The Stig: Who Is That Masked Man?
What Top Gear Can Teach Us About Christian Life
You have to be even older than I am to remember the Lone Ranger in his pomp. Nobody knew who he was, the story went, but they could definitely tell where he'd been.
This week, the same question's been asked all over the Twitter-sphere and in not a few of the nation's newspapers. This time, the hero of the hour is a man in a funky, futuristic helmet who drives cars around a test track on TV.
'Who is the Stig?' screamed the headlines. Hold the presses chaps: a modern Scarlet Pimpernel is about to become a little less elusive.
As I write, wily Top Gear executives are probably devising ways to use all the hoopla to their advantage. Perhaps they'll replace the Stig with a different celebrity mystery driver each week - 'Celebrity in a Reasonably Priced Helmet' perhaps?
In a week of stories about trapped miners in Chile and the like, using column inches on a story like this might appear vacuous. Yet it reveals something important about our society.
In an age of rampant celebrity culture, I think people find it refreshing that someone of clear talent, in a popular entertainment genre, would sign up to remain anonymous.
Yes, the driver now wants to cash in on his character's popularity, but only after six years of hiding his light under the proverbial bushel.
Actually, celebrity is more than a culture today; it's an industry. People will jump through all manner of hoops, risking ridicule and even emotional breakdown, to grab their chance at instant fame.
Yet while most of us may day-dream about fame, we know we'll likely never achieve it. We live our lives in what Clive James has, in his inimitable style, called a 'blaze of obscurity'. Yet is that such a bad thing?
Certainly for a Christian, obscurity is more an opportunity than an enemy.
Reading the stories of scripture and church history, we find that God sometimes subtracts from a person in the present in order to multiply their future.
Writing in his African diary, facing an obscure death, the revered missionary explorer David Livingstone penned what for me is one of the greatest descriptions of faith.
'We are working,' he said, 'for a glorious future we are not destined to see.'
As Christians, we are in a unique position to appreciate the benefits relative obscurity can bring.
After all, we follow a Master who constantly surrendered the interest of ego in the service of agape - even to the point of death. Yet he arguably has influenced history more than any other individual before or since.
What's more, scripture suggests that the ultimate calling of every believer is to make God's name great - or, as I like to put it, to make God famous.
The Old Testament is redolent with this theme. God separates a people to himself and does great works through them to draw attention to his nature and character (cf. 1 Chron. 17:21, Isaiah 63:12).
The New Testament takes up the same theme: we carry and honour Christ's name, which again speaks of his nature, character and ultimate authority.
God wants to make his name great through us. He does so for humanity sake, not for his own - God is not insecure.
When people, and societies, remove God from their worldview, when they forget what he is like, they demean themselves. Their thinking becomes 'futile', or empty of real purpose (Rom 1: 21-23).
So, in terms of human approval, obscurity is often a positive opportunity for the believer. It is a chance to throw the spotlight, through good works and great faith, on One whose name is greater than our own.
Of course, in terms of God's perspective, we are never out of sight. There is no obscurity under the eye of heaven. We may, like Isaiah, feel our work is 'useless' or forgotten, but it never is (cf. Isaiah 49:4, 2 Tim 2:2).
The Christian church ought to be a Stig-friendly zone: less a home for superstars and more the province of white knights, whose names remain unknown but whose impact is clear for all to see.
We don't need to achieve celebrity to lead lives that are worthy of celebration. We don't need to be famous to make God famous.
This article first appeared in Friday Night Theology (FNT), a weekly e-zine published online by the Evangelical Alliance, UK (see www.eauk.org/fnt).
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