“The man in black,” they called him, Johnny Cash, because that’s who he was and that’s what he wanted people to call him.  He thought he looked good on stage in black, not like Elvis Presley’s fringed jump suit, not like Glen Campbell’s rhinestone cowboy, not like Liberace’s flashy sequined costumes.  But also because black means you have to listen to his music, pay attention to his words; no distractions from his true message, his gravelly voice, his spilled guts, his open soul, best summed up in one of his later song hits and video with the one word title, “Hurt.”  To live is to feel hurt, hurt when you love, love Jesus and love your wife, and need them so much more than you can have them.  So close and yet so far away. 

“Hurt.”  That’s how Jesus feels as he teaches his disciples on the road to Jerusalem.  So close together, yet so far apart.  Jesus tries to make clear what’s going to happen to him (and them) when they reach Jerusalem.  Arrest, trial, suffering, death on the cross, rising from the tomb; but their human ears are turned off, afraid to ask him, afraid to let him get closer to them.  And so they busy themselves with their normal chatter.

“What are you discussing?” Jesus asks.  Silence.  They are ashamed, for they are up to their usual “ole boy’s game of one-upmanship,” each trying to step over the other to be first, on top of the pecking order in the kingdom of God.  Which rooster will rule the roost?

Jesus calls these twelve guys aside.  “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”  Jesus has called them to leave their day jobs and to become “fishers for people.”  And they are ready to climb to the top of the heap, to forge ahead with muscle, to control and to dominate.  But they are unprepared to share his suffering, his service, his humility, his sacrifice of himself as the method God will use to save his people from sin and evil. 

To fish you’ve got to go down deep, send your bait down deep where the fish live.  To fish for people you’ve got to go down where people are, and people are hurting, as Johnny Cash puts it over and over again in his music that soaks into us and grabs our heart strings.

Jesus looks around and lifts up a child in his arms, into the center of this circle and says, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not only me but also him who sent me.”  Who was it said, “You never stand so tall as you do when you stoop down to take up a little child”? 

The word for child in Greek is not male or female gender, but neuter gender.  His disciples are trying to out-macho each other (No women allowed in this locker-room jousting match, of course.), but Jesus stoops down to take up the lowest, weakest, most insignificant example of humankind to make his point—a little child.  We don’t know if this was a boy or a girl, but simply a neuter member of our species.  How do you become last of all and servant of all?  Whoever can relate to this little one is on the right track.  Receive, serve, even the smallest and weakest and neediest, for in this little one you meet me, Jesus teaches, and not only me, but the God who sends me.

During the years of the civil rights struggle, Ralph Ellison wrote an important book with the title The Invisible Man, referring to elevator operators, taxi drivers, farm hands, cooks, janitors, garbage collectors, usually persons of color or immigrants or what we in the deep south called “poor white trash.”

They did not vote; they made only minimum wage at best.  They had little education, no insurance coverage, little buying power, no means of social or economic advancement.  They might be necessary to do menial jobs, but they were taken for granted, insignificant politically, expendable by almost any measure.  Living nearby, but of little consequence to middle America.

But Johnny Cash came from them, from a family of dirt poor cotton farmers, where someone gave him a guitar and tuned his radio to the grand ‘ole opry in Nashville.  And Johnny Cash heard Jesus call him to serve the children who are weak, who hurt, who live with pain because they love, even or especially when their love seems to go nowhere or go around in circles.

Because I have spent so much of my life as an educator, I would prefer that Jesus call us into the library or to the podium in the well-ordered classroom.  But Jesus does not do his work in the synagogue; Jesus overturns the tables in the majestic temple; Jesus gets his feet dirty on the back streets, on the side tracks of life where the invisible poor struggle to make it from one day to the next.  And once when a sinful woman washed his tired feet, he smiled and welcomed her kind gesture, while a prim and proper Pharisee scoffed and condemned him for letting her even touch him.

The words and music of Johnny Cash touch us not where we aspire to be, the greatest of all, but down on the grubby floors where we so often find each other.  My friend Earl Morton has noticed that because our first pastor was Henry Ruffner, we have our lounge named the Ruffner Room.  A later pastor was John Calvin Barr.  If John Calvin Barr had been our first pastor we would have named our lounge not the Ruffner Room, but the Barr Room, and perhaps, Earl suggests, we would attract many more visitors to our church than we do now.

Johnny Cash seeks to give voice to the ignored, often suppressed, the left out, the overlooked, who nevertheless are also the little children Jesus stoops to lift up.  Johnny Cash hears a church bell in the distance, sees a father swinging his child in the park, and knows there’s nothing so lonely as the sound of the empty city sidewalks on a “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”  So close and yet so far away. 

Johnny Cash was out of church more than in, but his wife June Carter Cash helps him to share the spirit of Jesus who always loves us in and through each other.  Johnny and June see their devotion to each as the same experience as their love for Jesus.  Together they sing “Love is like a burning ring of fire, flames burning higher and higher.  I fell into a burning ring of fire.  I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher, and it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire.  The taste of love is sweet, when hearts like ours meet.  I fell for you like a child, but the fire went wild.”

Likewise, Johnny and June know you don’t earn Jesus’ love, but you respond to Jesus who loves you when you may yourself feel so unloveable, or weak like a little child.  Let’s sing together their song, “I Walk the Line,” to share how their love parallels their love for Jesus.

“I Walk the Line”

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.

I keep my eyes wide open all the time.

I keep the ends out for the tie that binds.

Because you’re mine,

I walk the line.

I find it very, very easy to be true.

I find myself alone when each day is through.

Yes, I’ll admit I’m a fool for you.

Because you’re mine,

I walk the line.

As sure as night is dark and day is light.

I keep you on my mind both day and night.

And happiness I’ve known proves that it’s right.

Because you’re mine,

I walk the line.

You’ve got a way to keep me on your side.

You give me cause for love that I can’t hide.

For you I know I’d even try to turn the tide.

Because you’re mine,

I walk the line.

Johnny Cash was what we call a cross-over performer—one of the few artists inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  But he was a cross-over in life too because while he knows the love of Jesus, he also knows the pain of suffering in body and soul, the stress of addiction to prescriptive drugs, nicotine and alcohol.  And he knows the agony of alienation so common among survivors of the Great Depression. 

Johnny cash even earned an “outlaw” reputation with his song “Folsom Prison Blues,” when a jailed killer listens to a distant train whistle and recalls, “When I was just a baby; my momma told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy; don’t ever play with guns.’  But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.  When I hear that whistle blowin’, I hang my head and cry.”

The convict weeps not merely because he’s in prison, but because he’s imprisoned to sin: the sheer meanness of gunning down someone in cold blood just because you can.  Johnny Cash goes right to the center of so much of the violence and heartache of our affluent yet decadent society.  He shows us how close we are to the good life, yet sadly and tragically so far away.

Music critic Neil Strauss puts his finger on a crucial difference between the sinners in Johnny Cash’s songs and most of the protagonists in today’s gangsta rap.  The gangsta rappers are often vicious, but with no center at all.  Those locked away in Folsom Prison are guilt-racked, famished for real redemption from their real misery.

Johnny Cash captures the human dilemma we know as frustrated souls, both free and imprisoned within our failures, within our guilt, and within our frail bodies—an entrapment we see our Lord God knows in the arrest, trials, flogging and execution of Jesus, both truly human and truly God.  Johnny Cash gives voice to this irony and this agony—to this crossing over—in the wail of the blues, as only he can do it.

Jesus’ twelve disciples are befuddled as Jesus calls them to become humble and to serve the least among them.  Johnny cash takes the Appalachian folk song, “May the Circle be Unbroken” and makes it an example of the human experience of the promise of salvation in the midst of poverty and despair.  Like Jesus, Johnny Cash takes a child, his memory of his own childhood as a focal point.  Let’s sing together this example of how childhood becomes Johnny Cash’s own, personal parallel for the experience of Christian faith.

“Daddy Sang Bass”

I remember when I was a lad

Times were hard and things were bad.

But there’s a silver linin’ behind every cloud.

Just poor people that’s all we were

Tryin’ to make a living out of blackland earth.

But we’d get together in a family circle singin’ loud…

Chorus:

Daddy sang bass, Mama sang tenor

Me and little brother would join right in there.

Singin’ seems to help a troubled soul.

One of these days and it won’t be long

I’ll rejoin them in a song.

I’m gonna join the family circle at the throne…

No, the circle won’t be broken

Bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye…

Daddy’ll sing bass, Mama’ll sing tenor

Me and little brother will join right in there

In the sky, Lord, in the sky.

Now I remember after work,

Mama would call in all of us

You could hear us singin’ for a country mile

Now little brother has done gone on

But I’ll rejoin him in a song

We’ll be together again up yonder in a little while.

Daddy’ll sing bass, Mama’ll sing tenor

Me and little brother will join right in there

In the sky, Lord in the sky.

One of these days and it won’t be long

I’ll rejoin them in a song

I’m gonna join the family circle at the throne…

No, the circle won’t be broken

Bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye…

Daddy’ll sing bass, Mama’ll sing tenor

Me and little brother will join right in there

In the sky, Lord, in the sky.

The singer-song writer Kris Kristofferson says “Johnny Cash was Abraham Lincoln with a wild side, as comfortable with the poor and prisoners as with Presidents.  He carried his integrity around the world and he’s loved in countries that don’t even like Americans.”  As Time magazine puts it, “He was not so much out of fashion, as above it.  He sings of pain and injustice in the light of eternal truth.  With his Old Testament prophetic voice, he made patriarchal integrity cool.  Deadpan poet of cotton fields, truck stops and prisons, he was a spellbinding storyteller—a witness, in the Christian sense of the word.  Here was a man who knew the Commandments because he had broken so many of them.”  He knew this and said so, claiming no virtue except the cold, hard, honest mixture of pain and love.

His biggest pop hit was “A Boy Named Sue,” written by Shel Silverstein, who wrote so many popular children’s books, such as Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends.  This song, “A Boy Named Sue,” is the story of a young man searching to find the father who gave him a girl’s name, so that when he got bullied he would fight back and become a tough guy.  The young man named Sue finally catches up with his dad and they get into a brutal brawl, because Sue was so angry at his dad for giving him this girl’s name.  His father mutters, “You oughta thank me before I die, for the gravel in your guts and the spit in your eye, ‘cause I’m the son of a bitch that named you Sue.” 

Jesus’ disciples are worried about what kind of name Jesus is giving them.  What will it mean to be labeled a “Christian,” a follower and disciple of the Christ, this Christ who calls you to turn the other cheek, to stoop down and become like a little child, who calls you to become a humble servant, who calls you to take up your cross.  Johnny Cash knows Jesus is not asking his followers to become sissies or saints when he calls them to serve with humility.  Because we hear how a boy with the girl’s name Sue turned his name to an advantage, to become strong.  But Jesus’ disciples are wondering with this friend Jesus, who needs enemies.  If you’re a boy named Sue, did your father really love you or hate you, help you or hinder you in your life? 

If we seek to follow Christ, will our childlike humility become our strength in our Lord’s service, as Jesus was strong when he became our sacrifice, found his life in loosing his life?  Or do we fear our new, born again name, Christian, like that boy hated his name Sue?

Johnny Cash insisted he was not a Christian artist, but an artist who was a Christian.  The Holy Spirit of our Lord God inspires us through many artists and through many mediums of creative expression.  In the art of this hurting fellow American, we have a voice who helps us to understand what Jesus teaches his disciples, including us: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not only me, but also receives the God who sends me.”

Once again, in the life and work of these two artists, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, we have been standing on holy ground, and we see angels, all around.  Alleluia!  Amen.