The author of our Sunday Bloody Sunday sermon is being ordained to the priesthood today. Congratulations, Jay!

Another pre-publication excerpt: this is from the preface to Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog by Eugene Peterson (author of The Message.)

"Metaphor... makes me a participant in creating the meaning and entering into the action of [a] word. I can no longer understand the word by looking it up in the dictionary for it is no longer just itself; it is alive and moving, inviting me to participate in the meaning. When prophets use metaphor we get involved with God whether we want to or not, sometimes whether we know it or not.

"When metaphor is banished and language is bullied into serving as mere information and definition, as happens so often in our computerized culture and cultural religion, the life goes out of the language. It also goes out of us. When this reduction happens in relation to God and all that pertains to God, we end up sitting around having study and discussion groups in religious museums. If we are lucky, a prophet, one of the descendants of Hosea or Jonah or Habakkuk, shows up and with the simple expedient of a metaphor, said or sung, drags us outside into the open air where all the stuff we are studying is alive and moving and colliding with us. For many these days, it is U2 that shows up."

This book is about preaching pop culture (yes, one particular example of it, but...), so I consider this relevant: there was an AP article about Bruce Almighty in our paper Monday. (You can read it on Yahoo here.) I responded with a letter to the editor (scroll down) in which I defended the idea of a "humanized" God as kind of the whole point of the Jesus thing and pointed out the director's heavy theological background. They published it. Great. (Although I think it reads more uptight than I meant it to.) Only problem is, I haven't seen the movie. Plus I said in the paper I might preach on it. So I may find folks showing up Sunday wondering "where's the Bruce Almighty sermon?"

Providence: there's a great passage about getting prayers answered and what we ask for in the lectionary this week. So... the first showing locally is at 12:55....

(Update at 6:38 PM: I just finished the Bruce Almighty sermon.)

Well, here's an interesting article. Looking for the Kingdom Come: Questioning Spirituality in U2. It's from Popular Musicology Online and dates to 2002 though strangely takes no notice at all of ATYCLB. He talks not only about U2's lyrics as "spiritual" (whatever that means) but also about why their music has a spiritual effect, first dealing with their early work...

...simple harmonic patterns (without extended verse-refrain forms), a driving bass technique, busy and echoic guitar patterns in high register, and a recitative-like vocal approach; the combination of these seems to cry out the band's sincerity. The epic, ideologically sound nature of many songs from the 1980s, the band's evident devotion to its audience, and three of the members' reasoned Christian commitment confirmed their idiolect's connotations ...U2's idiolect up to the late 1980s (as far as "Rattle and Hum," in fact) affords the listener a centring experience, the provision of an existential authenticity, an experience to be trusted....

...and then rebutting arguments that 90s U2 was about something else. On later albums, that spirituality is not overturned, is not found wanting. It remains present, but is presented even more elliptically, as if to acknowledge that the only way to encounter the subversions of secular postmodernity is to subvert those. He has some interesting stuff on ZooTV, and a take I never heard before on "The First Time":

The refrain asserts that "for the first time, I feel loved". The last of three verses focuses on a 'Father', owner of many mansions, but Bono 'left by the back door' and 'threw away the key'. Having repeatedly rid himself of this idolatrous object, however, the song intimately closes with the refrain.

Hm!

I (Beth) have been catching up on some of the articles about The Matrix Reloaded, and doing so has made me think again about the way the press tends to cover any religious leader/organization working with any example of pop culture in worship or education: Minister uses 'Sopranos' to teach religion. Church uses 'Simpsons' to reach youth. So often there's this sort of quaint, human interest tone, following a script that I imagine has been similar since the 60s: Priest wears tie-dye vestments to attract the today generation.

To exaggerate for effect, the script pictures an unchanging thing called "The Church," populated by out-of-touch authority figures who occasionally, amusingly, come across some reference to something the kids out in the real world like. So they trot it out as a recruitment tool, and this fact itself is what is newsworthy. Church tries to seem hip, hee hee.

Well, it hit me with something like horror this morning that -- assuming articles are written in the secular press about Get Up Off Your Knees, or about the concept of U2 sermons -- that script is likely to be layered over some of them. As hard as any of us say "No, this is no gimmick, this is who I am, this is my band, they've been part of my faith life for years," some of the articles will probably boil down to: Church tries to seem hip, hee hee. Oh, God.

I added a few more links to the "U2 and God" section over there on the left.... because (to paraphrase George Harrison), what is life without links?

It dawns on me there was something else I wanted to say about the Evensong. It was sung by the men and boys choir from All Saints Ashmont, a sort of "sister parish" to Advent (for those of you not from Boston, these are our two Anglo-Catholic shrines.) We had a very close view of the entering procession, and one of the little boys was wearing a classic, full-blown mullet; I mean a true mullet, a la Bono at Live Aid. (He did not leap out into the congregation to dance with a girl, however, nor did he force his helpless collaborators to extend the Stanford Mag & Nunc to 12'.)

My beloved and I went up to Boston's Church of the Advent yesterday evening for Evensong and Benediction (there's nothing like it), and had a great supper afterwards at Lala Rokh with a friend on the staff. On the way up, we were listening to the U2 Best of 1990-2000 CD, and all I could hear was things I wished someone had submitted a sermon on. Sigh.

It also kind of hit me, though, that some U2 songs stand alone in a way that makes them not lend themselves to being used in a sermon. I expressed surprise to a lot of people that we didn't get a sermon on Mysterious Ways, for example; but then I started thinking in the car, OK, so what are you actually going to do with it in the pulpit? Your sermon makes what point? - God moves in mysterious ways? (zzzzz) It's OK to use female images for God? (zzzzz, at least in my denomination) Men need to get in touch with their intuitive side? (We welcome our guest preacher today, Alan Alda...)

You could quote a line or two in a sermon making a point related to some aspect of the song -- say, people often figure out what God was doing with them by hindsight ("one day you'll look back and you'll see where you were held..."), or even "if you want to kiss the sky you better learn how to kneel" -- but honestly, U2's Mysterious Ways is almost too strong in and of itself to serve in its entirety as a central "text" for a separate proclamatory act. It already is a proclamatory act, especially visually and especially live. (In fact, in that setting it's exactly the kind of "EPIC" proclamatory act Leonard Sweet and people like him keep telling preachers we'd better learn how to do.)

Side comment -- I was looking for a link for the EPIC paradigm (Experiential, Participatory, Image-Based, Connective); I googled "Leonard Sweet EPIC," and the first thing I clicked on talks about Sweet using a live U2 video to illustrate EPIC. I think I saw that very presentation by him in his plenary for the Jan 2001 Group convention! (Elevation from SNL -- right, Leonard? I caused a stir at my pastors' table-group by yelling "God, YES!" when he introduced the clip by saying, "now, you know who understands all this, is Bono.")

I promised occasional additional prepublication excerpts. Here's one from Steve Stockman, who wrote Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2. I had a lot of fun making Rattle & Hum jokes with Steve by email. (If you're reading this, Steve: Play the blues.) His sermon is on "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."

...I have been engaged in debate about that song in Africa, Asia, and North America, and more times than I can count in my own country. There are so few people, it seems, who get the succinct theology, the searching spirituality or the vulnerable integrity that sets this song apart from most other attempts at expressing faith in the four minute rock song format. It was U2's producer Daniel Lanois who encouraged Bono to write a �gospel song� � and of course with a choir in a black church in Harlem, during the filming of Rattle and Hum, it becomes just that.
Biblically, it seems to me that �I Still Haven�t Found What I�m Looking For� is set, intentionally or otherwise, in Philippians chapter 3. In this passage Paul is writing to a church in Macedonia, and, as he often does, warning them against those who would bring legalism back into battle with the grace of the Gospel....

I'm delighted we have Steve as part of this book. There's more than one sermon on this song, and I find his concept that it's set in Phil. 3 really interesting.

Someone asked if I could put the table of contents up on the webpage. I'll try and do this as soon as I'm sure it's OK as is, as far as the publisher is concerned.
We've had hits from the US, Canada, Brazil, Italy, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Spain, Denmark, Yugoslavia, Germany, Chile, Poland, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Mexico, Singapore, Australia, Norway, Slovenia, Japan, Argentina, Israel, and Uruguay. Obviously we don't get tons of hits numerically, but it impresses me to see how far-flung U2 fans who are interested in this topic are.
{later EDIT, updated as necessary: you can add Thailand, Guatemala, Iceland, Romania, Ireland, Korea, Paraguay, Hong Kong, India, Slovakia, Sweden, Bolivia, Cote d'Ivoire, Greece, Russia, and South Africa.}

The manuscript just went to the publisher. That's two days early!

Hello to anyone visiting from the new link on Thunderstruck. Thanks Steve.

There's a round-up of U2 books coming out soon on @U2 today, and we're not on it. Of course, why would we be, since ours isn't available for pre-order yet? But it amazes me that the David Schaffer book, published by Lucent and coming out in November, is already available on Amazon. That publisher must work really far out in front.

The things you have to think about... Our editor settled one of them for good this morning: 80s and 90s, not 80's or '80s or '80's and 90's or '90s or '90's. Those two terms are important, in a U2 book!

A sensible person might have begun this blog last October, when we were first collecting material for a book of U2 sermons, instead of 7 months later when all the submissions were in and we were about to send the manuscript to the publisher. However, things didn't happen that way.

Sitting on my desk right now is a 1" black ring binder, chock full of the text that will become this book. In 6 days, it will all be emailed to Kevin at Cowley and then Get Up Off Your Knees will really take on a life of its own.

What will I (Beth) put here? Status updates, probably. Links to related stuff. Links to press and so on that we get, assuming we get press. Responses to any interesting comments. Blog things.