Seek

[grid blog :: advent 1]
This post is part of an Advent grid blog in which several Christian bloggers are participating. (Bob at The Corner will be aggregating them; you can also see an image for the theme there.) During the 4 weeks of this grid blog, I'm going to be looking at U2 songs evoking four Advent themes; the theme for Advent 1 is SEEK.

The obvious candidate for "SEEK" is "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," which is precisely why I'm not using it. Instead, I want to turn the image inside out and think about God's search for us. After all, those who traveled to seek the newborn Word could only do so because his own quest had brought him into the flesh first. So the song of the day is "Drowning Man." Put these words on God's lips in Advent and see what they reveal:

I'll cross the sky for your love
Give you what I hold dear

God who hung the skies crosses them, lovesick for his lost people. Christ, his own Self, the dearest gift, is surrendered into the fragile arms of a peasant woman.

Chorus and verse, over and over, the same message: the One we are seeking has already come out in search of us, and is only waiting for us to accept the offer. "Take my hand...hold on tightly," God calls repeatedly; "if you can," he promises to "be there" with a "love [that] lasts forever."

Just in time for Advent

Thanks to U2 Mart for making Get Up Off Your Knees one of their "Pat's Picks for Christmas 2003 - What every U2 fan should have on their Wish List this gift-giving season."

It was definitely the "recurrentes citas b�blicas" that did it.

Even MTV Spain is getting in on the act. �Si Coca-Cola es un misterio y Michael Jackson historia, �qu� soy yo?�

African Well Fund virtual vigil

The African Well Fund, a charity created by U2 fans to bring clean water to Africa, invites you to light a candle in their virtual vigil leading up to World AIDS Day.

Pop song sparks off a sermon

Another article on Derek Walmsley, this one in the Church Times. UK readers, watch for a picture in the Sun as well. Honest.

46664: 1 minute for AIDS in Africa

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in America. To everyone in the UK who has been searching on "Preaching the U2 Catalogue," sorry for my American spelling habits. (In the UK and Europe, you can order this book from Columba.)

And if you haven't been following the Nelson Mandela 46664 concert news, here is an article about it from South Africa. The webcast is this Saturday.

Rock the pulpit

The December issue of the United Church News has printed a reworking of this summer's profile of Raewynne and Get Up Off Your Knees, including some focus on contributors Shawnthea Monroe-Mueller and Stephen Butler Murray, who are UCC clergy. The article concludes with a substantial excerpt from Raewynne's essay. In another spot, the same issue also lists U2 Sermons as a website worth investigating.

Randomness

I've added a little more to the FAQ. Also, thanks to ginkworld for the link. {Update: and, as is obvious, I've switched to a 3-column format to make basic, unchanging info easier to find.}

Here we are on the BBC

And here he is! Congrats to our contributor Derek Walmsley, featured on BBC News. Pleased to learn from this story that Raewynne and I have joined the ranks of "U2-loving clergymen." Just kidding.

Check the FAQ

There may be something more official than this on the way, but for the time being I've thrown a quick FAQ on the book up for anyone looking for statistics or wanting common questions answered.

"The spiritual message in U2's work is often subtle."

A press release from across the pond. (I think the posters in the office are a nice touch.) Derek emails that in the one day since this came out, he's already been interviewed by BBC Radio Leeds, BBC Online, Pulse (Yorkshire Independent Radio) and The Church Times.

A vicar from the Bradford Diocese is the only UK contributor to an American book of sermons based on the songs of U2. The Revd Derek Walmsley, vicar of St Mark's, Utley, near Keighley, says, "I'm a big fan of U2 (my study wall is covered with their posters - which is a bit of a surprise for the couples who come in to arrange their weddings), so I was delighted to have the opportunity to express my thoughts on the spiritual content of some of their lyrics".

Entitled "Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalogue", the book includes chapters on "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "Pride" and "Peace on Earth." Derek says, "I chose to write on the song 'Playboy Mansion'. It's a clever comparison of the way people might seek success in the secular world with the way we get into heaven, particularly in the words, 'it's who you know who gets you through'."

The publishers, Cowley Publications, say, "This book highlights how preachers of all ages, from all theological traditions, are reflecting on U2's work. It's not seeking to prove anything about U2 themselves, but it shows how religious leaders are integrating spiritually informed pop culture into their proclamation of the Gospel".

Derek adds, "The spiritual message in U2's work is often subtle. Their lead singer Bono is reluctant to be labelled a Christian and has said 'I don't talk about God very much because I'm not a very good advertisement for it', but nevertheless, U2's lyrics are soaked in spiritual imagery and Bono often quotes from the Psalms in live concerts".

The book, "Get Up off Your Knees," will be available in the UK on 4 January {update: apparently the new date is 9 February} and all royalties will go to TASO, an African AIDS charity.
ENDS

Rhythm and Soul

I've been streaming Rhythm and Soul, the radio show that Steve Stockman hosts, while working this morning, and he just played Pillar's cover of Sunday Bloody Sunday. ...You know, that song is just not in need of a cover version.

Dec 1 from two perspectives

Well, the official release date of the book is a week away: Dec. 1, World AIDS Day. Of course official dates are sometimes honored in the breach. Whether or not the book is around yet, U2 Sermons will be participating in World AIDS Day Link and Think.

Had a nice email from a contact in the Message division at NavPress, commenting that everyone who works in the Message division at NavPress is a U2 fan.

"i have five senses/i need thousands more at least"

As I said earlier, I'm just late to this party, but, another utterly amazing song by Over the Rhine: "The World Can Wait" (already cited in a comment below).

There is a line in Raewynne's essay in the U2 book where she says that from the moment she first heard "Beautiful Day," she couldn't wait to preach on Noah. Me, listening to "The World Can Wait," I can't wait till the John 4 woman at the well reading comes around again. That song -- and I'm not necessarily saying this was intentional on their part -- just offers such a perfect opportunity to give a congregation a window into her emotions, say just after encountering Jesus. Put it on her lips, for example, as she goes back to the village to bring others to meet him.

While I'm in here, thanks to Sleepless in Surrey for the link. [Update: and to WeEbLeLand.]

Bono Much Music in Toronto interview text

From the Canadian interview after the Liberal Party convention:

George: How's your relationship with spirituality changed?...

Bono: Well, I think what you discover is God is even bigger than you think. It's very hard--

George: That he doesn't need your help? (chuckling)

Bono: (laughs) That's right, he doesn't need your help. You go, "I can help God here, I'm sure he's stuck, those kids in Africa and all; I'll help." God doesn't need your help, but, there's a blessing. Somebody said to me - I said this to you last night. A wise man, a spiritual man said this: he said, stop asking God to bless what you're doing, Bono. Find out what God's doing; it's already blessed.

You don't have to guess what's on God's mind. If you're looking for God, and can't find God, he's with the poorest, most wretched, most vulnerable lives. That's where God hangs out. If you want to get closer to God, that's a key. In your own moments of despair, in your own moment of wretchedness, you're also closer to God. [And, you knew it was coming, here it is...] But I don't talk about God very much because I'm not a very good advertisement for it.

I've corrected punctuation and one line, the end of the (unattributed) quote from Bill Hybels about not asking God to bless what you're doing. I have to smile at Bono's avoiding naming him, but I do sort of hope it gets back to Hybels that the sentence he gave Bono a year ago is now part of the playlist.

(However, an aside: I strongly associate that line with John Wimber. Any Willow Creek or Vineyard type readers out there who can tell me if Hybels might have been quoting Wimber, or is that also a Hybels line?)

And one more comment: within about a 10 minute interview (intercut with clips of his Liberal Party speech and U2 songs to make it 30), there are two quotes from the New Testament (one unattributed, and one credited to Bob Geldof). I want to comment on the first of them, when the interviewer has asked about bands who lose touch with the spark of greatness that got them started:

Bono: They say where your treasure is there your heart will be also. I know people who have a bit of success, make a bit of money, get a nice apartment, hang some art on the wall, you know -- as Ziggy Pop says, "here comes my Chinese rug." They get into all this stuff and suddenly music is not where they're at, they're more with furniture... it's not a great trade.

Anyone out there who leads a parish, or a Bible study, or whatever: isn't that exactly what we we all work so hard for, trying to inspire people to integrate the Bible? So that when someone asks them a question that is ostensibly a completely secular matter in their professional life, the first thing they will think of is, "Oh, what explains this phenomenon is a principle Jesus taught." What percentage of our folks have Scripture deeply enough integrated that they'd give an answer like this? (I'm not sure I want to know....)

People who bought this book also bought...

I can tell this is going to provide hours of interest.

Barnes and Noble
Weight of Glory C. S. Lewis (makes sense)
Strength to Love Martin Luther King, Jr. (also makes sense)
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Jonathan Edwards (whoa.)

Amazon.com
Selections from the Book of Psalms by Publishing Grove (smart connection)
Inside the Zoo With U2 by Lola Cashman (oh please no)
U2 / Achtung Baby (the book, that is.)

So... am I getting the sense that the U2 folks hang out at Amazon.com, and the theology folks hang out at BN?

U2 Go Home

The U2 Slane DVD came out today, and I had to drive to a clergy meeting at lunch which was the perfect occasion to run into Best Buy and pick up a copy. I've only had time to watch a couple things, but it seems very real. I wish like heck the book had not gone to the printer, though... because if I could, I would immediately substitute this performance of "Until The End of the World" as the recommended one in the next to the last session of the adult spirituality program in the appendix. Darn.

Let Them Sing It For You

Trivial fun: Go to Let Them Sing It For You, enter your favorite lyric, and, well, let them sing it for you. Just in case you were planning on using "One," it doesn't know the word "lepers."

Walk On by Steve Stockman

If you're interested in the U2 Christian thing and have never purchased Walk On, or want to give it as a Christmas gift to someone, you might be interested in knowing that Christianbook.com is selling it for only $5.99 right now. A cute typo in the product description mis-identitifies the Popmart tour as the Popular tour.

"We do know where this train is going; what we don't know is how many people are prepared to lie across the track."

Personally, I didn't think the AIDS speech at the Liberal Party convention (PDF here) was one of Bono's standout efforts on the topic. I found it a little too self-indulgent, although commentators seem to be falling all over themselves to say how "powerful" it was and so on.

But we're also getting, as we do every single time Bono does something high-profile about AIDS in Africa and debt relief, a new round of shoot-from-the-hip broadsides: either "what on earth does a rock star know about international development?" or "why doesn't he just shut up and spend some of his own money on the cause?" or more frequently both at once.

You know, if you disagree with the guy's position, fine. Not everyone shares his politics; jump right in and start refuting, if you want to. But "what on earth does a rock star know about international development"?! "Why doesn't he just shut up and spend some of his own money on the cause"?! Have these people been living under a rock for the past three years?

Bono and Paul Martin

As many readers of this blog probably already know, today Bono will be speaking in Toronto at the Liberal party convention, asking Paul Martin to build on Canada's commitment to provide generic AIDS drugs to poor countries by tripling Canada's contribution to the Global Fund, pressing other countries to do the same, and keeping Africa on the agenda of the G8 economic summits.
{Update: You can find the video linked here.}

Amazon.ca, MSN, and Paste

The sales rank of our preaching U2 book today on amazon.ca is 3050. This just seems really, really good to me. I mean, it's not the DaVinci Code, but still. [This blog does not endorse the DaVinci Code, yadda yadda yadda.]

MSN Entertainment has three tracks from the forthcoming DVD U2 Go Home: Live From Slane Castle for you to watch online. It looks like it's going to feel much more "live" than Boston. 160,000 people is a lot of people.

I was reading ramblin' man, who links us, and listened to two free tracks he has up by a roots group called Pentecostal Bouffant (which is a great name for a roots group). On the publisher's site, Paste Music, there is a "Paste radio" link, and there were some Over the Rhine numbers on it.

Now, as a sort of follow-up to my post yesterday, this all typifies how I personally interact with pop culture: I am not very hip or in the know, but after I hear about something 4-5 times I feel obligated to check it out. Over the Rhine is a good example; I know they are very widely discussed and respected in Christian circles (and out of them), I even know they postponed their fall tour, but I wasn't (knowingly) familiar with their work. So here was my chance! I asked Paste Radio to play me some Over the Rhine.

It was good enough. Fine. You know, I could see the attraction, but no blinding lights from heaven or anything. Until we got to the song I Radio Heaven, which absolutely froze me at my computer screen. Oh. My. God. I've probably played it 8 times and do not anticipate stopping any time soon.

On Clergy Refusing to Engage with Culture

Just when someone posts an interesting comment, Reblogger starts acting up and I can't reply. Pshaw.
[update: or, it could just have been that I am too long winded - sorry, Ben, it's there now in 2 parts]

Tuning in to a higher power: Divine intervention hits pop culture

Another article (thanks to Relapsed Catholic and Thunderstruck) on the recent proliferation of films and TV shows addressing spiritual issues. Music is not included.

The most telling thing to me is the end of the article, when they call a lot of local clergy to ask for comments. Nearly all of these people, whose vocation presumably involves assisting others in working their faith out in that fluid space where personhood and daily habit and culture intersect, are not really aware of the trend and cannot speak to it. Many of them also say something dismissive.

So let me get this straight: Part of your plan for effective ministry is to deliberately shut yourself out of the main arena in which your culture is addressing religious issues, refuse to familiarize yourself with the theological messages your parishioners hear all week, and then present your own message with no understanding of the real climate in which it's being heard? How's that working for you?

Stuck in a Moment

So, tell me: some of you have been suspicious, haven't you, that maybe only trendy disposable-pop-culture-religion bring-in-the-youth types take this stuff seriously? That our U2 book project may boil down to [for Baby Boomers: the Church of What's Happening Now redux? // for Xers: Buddy Jesus redux?]

Well, what if I sent you to an Eastern Orthodox blog writing about U2 and God? How about an Eastern Orthodox blog that suggests enhancing your Lenten observance by reflecting on "Stuck in a Moment" and St. Andrew of Crete?

Interview with Steve Beard of Thunderstruck

The U2 fansite Interference has posted an interview with Steve Beard about his chapter in that Spiritual Journeys book.

New Directions in Pooh Studies: �berlieferungs- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien zum Pu-Buch

No U2 content at all here, but can't resist. I think this mock scholarly textual analysis of authorship traditions in Winnie The Pooh will be funny to people who slogged through 19th-century German explanations of the documentary hypothesis in Old Testament class, and/or that whole Frazer History of Religions stuff... and not to many other people. Sample:

There is also a tradition that [Pooh] lived under the name of Sanders (W 1.2), which appears only once in our present texts, since for some reason now forgotten, Sanders traditions have been rigorously expunged from the corpus. The name Sanders does however occur in one of the illustrations (W 1.3) in the archaic script, which, belonging as they do to the pre-verbal stage in the transmission of the traditions, have a strong claim to authenticity. There is a secondary and utterly implausible 'explanation' of the two principal names for Pooh, Winnie and Pooh, which is offered by the final redactor and which only displays the editor's acute embarrassment with the double tradition. The complexity of the problem is increased by the appearance within the same chapter of the double name of Piglet's grandfather (Trespassers William), again implausibly explained by the redactor as 'in case he lost one.'

Thanks to the inimitable AKMA.

Amazon has a price at last

Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog is finally fully loaded into the Amazon.com system. And it's listed at $10.47, which is 30% off.

The U2 Xacobeo concert rumor

I had to smile this morning upon discovering U2 Sermons had been visited by someone at the Universidade S. Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. I don't know any more than you guys do, honest.

Book proofreading update

I feel like my eyes are about to fall out of my head. The ms arrived about lunchtime today, and I have to send it back tomorrow, so I've been proofing almost nonstop. I would like to make these comments:
1) I thought 160 pages seemed short! It's over 200.
2) I like Cowley's font choices, epecially the one for quotes.
3) I don't envy our editor having to make calls about lyric quotes - like, if a text is in lower case in the Pop booklet with no punctuation, does that mean all quotations of it should be in lower case with no punctuation?
4) Italics issues. Lots of italics issues. Must have been some computer glitch.
5) I'm kind of amazed how long the spirituality program appendix is, typeset.
6) Our editor made a really smart and U2-literate addition to the sentence about Zooropa in my essay and I am extremely impressed.
7) Whaddaya say: "beatific vision," or "Beatific Vision"? I can go either way.

mini-milestone

We just hit 5000 visitors to this blog.

Worship planning suggestion, a propos of nothing

You know what would make a perfect sequence hymn (or gradual hymn, for those that like to call it that) on Palm Sunday in any church that uses the lectionary? "Falling at Your Feet." Most of the lyrics are an imaginative fleshing-out of Philippians 2, which people would have just heard as the Epistle, and it ends with "not my will, thy will," which people would be just about to hear quoted at the very beginning of the Passion Gospel.

Preaching on this song would be hard, I think, but as essentially a prayer, it's perfect for liturgical use. And how often do you get a piece of music that transitions so obviously and directly from one reading to another?

Nice review of the Shine album with "Falling At Your Feet" comments by Jeffrey Overstreet at Looking Closer, by the way.

Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for these items

Hallelujah, Amazon has it right at last. {revision a few minutes later: no, I spoke too soon. They don't. You can buy it... but... for $0.00. Well, if I were you, I'd run do that right now!}

In other news, I'm expecting to spend Wed-Thurs proofreading the book. Whew.

Steve Garber at The Voice Behind

Just FYI, one of our contributors, Steve Garber, will be speaking this week in the Washington DC area on "The Power of Stories" at an event called Brewing Culture. It's sponsored by The Voice Behind.

The site also has an interesting reprint of an interview with Dennis Claus, the executive producer of the Luther movie. I was surprised to find some of what he said resonating with me about this book....

Amazon.uk listing is up

Well, Get Up Off Your Knees is now on Amazon.UK, though not pre-orderable yet. They have, however, done a much better job with the subject indexing than the American Amazon site.

All Saints Eve and/or Reformation Day

Thanks again to the folks at Friends at the Advent for the repeat invitation. It was really cool to preach in the midst of a Solemn High Mass at a place to which, years before I even went to seminary, I was sneaking down to go to Solemn High Mass. As for the sermon, instead of quoting U2 I ended up quoting both Betty Bowers and Dom Jean Baptiste Chautard.

I went up to Boston early and saw Luther, which was surprisingly good and made me get teary-eyed about the Word of God. It was also a fun history review, making me remember all kinds of things from school: oh, yeah, Prince Frederick... Staupitz.... the Peasants' Rebellion.... and later I remembered, oh, yeah, Luther's hilariously titled book Against the Murdering Thieving Hordes of Peasants.

But they skipped some of the, you know, off-putting, religious parts of the story. So we didn't get "The righteous shall live by faith" or "I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates." Thus we never really heard what Luther's brilliant, earthshaking insight about justification actually was, which is a shame. Still: much better than it could have been.

Another round of links

Thanks to NeoTheo(b)logue, who opines that our preaching U2 book "looks like yet another reason to violate my self-imposed moratorium on book buying," for the link. (By the way, if you're reading this, Daniel, one of our contributors, Mike Kinman, was at that concert with you.) And thanks also to The Ooze Blogs for listing U2 Sermons.