Guest post by my hubby, Paul. It’s long, but you need to forgive him. He doesn’t get out much.

We got dressed up last night (Rachelle looked good) and went to the U2 concert in Seattle. Great show. Low key; the flash of ZooTV is gone. Interesting but simple stage, with these giant screens made of light bulb curtains.

In Bono’s campaign to bring attention to the problems in Africa, they did mention World Vision, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Data, and the One campaign.

Bono is loony. At one point he was crawling—slithering even—down the elliptical runway through the audience. He pulled three people onto the stage: two to just watch him sing (like Elvis, Rachelle said), the third to read the fans’ T-shirt (which I think said “Me Me Me”). Bono the Rock Star Band Leader of the 21st century.

So, we’re in line for T-shirts for 45 minutes while Kings of Leon played, whom I’m too old and un-hip to have ever heard of. A guy behind us is talking, talking, talking to everyone who will listen. About the line, about how long he’s been a fan, about the concerts he’s been to. Talk, talk, talk. We struck up a conversation with a woman (a pastor at a United Methodist) while we wait and decide if we want the black shirt or the green shirt, why concert dates on the back are annoying, which buttons to buy, if the green shirt is too girly, why U2 can’t make a well-fitting women’s shirt, if you can tell how long someone has been a fan by the state of their concert T (until we discover that you can buy instant cred: authentically antiqued & faded shirts can be had for just $90). We end up batching our order and her buttons and some random guy’s shirt to save them some time. It turns out that the “girly” shirt looks girly because it comes only in baby doll sizes.

The problem is that it is the coolest of the shirts, emblazoned Heart, Peace, Bomb, nicely summing up the album promoting the tour.

“How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” is mostly a bunch of love songs. That, and “Yahweh”, one of the very few Inspired-From-The-Mouth-Of-God worship songs written in the last 2500 years, which I guess also qualifies it as a love song. Heart Peace Bomb Yahweh; it is enough to induce vertigo in anyone.

The concert, as I said, was low key, but U2 let their activist songs speak for themselves, and the concert was built on them. Rock stars are really disingenuous when they demur “No one wants to listen to me, I’m only a rock star.” All movements are galvanized by song. “We Shall Overcome” propelled the U.S. civil rights movement. Hymns solidified the newly faithful during every revival. The Vietnam War was halted by Woodstock. Psalms catechized the early church.

After a few songs, the band started “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”, a song about the massacre in Derry on 30 January 1972 of civil rights protestors. Bono re-envisioned the song with his introduction (paraphrased), “Don’t sing this song for Ireland. Sing it for yourselves.”

When fact is fiction and TV reality.
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die.

Next came “Bullet the Blue Sky”, U2’s rant against American power through military insanity. On Rattle and Hum it is bookended with the Hendrix rendition of “Star Spangled Banner” and Bono’s out-of-breath plea for the United States to live up to its iconic status. But last night, in this new context with a fighter plane flashing across the curtain of bulbs he sang: “You plant a demon seed / You raise a flower of fire.”

They followed with “Pride”, with Bono pointing out that Martin Luther King’s rallying cry is now the plea and hope of the world.

In the name of love
What more in the name of love.

To rousing—if confusing—cheers, Bono prefaced “Running to Stand Still” with “This song is dedicated to the brave men and women serving in the American Military”. The ‘official’ set closed with “One”

The large screens displayed the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, which has articles discarded as “obsolete” and “quaint” by top Republicans; statements like: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

One love, one blood, one life, you got to do what you should.
One life with each other: sisters, brothers.
One life, but we’re not the same.
We get to carry each other, carry each other.

I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb at first. After Bush 2000, after September 11, after the lies to invade Iraq, after Bush 2004, I wanted an album that cut hard. I wanted an album denouncing George W. Bush as evil. Not the Mike Myers comedic “Eeveal”. Not the garden variety hyperbolic mush you hear about on Sunday mornings. No, the real deal. The kind portrayed in Seven. The kind that kills innocent people for no rational purpose other than greed and egomania. The kind that napalms villages. The kind that gasses children and grandparents.

Make no mistake, George W. Bush is an Anti-Christ. His lies and his actions and his goals are antithetical to Christ and the Kingdom of God. And Bush must go. He must be stopped from his psychopathic destruction: from selling the American Project at a flea market for ADM, KBR, Halliburton, and Exxon; from raping the globe for profit; from orchestrating a world where the ultra-rich have more rights than the rest, where the poor are beat down into servitude, and where freedom depends upon the size of your gun; from torturing in our name; from killing innocents to enrich the pockets of corporations; from using Jesus as a pawn in a Machiavellian scheme to solidify power through moral fear.

But U2…

Who can forget the Concert For America in the days following 9/11? While we were subjected to propagandist bullshit all gussied up as music, U2 from London looks at a country wobbling on the brink, looks into the pain, and worshipped God in the face of evil.

Nonetheless some in the Christian establishment cite Bono as a contributing factor to the unchurching of the United States. Christianty Today knocked Bono for daring to criticize the church while not regularly attending one himself: “a Christian’s pleading for social justice without worshiping God regularly within the community of the church is little more than activism for its own sake”. Of course this begs the questions: Who is the Church? Where is the Church Worshipping? What does that Worship look like? Which is more dangerous to faith: the relativism of belief for which Bono is criticized? Or relativism of action, of which the church in America is guilty?

Perhaps, just perhaps, leading 17,000 mostly unchurched people in the neo-pagan Northwest in a prayer to Yahweh—something no preacher here can do—constitutes worship:

Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don’t make a fist
Take this mouth
So quick to criticise
Take this mouth
Give it a kiss
…
Take this city
A city should be shining on a hill
Take this city
If it be your will
What no man can own, no man can take
Take this heart
Take this heart
Take this heart
And make it break

And that is maybe why U2 has gone low-key. Love Dismantles the Bomb: my rage, my hatred, my prayers that God would smite down George W. Bush as He did the King of Babylon…. What more in the name of love? A lot more. More self-sacrifice. More compassion. More patience. More love. More worship. More repentance. More activism.

They closed with 40

I waited patiently for the Lord.
He inclined and heard my cry.
He brought me up out of the pit
Out of the miry clay.

You set my feet upon a rock
And made my footsteps firm.
Many will see, many will see and hear.

I will sing, sing a new song.
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?

May we sing the new song of God’s grace forever. But Yahweh, let us sing this song, this song of pain and pleading for the redemption of the world not too much longer.

Hallelujah. Blessed be the name of the Lord.