JOHNNY CASH - EDEN AND CALVARY; SINNER AND REDEEMED!

(on Sunday night at 7pm in Fitzroy Presbyterian Church, 77 University Street, Belfast we will use the songs and life of Johnny Cash to worship God... This is why?... you'd be very welcome!)

Johnny Cash is the time line of rock n roll. He was there with Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips in Sun Studios in 1955 when that which we could never have lived without was born. He dies covering the songs of the best writers in the late twentieth and early twenty first century. If I am in need to use, for their functional sake, songs like Mercy Seat by Nick Cave, One by U2, I Won’t Back Down by Tom Petty or Hurt by Nine Inch Nails I will more likely than not turn to the American Recordings albums that Cash recorded with Rick Ruben over the last decade of his life. Indeed, the video for the aforementioned Hurt was voted the greatest video of all time. The song was written by Trent Reznor for goodness sake! What over seventy something could do Nine Inch Nails? Only someone who was there with Presley and was still just as cool fifty years later!

But that is not why we are gathered to consider Johnny Cash tonight. This is a spiritual event. Why would we in Fitzroy Presbyterian Church be spending an evening with Johnny Cash?

Well, Johnny Cash was powerful in middle finger gestures BUT never so potent as when he made the sign of a cross. Johnny Cash took the nice out of Jesus and removed the blue eyes and perfectly groomed blonde hair BUT at the same time he told evil in no uncertain terms to go to hell and stared down the devil eyeball to eyeball. Johnny Cash gave Jesus back his masculinity and gave the devil his due disrespect. With Johnny Cash we not only got to see the beautiful coastline but he also showed us the quarry ravaged interior, the smoke stacked poisonous reek of all our ills. We also got to see the house in the midst of the darkness that always has a candle in the window and a fire in the hearth. All the complexities of human kind were there, all rolled into one.

It has always been a tricky thing after Christian conversion to hold to truth and grace with humility and...um...well... grace! Integrity often gives way to Pharisee like pretension, admission of guilt to holier-than-thou. Johnny Cash somehow held together the tension. He never allowed the honest confession of his fallen state to be used as a cheap excuse for an anything-goes-this-is-just-how-I-am slackness. Nor did he allow himself to be so righteous that he separated himself from the marginalised who populated his songs or set himself apart from anyone who was drawn to the candle in the window or the warmth of the hearth. There was no pseudo self righteousness that he wasn’t like the Church. There was no religious self righteousness that he wasn’t like the world.

Johnny Cash exposed traces of humanity’s fall in the Garden of Eden and Christ’s blood dripping from Calvary’s wooden cross, he was judgement and grace. He was the sinner and the redeemed. He was the perfect imperfect balance of a human life. So we gather in the testimony of the life of Johnny Cash to seek inspiration in a life that mirrors something of us all, all of the time.

Comments

[Pete Bate]

Coincidentally, I re-watched Cash's 'Hurt' video last week, and it shook me to tears. Such a humility and fragility, the antithesis of rock star pretension or 'got-it-altogether' Christianity - a geunuinely broken man. Earlier I'd watched a compilation of some of the best moments of the 'Johnny Cash Show' from the early 1970s. The artists and quality of music he had on there was amazing - Stevie Wonder, Derek and the Dominoes, Bob Dylan, Glenn Campbell.... wow! Hope it went well tonight Steve.

[Payday Loans]

He is a legend and up there with Bob Dylan in my eyes.. and my record collection! :-)

[repair my credit]

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