File this away under Extremely Depressing. It caught my eye because of the very relevant, to me, and probably to the whole world, sermon text from Sunday. We’re working our way slowly through the gospel of John and have got to the end of chapter three after wending our way through the strange Nicodemus saga. Nicodemus is left there in the dark and suddenly the reader is reminded of John the Baptist and his brand wrecking decision to move his work north from Judea, maybe even as far as Samaria, leaving Jesus to the main stage. It seems like a non-sequitur, as so much of the whole gospel does, especially whenever John the Baptist is mention, but the concluding line of that section ties up the whole chapter with a punch to the ego. Perhaps you’ve stumbled over it as I have. John, comforting his fame-frustrated disciples, announces, “He must increase and I must decrease.”
Ugh. First of all, I don’t wanna. The idea of decreasing anything, except for the amount of laundry that needs to be done every week, is vexatious to my already impoverished spirit. I don’t want the amount of money we have to decrease, nor the hours in the day, nor my energy, nor anything. I always feel like I’m working with a loathsome deficit anyway. I don’t want to decrease, I want to increase.
Second of all, it is probably impossible. I don’t even know how. If I had to do this with my personality it would be depressing and terrible. I like to think of myself as effervescent and charming. I don’t want to sit back along the wall while Jesus increases in every direction, and I am poor and boring and cast aside.
But most of all, as you can see if you clicked that link, it is an idea fundamentally contrary to the spirit of the age. If you want succeed in life you have to build your personal brand. Your brand needs to be bigger and better and louder and more obvious. You need to be yourself More, and take More risks in the public square, and you need to everMore craft a persona for yourself that is easily identifiable by others so that you can be hired.
Never mind that being yourself is hardly compatible with crafting an image—indeed, for the ordinary person they are basically contrary. I want to be known for real, but that will not really improve my brand, because the pictures I take look stupid without filters and if you knew what I was really thinking you would not be my friend. Therefore, I don’t actually want to be known for real. I want to be known for who I want to be. Who I want to be is marketable and delightful and shiny and lucrative. Emphasis on the lucrative. And on the being liked by everybody.
Incidentally, if you scroll down and read about the author of the piece, you can see that she runs a ghost writing business. Truly, the best way to build your brand is to have someone anonymously do it for you. I Heart Modernity.
Anyway, if you’ve been a Christian for any length of time you will hopefully have experienced the relief of getting to be yourself with Jesus—usually in the desperation of prayer—and waking up to the fact that he didn’t chuck you out in horror. He saw you, he knew you, and he didn’t walk away. Indeed, as he saw you, you were able to see yourself and, though humiliated, you were able to stand up and be forgiven. What decreases, strangely, is the ugliness of who you are, so that you slowly become nicer to be with, hopefully. But that doesn’t brand well.
And it has to be about the brand. So there have got to be some nice Christian-ish ways to get around this. Maybe you can create the illusion of decreasing, while actually increasing. The de-conversion narrative is a lovely way to accomplish this. I was horrid and narrow before but now I’m lit so please still buy my book. And there is always Instagram where you don’t photograph yourself, but instead take a nice picture of your bible and your coffee cup. It’s all about Jesus…and me reading about Jesus but really Jesus. And then there’s my favorite, marrying heresy with self-absorption so that everything else is drowned out by the glorious sound of my own re-defined gospel voice, expression, and personality shouting about the new and better Jesus who looks exactly like me.
Cynicism aside, I think this might be one of those areas where Christians have to eventually opt out. If you are in a profession where you are the thing being paid for, and not the work that you do (oops, forgot about Facebook, I guess what I’m saying is not true but I’ll carry on anyway) it may be that you should find something else to do. Obscurity, though uncomfortable, isn’t the worst thing. Being poorer and more cast aside isn’t going to kill off the Christian population of the west. I mean—there might be eventual actual undignified death, look at John after all—but before that there is the quiet unknown life where you show up and do your job and refuse for any of it to be about you, and all of it to be about the grace and mercy of God.
As I said, it’s an impossible, inhuman task. But it is the task of being a Christian, of being made alive in the image of Christ, of dying the death of the self day by day, however painfully.
And now I will arise and go pretend to be holier than I am on social media. Pip Pip.
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