵ From now on, you and the woman will be enemies,
and your offspring and her offspring will be enemies.
He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

¹⁶ Then he said to the woman,
“You will bear children with intense pain and suffering.
And though your desire will be for your husband,
he will be your master.”

¹⁷ And to Adam he said,
“Because you listened to your wife
and ate the fruit I told you not to eat,
I have placed a curse on the ground.
All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.

¹⁸ It will grow thorns and thistles for you,
though you will eat of its grains.

¹⁹ All your life you will sweat to produce food,
until your dying day.
Then you will return to the ground from which you came.
For you were made from dust,
and to the dust you will return.”

²⁰ Then Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all people everywhere. ²¹ And the LORD God made clothing from animal skins for Adam and his wife.

²² Then the LORD God said, “The people have become as we are, knowing everything, both good and evil. What if they eat the fruit of the tree of life? Then they will live forever!” ²³ So the LORD God banished Adam and his wife from the Garden of Eden, and he sent Adam out to cultivate the ground from which he had been made. ²⁴ After banishing them from the garden, the LORD God stationed mighty angelic beings to the east of Eden. And a flaming sword flashed back and forth, guarding the way to the tree of life.

This is God’s story for us today.  Thank you, God.

“Fame?” you may be wondering.  Andy Warhol said that everyone in the future would have their fifteen minutes of fame, but how do you get fame out of this story?  Were Adam and Eve looking for fame?  No, probably not, but there are three themes that pop up in this story that in our culture add up to fame: knowledge, immortality, and beauty.  Add these three up in America and you’ve got fame.  Let’s take a look at each one.

Knowledge

In Genesis 3:5 we read about the serpent tempting Eve saying, “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil.”  Knowing.  There is a kind of infinite knowledge we seek in America.  It is a desire to know and experience everything first hand.  We are not content to rest in others’ knowledge.  We want to experience the knowing ourselves.  It is a function of our western individualism.  We are a Wikipedia generation.

Take media for example.  According to a University of California study, the average U.S. household consumes 3.6 zettabytes of information a year (TV, video games, internet, etc.).  One zettabyte is one billion terabytes or “the equivalent of the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.”  We consume a massive amount of information and knowledge!

The king of media these days may just be the internet.  Sarah and I don’t even have a TV.  Just a computer.  I was unable to find how much storage capacity the internet currently holds, but I did find the weight of the amount of information traveling across the internet.  According to Discovery Magazine, all those little ones and zeros behind all that information traveling across the internet are made up of electrons, and each of those electrons weighs something.  When you add up all those electrons the massive amount of knowledge and information passing through the internet ends up weighing only 0.2 millionths of an ounce!  That is “roughly the same as the smallest possible sand grain, one measuring just two-­thousandths of an inch across.”  So what does all that information really add up to?  Not much.  I’m reminded of a passage from Ecclesiastes which says, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (12:12).  I have that verse printed on all my bookmarks to remind me that knowledge without God doesn’t weigh much.

There isn’t anything wrong with knowledge.  Faith often seeks understanding.  We’re talking about priorities and proportions.  Idols are often good things taken disproportionately.  To dethrone this idol in your life, consider this week fasting from media. Turn off the TV.  Turn off the computer.  Turn off the radio.  Sit in an information silence this week.

Immortality

The serpent continues tempting Eve by contradicting God and saying, “You won’t die” (Genesis 3:4).  Our culture is always looking for the causes of death so we can escape death.  Do you know what the number one cause of death is?  Car accidents?  Heart disease?  Cancer?  No.  None of these is the number one cause of death.  The number one cause of death is birth.  If you are born, you will die.  My dad likes to say, “There are only two things you have to do in life, die and pay taxes.”  You can’t escape death.  It will come some day.

Last week’s Time magazine had a cover story titled “The Science of Living Longer.”  It’s something we all want to do, live longer.  In 2007 we spent $2.24 trillion on health care (New York Times Economics Blog).  That’s 16.2% of our GDP (Gross Domestic Product) or $7,421 a person.  We also spend $5 billion a year on vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements (CNN Money Magazine).

Then there’s our weight loss industry.  We spend $35 billion a year trying to lose weight, and still somehow amidst all this we’ve got a childhood obesity epidemic on our hands.  Once again, there’s nothing wrong with health care, vitamins, and trying to lose weight.  I myself have a covenant with my pants.  I will never leave them nor forsake them.  That means that when they’re too tight, instead of buying new pants, I lose some weight.  This covenant ends up costing me less over the long-haul (I eat less, and I spend less on clothes!).

The question here is one of proportion and priority.  The body is a temple of God’s Spirit, but don’t make it into an idol.  To resist this idol worship of wanting to live forever, this week consider remembering your mortality by reading the obituaries or visiting a graveyard.  One day you too will show up in one of these places.  One day you too will die.

Beauty

Beauty is funny thing.  It is one of the classic virtues.  The problem with beauty in our culture is that we have set a standard of personal beauty that most of us cannot achieve.  Our standard of beauty gets mixed in with our idol worship of immortality by focusing on youthful beauty.  We all want to be young in the way that we look.  And even the young want to look like someone else.  We are ashamed of how we actually look.  This isn’t something new.  Once Adam and Eve eat the fruit we read that, “At that moment, their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness” (Genesis 3:7).  Their nakedness, the beauty of their bodies, hadn’t been a problem before, but now having gained the knowledge that sin provides, they were ashamed of the beauty that God had made.

Women certainly take the brunt of this in our culture.  There are tons of things floating around on the internet that show how images of women get Photoshopped into a certain kind of mold.  Maybe one of the best is a Girlpower website that features a magazine cover called Metropolitan.  The magazine cover looks like any women’s fashion magazine that you could pick up in the checkout line of the grocery store, except that this magazine cover lets you see what the girl on the cover looked like before her body was cut and trimmed and painted.

One of the subtle ways that images like this affect us has to do with our teeth.  On this magazine cover you see the young woman with a set of bright white teeth with no gaps, but when you toggle the image to see what her teeth looked like before they were modified by Photoshop, you realize that like the rest of ours her teeth are yellow and like the rest of ours between them there are gaps.

This might not seem like much of a big deal, but I went to one of the big department stores this week and took a look in the toothpaste aisle.  I actually bought one of each kind of toothpaste that they sold (I’m going to donate all this toothpaste to Compassion Closet), and put them in bags based on which ones have whitening agents in them.  I ended up with three bags of whitening toothpaste and about a half a bag of non-whitening toothpaste!  This whitening toothpaste seems to me to be a fairly recent phenomenon.  What has happened, I think, is that we have seen Photoshopped images of people with pearly white teeth so often now that we think our teeth must be just as white.  The standard for what we are to look like is no longer real people but a created image.  Life imitates art.  We have lost the creature.

It might seem like the color of your teeth is a small thing to pick on.  Certainly it is.  The problem is that it is just the tip of the iceberg.  What happens when this same impulse to make a person look like a picture ends up going so far as Ralph Lauren took it in a recent photo shoot of model Filippa Hamilton.  They altered her waist to the point of absurdity.  She may have the proportions now of a Barbie doll, but if women try to emulate this look in the same way that we try to make our teeth look white, we’re going to have some seriously ill, both physically and psychologically, women.

Or take the case of skin bleaching.  Many of my black friends talk about skin bleaching techniques they or their family or friends have used to try to make their skin lighter because “white is beautiful and black is not” according to the standards of our culture.  There are many of these kinds of product out there.  The safety of some of them is questionable.

While women experience the brunt of this idol in our culture, men are not immune to it.  There is a relatively recent push for men toward what is referred to as “manscaping.”  This pressure to shave various parts of the body is coming from images men see in advertisements and movies.  A major razor company has a whole section of their website devoted to this practice with pithy little sayings about why it’s important for men to shave various body parts such as their armpits saying, “An empty stable smells better than a full one.”

We may have begun looking for fame but what we’ve ended up with is shame.  We are ashamed at how we look rather than content to be diverse reflections of the image of God.  To fight against this idol in our culture, consider this week trying to find the beauty in each person by seeing people with God’s eyes and as creatures made in the image of God.

Humility

As I said earlier, all of this is really a question of proportion.  Knowledge, health, and beauty are all at their fundamental essence good things that God has created, but our culture takes them and expands them out of appropriate proportion.  We seek infinite knowledge, immortality, and a youthful beauty that lasts forever.  I’d suggest that an antidote to all this is the practice of humility.

Going back to the story we read that the serpent says, “You won’t die!…God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5, NLT).  We want to be more than we are.  We want to be like God.

The problem is that we were already created not just in the image of God but also in God’s likeness.  We can’t do anything to be made like God.  Only God gives that gift.  Fame in our culture is a desire to be like God by what we do.  Rather than seek after this idol, let us first seek after God who is the only one who can give such gifts.  This is not about what we can do.  It is about what God can do.

May it be true in our lives by the power of God, whom we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Note:
For further reflection on the role of photoshop and images of beauty, check out this post.