Pages

Monday, July 27, 2009

Bono preaches my sermon

As Stocki tips us off, Bono just flat out says it this time;
He quotes verbatim my favorite sermon I have ever preached.
Some have heard that I almost made the Guiness Book of World Records for shortest sermon.

It was one word,

But not the two words it should have been.

Though it's nothing like being there, you can watch Bono preach it at 0:43ff below:


Perhaps my most quoted quote to my students is Frederick Buechner’s definition of vocation; “The place where your deepest gladness and the world’s greatest hunger meet.” I spend a lot of time pastoring students to that point where they find out what they were created to be and how that can penetrate the needs of the social order. Four songs into U2’s first of three homecoming Croke Park gigs Bono is singing about how he was born to sing and was given songs to sing. Nearing the end of Magnificent the fourth song in a row from the new album No Line On The Horizon, Bono stand arms open and declares “I surrender.” It is a surrendering to his God; it is a surrendering to the people (the fans) whose hard earned money put him on this stage, in one of
the biggest stadiums in Europe, literally one or two miles from where he grew up; it is a surrendering to his place in the world, where with three chords and the truth, as he once said, he could meet some of the world’s deepest hunger.
And as I watch I am thinking that this is where I hope all of my students get to, because that man and his three mates are without doubt right on the vortex of their place in the cosmos
-Soul Surmise, link


As he does in the above clip, it would seem Bono has a history of preaching, then turning over the pulpit to Edge's guitar to preach an instrumental version of the same sermon (All in favor of wordless sermons?), the classic of course being the Rattle N Hum version of "Silver and Gold," 4:28ff here.

Beyond words.

1 comment:

Hey, thanks for engaging the conversation!