Age of Entertainment: "Worship"

A couple of weeks ago, I started discussing the idea that we are living in an Age of Entertainment. I've talked about love in this age and now I want to think some about worship.

The first 7 months of 2009 have seen a lot of deaths of people considered famous.

• Patrick McGoohan
  
• Ricardo Montalban
• Natasha Richardson
• Bea Arthur
• David Carradine
• Ed McMahon
• Farrah Fawcett
• Michael Jackson
• Billy Mays
• Karl Malden
• Steve McNair
• Walter Cronkite
• John Hughes

What was interesting to me surrounding these deaths was the amount of grief that accompanied some of them, particularly the death of Michael Jackson, which on one level is very understandable as is the grief surrounding any of these deaths. Because of their fame, they had a tendency to give people a common experience. People who loved Karl Malden's performances, people who loved Michael Jackson's music, people who loved watching Steve McNair play. They provided experience that many people could have together and so when they died, that grief provided another common experience for people to share.

What is curious to me is that it's very easy to transfer admiration into a form of worship. To so admire a person for what they are good at and ignore their flaws becomes dangerous, because it's so easy to put faith in a person and have that faith crushed. People believed that the hard-nosed admirable play of Steve McNair would transfer to him being a moral guy off the field as well, and that wasn't true.

The good thing about this is that it shows how much we want to be able to admire and look up to people, but it's so dangerous to put all our faith in people. People are screw ups. We fail. When we seek to worship something other than our Creator who made us, those pursuits ultimately become empty. Whether it's a person or a TV show or a piece of technology, those fall short. Devoting our lives to the pursuit of entertainment and pleasure falls short of devoting our lives to pursuit of what God wants us to be: people seek after him and look more like Christ.