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Last updated on: May 29, 2004 at 4:33 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2004-05-29T16:33:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but clergy like it

It’s hard to imagine a group of teenagers sitting around listening to a Blink 182 or N.E.R.D. album — liner notes in one hand, Bible in the other — trying to pick out lyrics that quote Scripture or allude to spiritual truths.

“When Pharrell sings, ‘She makes me think of lightning in skies — Her name, She’s sexy!!/ How else is God supposed to write — Her name, She’s sexy!!’ do you think he could be talking about the Holy Spirit?”

Nah. Maybe I’m out of touch, peering back from my vantage point more than 15 years post-high school, but I just can’t picture it. Kids today and their crazy music, I say to myself, clucking my imaginary dentures and rattling my imaginary cane at the sky.

See, back in the day, for many fans of the Irish rock band U2 — particularly those with religious predilections — combing through the band’s lyrics for biblical images or references to Jesus Christ and his teachings was almost a sport. Like a cross between a hermeneutical “capture the flag” and a theological “Where’s Waldo?”

Now some of those especially devoted fans who spent a good deal of the 1980s looking for God in U2’s songs have apparently found what they were looking for, and recently assembled their discoveries in a book.

Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog is a collection of 32 sermons inspired by U2 songs, written by Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy and lay people — most of them under the age of 40.

The Rev. Beth Maynard, an Episcopal priest from Massachusetts and one of the co-editrixes of Get Up Off Your Knees, is like many of her ecclesiastical contemporaries who attended seminary in the 1990s. U2’s music was “a bedrock soundtrack for some aspects of the Christian vision,” she said.

Several of the members of U2, including chief lyricist Bono, have spoken, with varying degrees of openness over the years, about their Christian faith.

“I think U2 tends to strike a note with clergy,” Maynard was telling me the other day, fully aware of the bad pun. “One reason is that U2 sort of models a kind of thoughtful fresh engagement with spirituality, and they bring Christian themes to bear on contemporary issues in a way that we’re always trying to teach our parishioners to do.

“Preachers are always looking for meaningful connections in the contemporary world with Scripture, and U2 do a great job of drawing those in their own art,” she said. “U2 has been working for 25 years, and they’ve dealt with so many major theological themes over the course of their career that it’s a wealth of resources to draw on.”

The title Get Up Off Your Knees comes from the U2 song “Please,” perhaps written from the perspective of the Creator, which says:

Your Catholic blues

Your convent shoes

Your stick-on tattoos

Now they’re making the news

Your holy war

Your northern star

Your sermon on the mount

From the boot of your car

Please, please, please

Get up off your knees

Please, please, please

Leave me out of this, please.The book interacts with U2’s music “the same way that a preacher would work with Shakespeare or John Donne,” Maynard said, adding that the authors tried to resist the insipid Bono hero-worship that is pervasive among U2 fans. “This book is engaging with someone’s art, not with them as role models.

“Art is there to be dialogued with,” she said. “If we can’t bring a theological assessment to pop culture, we’re really handicapped in our growth as believers.”

Maynard’s favorite sermon in the collection is a meditation on U2’s song, “Wake Up Dead Man,” written by Brian Walsh, a Christian Reformed minister at the University of Toronto. Walsh says “Dead Man” is a spiritual lament, just like those penned by the psalmist in Hebrew Scripture.

U2’s song begins with the words, “Jesus help me/I’m alone in this world and a f****d up world it is, too/Tell me, tell me the story, the one about eternity and the way it’s all gonna be/Wake up, wake up dead man.”

In his sermon, Walsh argues that Bono’s language in the song — invoking the adjective form of the gerund that got him in trouble with the FCC last year when he used it on live television — is actually less harsh than the words used by the Hebrew psalmist.

“The song wonders whether Jesus is able to help,” Walsh writes. “‘Maybe your hands aren’t free,’ muses the lyric; maybe you were busy when calamity hit, ‘working on something new.’ The psalmist, however, is not so gentle. He refuses to let God off the hook.”

“‘You made us like sheep for slaughter; you sold us for a trifle,'” Walsh quotes from Psalm 44.

“It is more risky to recite Psalm 44 in church than to sing ‘Wake Up Dead Man,'” he says. “Both songs wind up in the same place. Both the psalmist and U2 have the audacity to raise a voice of lament that calls upon our divine covenant partner to wake up.”

Maynard hasn’t heard anything from the U2 fellas about Get Up Off Your Knees. Earlier this week, a spokeswoman for the band said Bono and the boys were locked in their Dublin studio, finishing their new album (due out in the fall), and couldn’t be reached for comment.

The authors have donated proceeds from the sale of Get Up Off Your Knees to TASO, an AIDS organization in Uganda with which Bono’s not-for-profit advocacy group Debt AIDS Trade in Africa (DATA) works closely.

A few years back, when asked about the role faith plays in the band’s music, Bono said: “Maybe we have to sort of draw our fish in the sand. It’s there for people who are interested. It shouldn’t be there for people who aren’t.”

Fair enough.

I doubt anyone who simply enjoys U2’s “The Playboy Mansion” because it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it might not care that the song contains an allusion to the Gospel of St. John where Jesus describes the afterlife, saying, “In my father’s house there are many mansions.”

Nor would the casual, non-religious fan likely be intrigued by ideas the Rev. Steve Stockman, Presbyterian chaplain of Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, espouses in his sermon, “Pressing on with Bono and Paul.”

The chaplain says U2’s song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” — rather than a statement of disbelief — is much like St. Paul’s statement of faith in his Letter to the Philippians that says, “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Jesus Christ.”

Too heavy, though, right? After all, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll, and U2 is just a band. Just like N.E.R.D or Blink 182.

And you don’t see anyone sifting through their lyrics with a biblical concordance. Do you?

But, as they say, for those who have ears to hear . . .

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