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Bono and his band, U2, have been provoking audiences, including Christians, since they began playing in the '70s. After making clear their Christian influences early on, the band took on social justice concerns and explored the depths of pop culture in the '90s. With their album All that You Can't Leave Behind, U2 returned to exploring its spiritual roots. Bono then toured the United States asking Christians to step up the fight against AIDS in Africa.

All along, however, U2 has been a staple in sermons across the country, across denominations, and across generations. Get Up Off Your Knees is a collection of sermons from the U2 catalogue written by several authors. Co-editor Beth Maynard is the pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

Your co-author, Raewynne Whiteley, has a piece on pop culture and preaching. What is the connection between those two?

Preachers are always looking for effective cultural connections that help people grasp the meaning of biblical text. One of the points that Raewynne makes is that not only do we take the biblical text out into the world, we bring our life experience and our experience of the world with us when we read biblical text. If you're a fan of U2, when you come to a situation of discouragement, when you need to be encouraged to persevere, you may come to that situation with "Walk On" in your head. There's just a natural connection that you make of these different texts and these different ways of telling the story of the world that we're in.

For people that aren't that familiar with U2, give a brief history of U2 and why it is that their lyrics so consistently convey biblical themes.

U2 is an Irish band, formed in the late '70s, out of the punk/new wave movement in Dublin. Very early on in their formation as a band, three of the members of the band became heavily involved in a Christian community called Shalom, which was non-denominational, and one can tell from their later comments was a very intense, influential experience. They ended up breaking with that community, it seemed, largely over the question of whether you could pursue a "secular career," such as rock music, and continue having a profession as a Christian.

In the '80s, U2 was known for being very straight ahead social justice, change the world, get out there and wave your white flag, and by the end of the '80s they were much critiqued for that self-righteousness. They completely re-invented themselves in the '90s, borrowing a page from C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, and became the band of irony. At the end of the '90s, as the millennium came, they went back, in a sense, to wearing their heart on their sleeves with their most recent album, All That You Can't Leave Behind, which retains some of that subtlety and nuance that we came to associate with U2 in the '90s, but is also much more straight ahead about basic human values.

Steven Garber writes the chapter "To See What You See: On Liturgy & Learning & Life," and focuses on Psalm 123. He talks about a meeting in Washington, D.C., where Bono was going to come and talk about AIDS in Africa.

It's interesting, the actual context that he's in. He's a scholar and resident at Calvin College, and he was talking to the congregation of students there about building a Christian worldview, learning how to do what Bono says he wishes he could do in "When I Look At The World," to see the world the way Jesus sees, to understand how our world looks to Jesus Christ. Steven tells this story of his encounter with Bono at a meeting about AIDS in Africa in Washington, D.C. and then talks about a few other contemporary examples of people that he knows who also have worked at trying to build a Christian worldview. And then wraps that all up by exhorting his students to learn to see the world as Jesus sees it.

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April (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48