Sermon : On Why ‘Hero’ and ‘Celebrity’ Aren’t the Same

I have been developing a list of all the great or amazing or life-changing moments on TV. There was that moment when Walter Cronkite announced that J.F.K. had been shot or when the U.S. hockey team won the Olympic gold medal. That was the extent of my list until a couple of months ago, when another memorable moment crept onto the TV screen, quite by accident, I’m sure. To have experienced this magical moment, you would have to be a channel switcher. I have long since worn the paint off the button of my remote control and raised a huge callus on my button-pushing finger searching for those elusive moments of significance on TV.

It was late at night. David Letterman had Channel 2, Jay Leno had Channel 4 and I had my remote control. Then it happened. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern were on the air at exactly the same time. Knowing from previous experience that nothing of significance was likely to come from either of them, I felt free to switch back and forth at will.

That’s when I experienced the amazing moment. It came in the form of a revelation, the realization that these two guys, who look so different and claim such diverse political turf, were exactly the same. Both of them spoke as if they held a monopoly on truth and anyone who disagreed with them had the brains of a slug.

This self-ordained omnipotence seems to give permission for an arrogance and rudeness of speech not usually tolerated in mere mortals. They both unilaterally exempt themselves from any need for sensitivity to how their remarks might affect and hurt other people and certainly from any vestige of politeness. And they both appeal to narrow slices of society that most of us would rather not think about.

Stern’s slice lined up by the thousands at a local bookstore recently. It was an amazing spectacle, all those people jamming into a bookstore for perhaps the first time in their lives and leaving with the first book some of them had ever purchased, without a centerfold, and perhaps the first book some had ever read. When I saw it on the TV news, I felt compelled to call up “America’s Most Wanted” and say, “I found them all.”

Must everything on radio, TV and even in book stores be a freak show? TV talk shows offer the invitation in the closing credits, “If you are a misfit or a curiosity of nature, call us and we’ll put you on TV.”

Then there is Michael Jackson, who probably holds the record for the most media time devoted to someone who hasn’t actually been charged with a crime. It’s not because he is a star as much as it is the fact that his story is so strange and strange makes good TV.

What does it say about our society when all our heroes are freaks and the only talk that is stimulating to us is shallow and insulting? When the poet laureate of the youth culture is a rapper whose poetry, if all the expletives were deleted, would fit on a postage stamp. It means that we have grown comfortable with the lowest common denominator--the art of pleasing without stretching. We make heroes of people who tell us that the precious little we are is quite enough; we love them because they require nothing of us except our adoration and our checkbooks.

Real heroes, like real literature, challenge us to be more than we ever imaged we could be. Real heroes understand that because of their celebrity status their words carry special power and, therefore, must be chosen with that much more care. All those real heroes in this time or in the past share one lovely virtue lost on the present crop of hero wanna-bes: humility. Let us choose our heroes carefully; a hero and a celebrity are not the same thing. It matters whether their speech and manner are defined by the word “grace” or “gross.”

I think of the simple admonition of Paul the Apostle in the book of Philippians: “Finally, brother and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”