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94: The Gospel According To U2 (Part 2)
73 Plays6 months ago
Pastor Jim Mueller joined Jill Devine for a two-part episode on Normal Goes A Long Way. Jim is the Lead Pastor at Messiah Lutheran Church in St. Charles, Missouri and has been on the podcast several times before.
Messiah St. Charles is in the middle of a sermon series called, The Gospel According To U2.
Jill wanted to get Jim’s take on using “secular” music to reach believers and non-believers. Jim also shared a “secular” song that made an impact on him at the young age of 9-years-old.
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Transcript
Introduction by Jill Devine
00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Devine Media production.
Jill's Journey to Faith and Podcasting
00:00:04
Speaker
Christianity has become known for judgy people, strange words, ancient stories, confusing rules, and a members-only mindset. This is why I stayed away from the church for so long, but it's not supposed to be that way. I'm Jill Devine, a former radio personality with three tattoos, a love for a good tequila, and who's never read the entire Bible.
00:00:24
Speaker
Yet here I am hosting a podcast about faith. The normal
Purpose of 'Normal Goes a Long Way' Podcast
00:00:28
Speaker
goes a long way podcast is your home for real conversations with real people using real language about how faith and real life intersect. Welcome to the conversation.
00:00:39
Speaker
Welcome back
Impact of 'Kyrie Eleison' and Church Traditions
00:00:40
Speaker
to part two of the conversation with Pastor Jim Mueller. So we left off in our last conversation talking about the songs that really made a difference, really made an impact on you. So let's talk about it. What are those songs? I'll take you back to nine-year-old Jim. Okay. Yeah, the year was 1985 when all music was bad. It says some people, but it's the music I grew up with, so I loved it, right?
00:01:09
Speaker
80s, it meant hair bands, not not bands in your hair, but literally bands that had long hair. Yep. A song comes out by Mr. Mr. That hits number one in the charts, and they only had a couple songs, two or three, I think, that were really top 40 charters. OK, so they weren't a one hit wonder, but at most maybe a two or three wonder. But one song came out that was Kyrie Eleison.
00:01:39
Speaker
And when I would hear it as a nine year old kid, I thought, oh my gosh, this is what we sing in church. And I don't think anybody knows it. And then I even like heard some people would like sing the lyrics to it. And instead of Kyrie a liaison, they would sing like carry a laser or something like that. Like they were like in their minds. They must've been saying something like that.
00:02:06
Speaker
And of course you
Christian Themes in 80s Music
00:02:07
Speaker
would know some of the lyrics and I'll just read a couple of lyrics. I won't sing them here, but the wind blows hard against this mountain side across the sea into my soul. It reaches into where I cannot hide, setting my feet upon the road. A lot of great imagery there. And I'm going to tell you like every single one of those lines could have come from the Psalms and it does come from the Psalms. Not that, not that the author of the song, the authors of the song, the band,
00:02:35
Speaker
Um, took them from the Psalms, but I mean, they could be direct quotes. And then, and then the chorus, which is the name of the song Kyrie liaison down the road that I must travel. Kyrie liaison through the darkness of the night. Kyrie liaison where I'm going. Will you follow Kyrie liaison on a highway in the night? Now we sang that phrase Kyrie liaison in church all the time. And I knew what it meant. And I knew what it meant because my grandfather,
00:03:03
Speaker
I was a pastor and actually had his PhD. So I was raised in a very educated Christian environment at home, even though I didn't go to a Christian school. I knew that Kyrie meant Lord. So every time in the gospels that you have the disciples saying, Lord, Lord, where are you going? Or Lord, what are we supposed to do? They're using the word in Greek and it's Kyrie or Kyrios. And a liaison means have mercy.
00:03:33
Speaker
So the phrase, Kyri Eleison, is Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, all throughout that song, over and over and over again. And it's a uniquely Christian phrase. It's a New Testament phrase. And again, just for our listeners, the New Testament was originally written in Greek, because Greek was the language of the Roman Empire at the time. And this pattern of calling on God, the Trinity, in triplet was common.
00:04:01
Speaker
in Roman Catholic churches, Eastern Orthodox churches, and then even found its way in many other churches, including the church I grew up in. And so in the traditional church that I had, we followed that
Exploring U2's Spiritual Symbolism
00:04:12
Speaker
same pattern. We would chant curio laison, creisto laison, curio laison, which means Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
00:04:22
Speaker
So it's like you're singing to God the Father, you're singing to Christ specifically, the God we know, Jesus. And then you're singing to the Holy Spirit. So Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. And you would repeat this over and over and over again. And I always, as a kid, I always thought of that as like a desperate prayer, repeated and repeated, Lord have mercy. Sort of, I'm so out of options. Or God, I'm so out of breath.
00:04:51
Speaker
and I don't know what to say, so I'm just begging for mercy. And there I was, I guess my point being, I was nine years old and I was hearing that same desperate prayer on Top 40 radio station and it was good. In my 80s music loving opinion, it was a good song.
00:05:14
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And I thought, how beautiful that this band, this hair band, can't help it that in the middle of their catalog, they had to write a song about those times in life where, as humanity, we're so desperate that we would just call out, Lord have mercy, down the road I must travel. Lord have mercy through the darkness of the night. Where I'm going, will you follow God? Like, oh, it's so beautiful.
00:05:42
Speaker
Well, I have to wonder back then, I mean, I feel like this could be on a Christian radio station now. Back then, I don't I don't even feel like that was an outlet. They didn't really have radio stations back then. It wasn't until a few years after, I believe, if I had to guess that really. Some pretty well known like Amy Grant, Amy Grant, yeah, became famous.
00:06:13
Speaker
as a Christian artist first and then a popular artist later. That was really towards the end of the 80s more. Correct. I think the song was actually redone by a Christian artist named Mark Schultz, if I remember. But that would have been done more like in the, if I guess, late 90s or early 2000s.
00:06:35
Speaker
And there's some crossover now. Not a lot, but there's some. I just have to wonder like, why can't there be, okay, maybe I should reword this. Do you know was Mr. Mr., those guys openly say they were Christians, they were believers. Do you know anything about that portion? I won't label them anyway. I do know that
00:07:06
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one of the band members who was helping with the phrase Kyrie Lason and the words, he said, I remember singing this in my Episcopal church as a kid. And so I just read that, like where their faith was in their personal lives, I really have no clue. But there's something to be said. That he's, yeah, so yeah, one of them remembers the phrase from his Episcopal upbringing, at least in church. So that was something that I read, but
00:07:35
Speaker
Again, I never looked into this. Right. You know, like as a kid, I just heard it and I'm like, oh, there must be. That's it. Yeah, you felt it. And whether somebody, you know, when you're in a band and you're touring, whether or not you're actively following Christ or not, I still think, though, that it's cool that at the human level, they knew humans have this desperation in us. Mm hmm.
00:08:00
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Sometimes we have to be able to sing out like that. And like I said, sometimes when life gets bad enough, and it will, at times, even the atheist gets desperate enough, they're gonna have to fold their hands sometimes. So we will have all of the gospel according to you two sermon series on the show notes page at normalgoesalongway.com. But I wanna talk about two more things before we wrap up.
00:08:29
Speaker
The two things I do want to talk about Beautiful Day and cover art for the album. Yeah. And then also like any there's so much work that you guys put into these sermons that maybe didn't make it to the actual sermon. So I want to also end with that. But let's talk about
00:08:49
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the terminal, the airport terminal, because that still blows my mind. I've told about, I don't know how many people about this. To start, like you two and Bono in particular, they were always drawn to shooting videos and taking pictures and things like that from airports because
00:09:09
Speaker
They believe that the airport is the first thing you see when you meet a city. And of course, when you tour like they have, they've been like so many places. But you meet your first Roman person when you land in Rome's airport. Or you meet your first New Yorker when you land in LaGuardia.
00:09:31
Speaker
I think that's what he was saying is you meet the people, you get to smell some of the food, you get to see a little bit of their artistic-ness and things like that. And so that album was shot at Charles de Gaulle Airport. They included just this little thing that kind of looks like a digital clock, but I think most people would have assumed that it's displaying a flight number, which was J33.3.
00:09:58
Speaker
But as the band explained and Bono explains, no, no, no, that's God's phone number, Jeremiah 33. You know, call on to me and I will answer. Basically he's saying like all of us can have God on speed dial, you know, just putting that on an album cover and thinking about it that way. And I love, I love that thought that like God gives us
00:10:24
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his phone number from the very beginning. And it's as simple as just a prayer, just a, yeah. Yeah,
Music as a Catalyst for Faith
00:10:34
Speaker
so. I don't know, I thought that was just so fascinating. And I love hearing little things like that. And it's just like, wow, yes, that's really cool. What else about your research
00:10:49
Speaker
that you would like to share or I mean, just anything that the listener might be able to resonate with. I just keep thinking about that one person who is like, I don't know. I mean, kind of like me where I don't know all the stuff. I don't know all the things. I don't know where to begin. I don't know what to do. What about this? What about that? And just how something, I don't even want to use the word simple because it's not, but it feels simple like music.
00:11:20
Speaker
can be that catalyst. The amazing thing about a song like Beautiful Day is you're actually not going to hear it on a beautiful day. You're probably it's probably going to show up or start playing or. Come up on your playlist or come over the radio on a day that's really miserable. And so a song like that, and I think the band knew this, by the way, this is one of the things they talked about, and I didn't really have the time to go there, but
00:11:50
Speaker
The song is meant, is meant to redirect you on your crappy days. It's not meant to amplify your super great days. And we all need that. We all need, we need to know that there's hope when we don't have it. And when we become wiser in life, we need to know that, we need to know how to find it
00:12:18
Speaker
when we're in those days. So it's like you would, on a bad day, you should force yourself to reflect on a song like Beautiful Day. And the Bible's filled with those stories.
Lessons from the Story of Job
00:12:31
Speaker
Like I brought up Noah when I was teaching on this, just because of some of the imagery and the verses of the song, but I really wanted to talk about Job.
00:12:42
Speaker
Job is the craziest book in the Old Testament. I actually studied it in detail verse by verse in Hebrew when I was in seminary. It was one of the actually I was at Cambridge University and I studied it with maybe the best Job scholar in the world. He had the book of Job in Hebrew memorized. And I know this because he was blind by the time I became a student. Oh, wow.
00:13:04
Speaker
And so as I'm translating, like through the book, he could say, Oh no, no, parse out this word and go to page, you know, whatever 300 and something in your Hebrew Bible. And I'd flip and I'm like, there, it's exactly as he says it. And he would just say it from memory, these lines in Hebrew, uh, forcing me to get my syntax right and everything else is unbelievable. Um,
00:13:31
Speaker
But what I want to share with everybody is the story of Job is amazing because it opens with just a couple chapters of narrative. And then it's 30 something chapters of poetic misery and searching. And then a couple more chapters at the end of an explanation. So the story starts with Job.
00:13:55
Speaker
having a wonderful life, family, kids, wealth, so successful. And Satan believes that nobody in the world is really righteous and wants to follow God. And God says, what about my man Job? And Satan says to God, well, if you weren't giving him everything, he would curse you. God doesn't believe it. He believes in Job. He believes in who he is. And so Satan gets after him.
00:14:26
Speaker
and has his kids die in an accident, and has his wealth squandered, and his, you know, his herds and everything that would symbolize wealth at the time. Job just loses everything. His wife even comes to him and says, it's time for you to curse God so you can just die. He had welts on his skin. I mean, he had lost everything, his family. He had lost his wealth. He had lost his health.
00:14:56
Speaker
I just imagined boils and things everywhere. And he tears his clothes and screams in just agony, but he refuses to curse God. Didn't blame God. And then he has these three friends that come in and that's the 30 something chapters are basically them going back and forth with him where they're like, if you would just, there must've been something you did to deserve this terrible thing. And Job's like, no,
00:15:26
Speaker
Sometimes terrible things happen not because we did something. They happened not because of us, but they happened to us. See, sin isn't just the thing you commit. Sin's also the brokenness you're just experiencing. No kid was born with leukemia and we would ever think to blame their parents or them. Like, of course not. And yet so often, you know what?
00:15:54
Speaker
It kind of seems like we are or we're wondering it. And so Job just explores that over and over again where his wife and these friends are trying to convince him that God must be against him and it'd be better for him to just die. And Job just won't give in to all that. He just won't. And at the end of the book, finally, like Job is calling out to God and saying, how can any of this happen? And how is this okay? And God finally,
00:16:23
Speaker
spends a chapter plus saying to him, Joe, you wanna know the answers to the secrets of the universe, essentially. Like, were you there when I measured out the heavens? Were you there when I took my tape measure out and literally got everything perfect and, you know, the gravitational pull, the moon and the earth? I mean, just stuff like that. Like, God is just kind of explaining this whole thing to him. Essentially, he's asking him, Joe,
00:16:51
Speaker
Are you really asking to get to decide all this stuff? What's right and wrong and what's just and unjust? And do you really want that responsibility? And Joe, just kind of praise of repentant prayer. No, I don't, I don't want that. I don't really doubt you. Then God blesses him. His health is restored. His wealth is multiplied from even where it was.
00:17:20
Speaker
receives is a family again, better and more beautiful. It even describes like all his kids are mega beautiful this time. Like it's just amazing at the end. And I think in a way what it is is it's a proverb, not saying the story is not true, but I'm saying it is like, it is kind of a proverb about life. It's a lesson about life is at the start of a story, of course it's a beautiful day. At the end of the story, of course it's a beautiful day.
00:17:49
Speaker
But what about in the middle of that? Because there's a lot of days that we're there and things are falling apart. And what are we gonna say about God? And what are we gonna say about life? And what are we gonna say about love and beauty on those days? And Job surely had his doubts and had his trouble, but there was a certain step he wasn't willing to go to. And that's what God meant from the beginning when Satan was saying, oh, all humanity is just trash. God's like, no.
00:18:19
Speaker
No, I believe in him. And let me show you Job. He is a good man. And that's when I think about the song Beautiful Day, like that's an example of one where I'm like, oh, can I be like Job on my worst days with also some hope that I know that beautiful day is coming. So I'm going to live like it's about to come. I'm not going to live.
00:18:48
Speaker
in the misery I'm in right now. So basically. The sermon could have been an hour and a half. Yeah. Sorry. No. But like what you said was when you were saying Satan was basically thinking, saying all humanity is trash. Yeah. That there are people like Job in the world that keep
00:19:17
Speaker
Showing Satan that he's wrong Yeah, and that we and we have to we for our own sake to like we have to keep holding on to that Yeah, and I think that that really hit just hit me because thinking about it all like if Satan was right everybody would be trashed We wouldn't have be having these conversations. There's there are good people
00:19:40
Speaker
that remind us of the beautiful day in the darkest days. I completely agree and I would just say to anybody out there, we all can be jokes. Yeah. The problem is how are we going to respond on the day that's between the beautiful days? Can we find beauty in that too? And I think that's what I really resonate with that song.
00:20:05
Speaker
It's like, it's like, it's like Bono is singing. It's a beautiful day because he's trying to convince himself. And you know what? I know exactly what that's like. Oh yeah. Exactly what that's like. And that's the problem with life because the story of the Bible is a story of trees. It begins with the tree. Things are good. Then it's lost. And of course it ends with the tree.
00:20:33
Speaker
And at the end of Revelation, it ends with the tree where we're back again with the tree of life and humanity's restored and beautiful. The problem is we live between the trees. And if Satan's right, and the only reason any of us ever praise God is because everything goes fine in life, well, then none of us are gonna end up praising God because life isn't always gonna be great. And by the way, I don't wanna be good to people.
00:21:04
Speaker
just because things are going well for me. Like I hope I would be a good person in prison. I hope I could bless people even if I was poor. I hope and my soul is strong enough that I could love even if nobody
Music, Memory, and Spirituality
00:21:25
Speaker
would love me back or I would be kind even if nobody was kind to me. I'm not sure I have it.
00:21:32
Speaker
It appears that Job had a lot of that, and I really admire that. So that's, when I think of a song like A Beautiful Day, it's just, it's that mantra that I wanna say to myself to convince myself to have a little bit more hope, even when stuff sucks. And I wanna just say, Joel, this is like why,
00:21:56
Speaker
I'm drawn to the scriptures because some of these stories I've probably told dozens of times, and even for me, why doesn't it get old? I think it's because it's showing me how to live, truly live. I've often wondered that too, this whole another episode, like the same things over and over again. How do you get inspiration?
00:22:20
Speaker
We'll do a different series on that. I mean, my gosh, but there has to be something that you take away each time. Also, just like with music, as much as you have listened to that song, Beautiful Day, or insert your favorite song here, whatever it is, depending on the day, you will take something out of it that you didn't before. And it will become deeply specific and personal to the day you're having that day. That's what changes it.
00:22:50
Speaker
That's what I love about music. I remember somebody asked me something along the lines like, why is this such a passion of yours? I said, because every single song evokes a memory, whether it's sad, happy, eh, usually every song that you know, you have tied an experience to. And it's okay to go down the deep
00:23:19
Speaker
and also the highs, the lows, the ebbs, the flows, the valleys, you know, all of it. Because
Conclusion: Music and Faith Journey
00:23:26
Speaker
I think it's beautiful that I can think about those things and either think about how far I've come or the wonderful memories I had with that person or maybe that makes me think, oh, I should text them or whatever. So there's just that connection with music that I just, everybody has it. Yeah. Cause there's definitely songs that you would say like you associate with a past relationship and
00:23:49
Speaker
college, high school, mom and dad. Yeah. You went to that concert. Absolutely. Yeah. So now I can add the Lord into that. And I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. And I would, and I would just say like, and yet even that same song that's got a pass memory, depending on what you're going through right now today, there could be layered meaning even on top of that again, based on your experience and
00:24:17
Speaker
Um, that's why I like, uh, bands like Mr. Mr. And bands like you too, who put out some stuff that when I was a kid growing up, I thought, you know what? I want to be the kind of person that never forgets to say Lord have mercy, no matter what my faith felt like that day. And a song like beautiful day.
00:24:40
Speaker
Trust me, I wouldn't be speaking on it in front of a crowd of hundreds and hundreds of people unless there was something that had spoken to me individually too. And again, preaching isn't all about me. It's not all about my experience, but for the people that are out there listening, I'm the first listener. I'm listening too. It's speaking to me, hopefully, as much as it's speaking to anybody else. I haven't figured it out.
00:25:08
Speaker
I just try to tap into it so we can all tap into it. My point is I'm just there in some ways listening with all of you too. It's working on me as much as it's working on anybody else.
00:25:19
Speaker
Well, thank you. Um, sure. I mean, we'll have you on again. Who knows what we're going to talk about, but I always appreciate this time and appreciate your insight. So, uh, we'll get everything online. Normal goes a long way.com. Okay. And yeah, anytime you want to talk music, I'm in. All right. Thanks Jim.