Part of the “singing” side of Jesus’ story is the celebration of his many voices, which, as my friends and readers know, I parse in terms of Bach, Bubba, and the Blues Brothers (Chapters 8-10 of With One Voice).

Recently and unexpectedly, God allowed me a special hearing of each of those voices.

• Bach’s Voice: The Gloriae Dei Cantores
• Bubba’s Voice: “Life is Like a Mountain Railroad”
• The Blues Brothers’ Voice: U2’s Vertigo Tour

A few Saturday nights ago, the Gloriae Dei Cantores, (GDC) offered a free concert at 1st Presbyterian Church in downtown Orlando (sponsored by United Arts of Central FL [UACFL], and others). The Gloriae Dei Cantores (= “Singers to the Glory of God”) are a splendid sacred music choir from Cape Cod, MA. High points of the GDC program were pieces by composers new to me: Samuel Adler’s “Psalm 146” (Oh, did Ps 146 dance!), Bruce Neswick’s “I Will Set His Dominion in the Sea” (powerful organ, soaring voices), and William Matthias’s suite Rex Gloriae (”Sing praise with joy, you mountains, for our Lord will come, and he will be merciful to his poor”).

In With One Voice, I write about the way “Bach’s voice” (classical music in service of Christ) promotes, what, in the spirit of Aristotle, I call “greatness of soul” and, in the spirit of Paul, “the weight of glory.” That night in Orlando , I heard Jesus singing “Bach’s voice” full-throated, and I felt greatness of soul.

That same night the Doobie Brothers were giving a free open air concert a couple of blocks away — there’s a sermon somewhere in that juxtaposition! I walked out of the building onto a street reverberating with the Doobie Brothers’ question: “Without love, where would you be right now?” Indeed, without the Savior’s love, where? And without brothers and sisters like the members of the Gloriae Dei Cantores, how could we hear his splendid song of love?

Not long after that, I took my 80 something year old mother to East Tennessee to visit my father’s burial site. Hosting us was my favorite cousin, Frank Kidd, retired educator and lover of Jesus. He was ebullient about his recent trek to Greenville , SC , for the Southern Gospel awards ceremony. I think our relationship went to a new plateau on this trip, because he played me two recordings of his all-time favorite hymn, “Life is like a mountain railroad, with an Engineer that’s brave” — one version by Patsy Cline, the other by Burl Ives. I had no idea this earthy sort of music touched my cousin’s spirit so. It was unimaginably endearing — his love for the song and for the way it made him love more earnestly the brave Engineer of his soul — well, it was irresistible. Jesus grew up in Palestine ‘s equivalent of East Tennessee . He was an artisan’s son who got dirt under his fingernails — and he’s not above the simplest of songs. I rejoiced to hear Him sing Bubba to my cousin’s soul.

And then, just to round out some sort of cosmic dance and thanks to my friend Greg Davis , I unexpectedly got to take in U2’s Vertigo Tour in Miami last week. A transcendent experience in many respects. Adam (bass) and Larry (drums) lay down such a solid, tight foundation — though he might never warm up to the idiom, Bach would appreciate the language. The Edge plays a lead/rhythm guitar that to me is the rock equivalent of Arvo Pärt’s chiming “tintinabulli” — ethereal and soul-piercing all at once.

Bono embodies his own musings about David being “the Elvis of the bible” [sic]: “unlike most rock stars, he had the humility of one who knew his gift worked harder than he ever would.”

F-bombs aside, here’s a voice that knows it’s been given a gift, and has accepted the gift as a stewardship and a call to service. So Bono’s not afraid to say thanks to folks “for standing in line, and giving us such a great life.” And rather than using his platform to glorify Ego or Bacchus, he calls a generation (actually, a couple of generations) to live for something more, and to unite around things that should concern people “in coliseums and churches — rock stars and preachers, right and left.”

Remarkably, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” isn’t just Ireland ‘s song; in a world of suicide bombers, it’s America ‘s (and Iraq ‘s and Israel ‘s?) song. And with slave trafficking in Asia and AIDS in Africa, “Love and Peace or Else” and “Miss Sarajevo” aren’t just America ‘s songs, they’re the world’s. I wish churches — for Christ’s sake! — could tap into the eagerness U2 senses in their audience to have more than Ego or Bacchus to live for. Here’s Jesus’s Blues Brothers voice (popular music in the service of Christ) — music that’s rooted simultaneously in a larger, ancient story and in its own culture.

Yeah, OK, I was hoping for the concert to end with the prayer songs “Yahweh” and “40” (as happens often on the Vertigo tour, and as captured on the Chicago DVD). Still, when the band walked off after (a drop dead gorgeous acoustic version of) “Walk On” and “Bad,” leaving the crowd chanting “People got the power,” I still felt like I could hear “a real though far off song that hails a new creation.”