Stand Up Comedy

Wow...that's quite the post there. While I, as a fellow Christian, respect your passion about defending the Gospel, I think you might be missing just what the song is referring to.

The "helping God crossing the road like a little old lady" reminds me a lot of the passage in 2 Samuel 6 where God struck Uzzah dead for reaching out to grab the Ark of the Covenant when the oxen stumbled. Uzzah's intentions were fine, but he forgot that God is the most powerful force in the universe--that he is infinite and mysterious and does not actually live contained in a box, and that such a box therefore does not need to be cradled like a newborn child.

The people who I feel are "reaching out to grab the Ark" or "helping God across the street like a little old lady" in the most visible sense today are those who make it their calling to revise and propose possible scenarios through which both God could have used evolution to create life, as if it's too inconceivable to imagine a God who didn't do things this way, who really created a perfect world the way He said He did, and THEN things started degenerating after the Fall.

Invert the chord now. There are people who claim that Scripture is 100% no-nonsense, not poetry and nothing but a textbook. This is clearly not the case. I believe that the Bible is the God-inspired Scripture. But it is not a textbook. It does not have a logical, topic by topic format with subheadings and bullet points and definitions. When addressing the Big Bang Theory, why is it so beyond our imaginations to consider that God saying "let there be light" may be quite similar to an explosion from a single point? Doesn't the idea fit even better with God than with some nothingness turning into something? Doesn't a Godly worldview have a larger upside anyway?

I don't say this to convince you that this is clearly the way it is. I'm not asserting that I know exactly the lab-report process by which God created the Universe. I'm just saying that it should not be our mission to do this as we recognize that it's not what we're called to do. That's the point. We have to get over the need for certainty here. Faith has to be rooted in a reverence for awesome power.

What we are called to do, however, is to love one another. That's the point of this song, I feel. It seems like Bono is singing from both sides of a spectrum, kind of pointing out the folly of both the people trying to extract physics formulas out of the Word as well as the "rock stars" who shout big ideas they don't even know the meaning of. The "Comedy" in "Stand Up Comedy" is in this discrepancy. By the way, I think Bono partially identifies himself with the latter group, though I myself feel he's much better grounded than most songwriter-philosophers.

There are a few things Jesus said no lack of certainty. One is His commands to "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind" and "love thy neighbor"--the two greatest commands. He also tells us firmly that He is "the way, the truth, and the life [and that] no one comes to the Father but by [Him]" (John 14:6). These are two pretty important things to know for sure. The rest of the time, Jesus answered most questions with a parable. Why do we feel the need to put Christ's parables in our little converter-notes box to serve our insatiable desire for certainty?