Bravo U2log.

I like the line about being "Christian by faith, not by genre" in this article on Switchfoot. Contains bonus "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" reference and funny Bono story. (Thanks to Thunderstruck.)

You can read here about the U2 and spirituality presentation I'll be giving in Boston next month. Scroll down, but not too fast, because the folks speaking before me sound really good.

What I want to know is whether hanging out with "Friends at the Advent" qualifies me to meet the author of their Ask Liesl: Hagiographer to the Stars!

So I've been listening to the CDs of a Eugene Peterson lecture series I bought, called "Eat This Book." And in it he is talking about the rarity of people who actually do that, actually shape themselves by what he calls "the primary text of the Christian life" -- the rarity of people who

...don't simply learn or study Scripture, [but] assimilate it. Take it into [their] lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration to the Father.

See, there's our big problem right there. We have way too many people lobbing undigested hard lumps of Scripture at their neighbors, but also way too many people who haven't bothered to assimilate any Scripture before deciding what an act of love even looks like.

The metabolizing image brought to mind a comment by David DiSabatino in his purple prose Prism article on U2: "Bono offers me a living exemplar to diffuse the stereotypes that non-Christians inevitably hold of Christians (By simply dropping his name I can minimize the damage done by televangelist scandals or Harry Potter book burnings). ... he has shown me that the gospel can weave itself into the fabric of my daily life without making me act and speak like a Martian."

See, this is why we need more metabolizers.

Today marked our 3000th visit, which was made by someone from Canada.

Thanks to alert archive reader Edward, I can now link to an actual picture of something I mentioned on August 15: O clement, O loving, O Edge's-equipment-guarding Virgin Mary.

It's nice to learn that @U2's lyric pages are back up. It's not the only place to go for reliable lyrics, of course, but it is the only place to go for Angela Pancella's Drawing their Fish in the Sand, the archive of U2 Biblical references. These include direct Bible quotes, clear conceptual references, and linguistic allusions, and there are a lot of each. How conscious was that? We'll never know.

I grew up in Nashville, so I can harp on this: today my hometown paper covers CCM's professional provocateur Steve Taylor heading up a meeting with Senator Bill Frist on behalf of DATA. Several quotes:

...Taylor said the issue was resonating in many evangelical Christian communities particularly disturbed by the orphans left behind when parents die of AIDS. There are an estimated 11 million AIDS orphans in Africa. ''We believe we represent a large constituency, and we're saying these voters want action on this issue now,'' Taylor said.

...''It just seems like the main crisis of my generation,'' said Matt Slocum of the band Sixpence None the Richer, whose hits include Kiss Me and There She Goes.

...''I'm here to tell people in America that the $3 billion money is not even enough,'' said Agnes Nyamayarwo, who was part of the meeting at the Frist office. ''That $3 billion could be used by Uganda alone."

Stephen Shields, who runs faithmaps and whom I bumped into online a few times back when I used to be really involved in GenX stuff (which was back when churches believed in GenX), reveals on his blog emergesque that he was there at the recent USA Today event with Bono. OK, I'm impressed.

Well, even if the mainstream media can't, at least Religion News Service can still figure out what Christian groups people at an AIDS press conference are representing!

RNS also put this in: During the news conference, Bono explained why he joined forces with religious leaders who have been fighting for assistance to address AIDS and other humanitarian needs far longer than he has. "I'm an amateur and they're professionals," he said, standing before reporters in a black jacket surrounded by ministers with clerical collars. "They're my bodyguards and God's their bodyguard so I reckon...it's just the smart thing to do."

I've developed a habit of running searches that brought people to U2 Sermons myself, to see what else they pull up, and somebody was here recently looking for J33-3. (In case they make it back and didn't find it, it's a verse from Jeremiah --"Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things that you do not know." When in doubt, check the FAQs.)

Anyway, I think it's pretty common knowledge that the cover of All That You Can't Leave Behind was doctored to cover over the gate sign F21-36 in favor of that Bible reference. But an archive post on a blog called Waving or Drowning pointed something else out, and it's still true: nearly 3 years after the release of the album, Amazon.com continues to display the undoctored version. (Click to enlarge the cover and see.)

Since we observed another contributor's.... Today is the 16th anniversary of my first U2 show (Boston Garden, 1987). This is not the show where the lighting failed and rather than stop the show, they just played for an hour with the house lights on: it's the night after, where they had just gotten the key to the city. There was a sound problem of some sort with the guitar, though, and Bono just waved the band off and led us in "I Still Haven't Found" a cappella nearly twice through, and I remember sitting there thinking: I cannot believe this is happening.

When I got a CD of this show some years later, I was stunned to discover that Bono's rant/prophecy-thing in "Bullet the Blue Sky" that night had been about homelessness. Not because that was one of the biggest issues in Boston then, which it was -- but because I went to work for a homeless shelter three months later.

There's been lots of coverage of yesterday's AIDS in Africa/ Millennium Challenge press conference with Bono and several religious leaders. A video is at the Kaiser Health Network. The ELCA was certainly well represented by the guy from Bread for the World and another bishop.

Amusing how the press can't even get religious identifications straight anymore -- the CME bishop was referred to as Episcopalian by Reuters, and all the religious leaders were identified as bishops of Bush's United Methodist denomination by Yahoo. (In reality, there was no one from either ECUSA or the UMC present.) Plus, nobody in the secular media was able to figure out that the guy from World Vision was there to represent evangelicalism.

Anyway, as usual, Agnes Nyamayarwo, an AIDS nurse from this book's charity, TASO in Uganda, stole the show. "People are coming to me asking me, where is the money? Where is the promise that Bush made? We are dying." Apparently she is about to go on tour again, appearing in Tampa tonight at the University of Southern (or is it just "South"?) Florida, and in Nashville on Friday at Vanderbilt University Divinity School (with what they're calling "DATA artists," which I assume means Christian performers.) More power to her.

For readers in the USA: Numerous organizations, including Bono's DATA, are sponsoring a global AIDS call-in day to the White House tomorrow, September 16th. You can read about how to participate here.

One day I'll die; the choice will not be mine.

That, and the recent post about Henry VanderSpek's sermon mentioning the value of contemplating our deaths, is probably my only excuse for U2 content here. Still, I want to share this link to an extraordinary art piece on the Internet. After Life: Streatham Cemetery, the Four Seasons by Jonathan Clark is a series of photos of a cemetery, taken over 2 years, with slight Flash enhancements and a sparse soundtrack. The four seasons can be clicked on at the top left; selecting any cross within a season leads you to a different photograph, some of which are still and some of which respond to mouseover.

Many of the photographs are stunning in themselves, but I found entering into the whole ensemble a moving and numinous experience. It seems to me to be a sort of Christian digital-age equivalent to the classic Buddhist meditation on the corpse.

The site repays attention and does not repay inattention, so I would advise you not to bother visiting if you aren't willing to invest perhaps 10 minutes in contemplation, moving slowly through several pictures.

I've mentioned the U2-CORE-Dublin connections from Cathedral Church of the Advent before. This announcement by their Dean made me laugh out loud (you must read all the way to the end).

I bought that Eoghan Heaslip CD, by the way. The best track is #10, which I've been tooling around my little town singing along to in the car: "Lord it's your selflessness/ that covers my weakness/ Lord it's your mercy/ Lord it's your mercy."

If you want to do something in memory of Johnny Cash, you could do worse than re-read the lyrics to the song he sings on U2's Zooropa.

I'm proud to say that I worked with Johnny Cash, and when he came through the studio door for the first time it was like Moses himself had arrived. He is a character of truly biblical proportions, with a voice, all wailing freight trains and thundering prairies, like the landscape of his beloved America. Before I got to see it with my own eyes, I had a picture of it through Johnny Cash's singing. He has a soul as big as a continent, full of righteous anger mixed with human compassion. A true individual in a land founded on individuality. There will never be another like him, and he could have come from nowhere else.
--The Edge

Raewynne and I were chatting by email tonight about search strings that land people here. One I've seen a few times is "Eugene Peterson Bono," and I clicked on it out of curiosity to see what else would come up. Well, interestingly, something that did was a Google-Words ad for "Eugene Peterson courses and lectures on CD and tape." Really? I thought.

Yes, really. Regent College, where he used to teach, has a slew of them (as well as lots of things by other people). It made me miss seminary. I even ordered one, although no matter what I do I can't get the thing to link to an individual product. I bought Eat This Book: The Holy Community at Table with Holy Scripture. Now, of course Eugene Peterson wrote the introduction to our U2 book, Get Up Off Your Knees, but apart from that, I'm not sure how to argue that my discovery has U2 content - other than, a big stretch, that there is a lot about David, earthiness, and the Psalms (including one lecture with the great title "Why did Uzzah die? Why did David dance?")

Even if you have no interest in buying anything, you can listen to excerpts on Real Player of lectures. Cool!

"Their lives are bigger than any big idea."

One more reprint of the article on Raewynne and preaching pop culture, from a few days ago in Bismarck ND.

We did not receive any sermons using U2's scathingly self-aware meditation on celebrity, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me," which is a darn shame. However, U2page has just put up a long, informal piece which wanders through the lyrics in three possible readings: if they were sung by the self-consciously manufactured '90s public persona "Bono," if they were sung by the character MacPhisto, and if they were sung from Jesus' point of view.

A sample, from the commentary on the last line in the jaw-dropping verse
They want you to be Jesus/They'll go down on one knee
But they'll want their money back/If you're alive at thirty-three
And you're turning tricks/With your crucifix
You're a star


Earlier in the song, [the "Bono" character] expressed the idea that his fame was forced on him, or at the very least unexpected or even undeserved. But here he turns that concept on its head by saying he is actually abusing or desecrating that position (�turning tricks�, which places the blame squarely on his own shoulders). If he had ended the verse with �alive at thirty-three�, it would have been a bitter resentment of the position celebrity thrusts upon him. But by continuing it with the �turning tricks� couplet, he takes the blame back on himself. He calls himself a charlatan and a fake.

Read the whole thing here.

I'm not sure I've ever linked to the blog of our contributor Wade Hodges, whose sermon on Grace is part of the closing group in Get Up Off Your Knees (we've tried to arrange the sermons to draw a very loose redemptive plot line - you know, like a U2 concert - but who knows if we succeeded....) Anyway, Wade is into the Kingdom of God these days, which in Jesus' book is a very good thing to be into.

A notice from Steve Stockman, who has a sermon on "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" in our preaching U2 book, and is also the author of Walk On, about the fall return of his radio show:

after a summer in hibernation
RHYTHM AND SOUL
from Sunday September 7 at 8.03pm (UK time)
and for the entire week after when you want to listen
www.bbc.co.uk/ni/religion/rhythmandsoul
Steve Stockman brings you the best in contemporary music with a spiritual twist, music that is not just good but good for something...
keep the door of your soul ajar...
likely to feature Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Neil Young, Mark Heard, Radiohead, Gillian Welch, Denison Witmer, Switchfoot, Pedro The Lion, Over The Rhine, Spiritualized, Joni Mitchell, Rich Mullins, Willard Grant Conspiracy, U2, Bebo Norman, Johnny Cash, The Waterboys...

A new sermon excerpt, as promised. This is by Henry VanderSpek, who traces the theme of mortality in U2 with special attention to their most recent work.

Perhaps part of the problem is that Western culture has lost the thread of reasoning and motivation to contemplate death. "Why bother with such a depressing task? Leave it to medieval monks to keep a skull on their desk for meditating on life�s brevity! I�ve got things to do, places to go. Life is too short to walk around moping and being depressed. I need to make my mark in life."

It is interesting that "Kite" asks the question of life, "Did I waste it?" What allows one to really make a mark in this world? Those obsessed by beauty and youth are rarely remembered for their life�s work. Only those who are freed from the fear of death � often hidden in an obsession with beauty, youth, wealth, or power � can really go on to accomplish great things. Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King will be remembered years after the most fashionable stars of their day. It is an ironic paradox that only once we get over our fear of death can we then begin to produce something significant and memorable.

Thanks to Darren Friesen for the link. His post reminds me that sometime soon I do need to post another book excerpt - so much of the news this past week has just been about press the book is getting.

As an American, I've not surprisingly never been to Greenbelt. I do occasionally check Jonny Baker's blog, though, and followed his link to read the liturgy from the closing Greenbelt communion service (PDF file - description here if you don't have Acrobat). Interesting (to me: this may be real old hat to Greenbelters) to notice that one of his collaborators in writing the liturgy was Martin Wroe, the editor of U2's official website.

While looking around for what else Wroe had done (he's a journalist and an old hand at Greenbelt, apparently) I was suprised to find out that the sort of fresh, questioning spoken meditation with music that was going around on the internet last Christmas (I think: "welcome to the body, God; thank you Jesus Christ for being body among us") was also written by him. (You can see the whole CD and hear a couple there.) And he also wrote that Seven Last Words meditation on re:jesus. (I do the re:jesus online daily prayers a few times a week.)

My UK readers are probably smiling condescendingly at this point and saying "well, everyone knows that." But I didn't.

Reblogger anesti! Alethos Anesti! You can comment again!

Oh, I forgot to say: thanks to Ramblin' Man for the link.

On a personal note, I'd just like to say that the past week has been going really well for us: the disposable mobile phone, the three-blade razor... and over 450 visits to the blog since the Inquirer story came out.
(For anyone who can't tell, that was a U2 Grammy acceptance speech joke.)
The only thing that isn't going well is Reblogger. We need a kind of Lazarus event here.

I'm told the U2 book and Raewynne were in the Washington Post on Saturday, but I can't find it online. If anyone does, please send me a link. (So sorry about the lack of commenting ability.)

Just for completion's sake, there were also reprints in the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer, the Pew Forum on religion and public life, Oklahoma Daily, ChristDot, the Montgomery Advertiser, the Anniston Star, and the St Augustine Record. This doesn't count people who just linked to the story rather than publishing it.

Incidentally, if you're here because you saw it somewhere other than the above list, emailing me a link or a reference -- to u2sermons (at) comcast (dot) net -- would be really helpful.