I commend Rick Luoni’s musings titled “Rock Stars, Hate & Jesus.” I quote a particularly salient soundbite from his blog entry:
I find it interesting that it is the rock-n-roll artists and musicians who were instrumental in formulating LIVE AID and now LIVE 8. Theses were the guys in Elvis’ day who were supposedly the ones who were “doing the devil’s work” and here they are now doing God’s work or as some would say, the work of the church.
Leave it to a rock star to show me how to follow Jesus.
Meanwhile, “Bob Geldof, Bono, Richard Curtis and everyone at Live8” have written an open letter to the G8 leaders. Again, an excerpt:
The hugeness of Live8 was the best that we normal citizens can do to send our leaders a message.
For God’s sake, take this seriously. Don’t behave normally. Don’t look for compromises. Be great. Do more than expected, not the least you can get away with. You know what will really make a difference, what will turn extreme poverty around. What will actually begin to save the lives of millions of men, women and children.
Do it. Please, do it. The world is watching.
Update:
Rick posts more on the subject, this time getting all nasty and quoting Leviticus 25:35. Meanwhile, in Canada, PM our PM won’t commit on .07GDP. The only G8 country with a budget surplus, a surplus which the Liberals seem repeatedly surprised about, and which isn’t all that far off the annual shortfall required to make up the .07GDP committment. If the political will was there, we could hit the target long before 2015. News coverage in the National Post and in the Globe & Mail fleshes it out somewhat; criticism of Paul Martin is quite damning. For the Liberals, it seems they don’t want to commit funds without knowing all the details of where it will go. This excuse is rather lame though, basically saying that because the problem is complex and we know it will be expensive, we won’t even begin setting aside the funds to deal with it. The Liberals cite polls for the notion that Canada should only give more foreign aid if it doesn’t cost us anything…. which is not a stance that justifies doing nothing. When a child dies of extreme poverty every three seconds, you have to explain it pretty fast so that they’ll understand.
Shameful. Add your voice to tell them so — unless of course you understand why their inaction is excusable… I, for one, do not.
Celebrity worship really bugs me. The Bible can say from cover to cover to feed the poor, but we don’t believe it until we hear it from Bono, with a few f-words thrown in. We then ask why the church didn’t teach us these things first.
Opie, I’m with you about celebrity worship. I remember back in college once in the cafeteria at breakfast, a group of students were talking about Steve Camp, the famous musician, who they’d heard the night before and gotten a chance to talk with after the concert. I looked at them (down my nose) and said, “I talked to God this morning.” I was kinda snotty in those days. (What’s changed? er, never mind.)
I think there are perhaps two things which cause Bono to be heard above the local church. First is “sphere of influence.” When Bono speaks, he has a bigger audience and more prominence… kinda like when Mother Theresa or Billy Graham would say something, somehow that means more than when your local pastor says it. (Hey, I’m not defending it, maybe it’s just human nature.) The second thing is example. Given how in vogue it is for celebrities to plug causes now, people are starting to figure out which ones are genuinely behind something… and Bono is genuinely behind this. Sadly, in a lot of cases the church doesn’t sound credible when they say “Care for the poor” but don’t actually do it.
If I really want to push buttons though, I might ask this question: Don’t you think that in some way perhaps Bono is filling the role of a modern-day prophet?
If I had to name a modern-day prophet, Bono would probably be way down the list because he does not challenge me in any wide range of my Christian life. I will say I have slowly come to at least listen to his ideas about helping the poor, because I have noticed that some of them have feasibility. (I’ve seen way too many people who just use the issue of poverty as a tool of judgementalism, and at first I assumed Bono was that way, but upon further examination I don’t see much of that.)
If he wanted to be a prophet, there’s so so so much more he could do with his visibility. That’s not a duty I feel I have any right to saddle him with, but since you brought the topic up, yes, I’d have a long list of causes I’d love to see him take up, since people seem to listen to him. I wonder what he and Mel Gibson could get together and do, for instance. I see lots of possibilities.