U2: A worship service.

It’s worship that is honest; songs about our brokenness, songs about injustice, songs about differences, songs about doubt, songs about LOVE! As Bono once said to Eugene Peterson, where are the worship hymns about divorce? When we read the Pslams we have the entire expression of the human experience. But in so many ways we’ve hidden that for the ability to escape our troubles rather than enter in to our troubles. And there’s a great time and place for the need to simply feel God’s loving presence that gives us ease away from our pains. But God’s presence is ALSO in that mess. Let us sing about the mess! Let us sing about the pain! Let us sing about the doubt! May we share that with one other as we lift our voices up. May we also be led to freedom in the presence of a vulnerable God. Who deeply desires our honesty. And so does the world!

We have a God who enters into the sufferings of humanity and meets us there.

Seeing U2 in D.C. after the height of the divisions of the former years was immensely sobering. “We will find common ground seeking higher ground.” Finding unity while not avoiding the injustices happening all over the world. Speaking of what we all have done as Americans in fighting the Aids epidemic. That despite our differences we can always seek to heal, we can seek to uplift, we can seek to bring justice. Is this what Paul suggests when it is said there is no Jew or Gentile, nor slave or free, no male or female in Christ? Our divisions don’t exist in the work of Christ. We are one even if we’re not the same. Because the work that unites us IS the work of one-ness. It’s the truth revealed in the Trinity. We are invited into relationship with relationship itself.

It’s the humanity that the incarnation and the cross beg us to see, and it’s the invitation the resurrection begs us to enact in our lives. We have the vocation of building the kingdom of God HERE. Preparing this home of ours for the renewal of all things. And that’s cosmic!

The renewal of all things.
The renewal of all things.
The renewal of all things.

Oh Church do you hear that call?

Brothers and sisters does that wake you up in the morning?

We are lucky to have been invited to this beautiful work!

It’s GOOD NEWS is it not!? The whole thing is being renewed and EVERYBODY is invited.

I’d take that message to the entire world would you not?

Bono dedicated songs throughout the night to centuries of champions for women’s rights and women who “light our way.” It was World Refugee Day and the crowd passed around the entire stadium a passport photo of a Syrian refugee as sound-clips of leaders of our nations from both sides talked about the humanity of everybody everywhere. Videos and poems brought attention to the mistreatment of the indigenous peoples, and they brought words of healing to the darkness of these last few weeks with moments like the shooting in Alexandria.

The entire show was about acknowledging the things that get in the way of us seeing each other. And exchanging that for that which builds us all up.

“Love holds us all up.”