Advent 1 (2006): "What Johnny Cash Knew About Advent"

Advent 1 (2006): "What Johnny Cash Knew About Advent"
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-10; I Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36
Preached on December 3rd, 2006.

On November 19th, 1955, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash were together in a dressing room, before a concert in Gladewater Texas. One musician turned to another and said that he wanted to write a song about being true to himself, his wife, and God. He wanted to call the song something like "I'm Still Being True."

Carl Perkins didn’t like the name of the song and thought differently.

Less than a year later, Johnny Cash appeared on the Grand Ole Pry, with a one-song debut that vaulted him into stardom. The song that Cash played that night was the one that he had played for Carl Perkins that night in Texas. That song was "I walk the Line."

Three years later, in the same Sun Recording Studios where Johnny Cash did his earliest recordings, an argument broke out in the control room. Jerry Lee Lewis was arguing with his producer, Sam Phillips. while they were trying to record the song "Great Balls of Fire." Lewis, having been raised in the Assembly of God, was convinced that he was bringing damnation upon himself by recording a song with subtle references to Pentecost and also full of sexual innuendo.

Elvis as well, as one story goes, had gone to his pastor and said "everything you told me to do, I haven't done. Everything you told me not to do, I have done. And I'm an unhappy man."

Johnny Cash didn’t have the struggles that Jerry Lee Lewis had over his recordings. He could record gospel hymns right alongside songs about murder and final judgment. And Johnny Cash couldn't walk the line any more than Elvis could.

Johnny Cash knew sin as well as any man, and he knew his need for redemption. His first marriage fell apart, and his life spiraled into an addiction to amphetamines that led to arrest and damage to the relationships with those closest to him.

The people that knew him well when he was in the depths of his various addictions said that they never knew who was going to show up, the kind man Johnny, or the beast named Cash. Johnny Cash said of himself that he was two people, that Johnny was the nice one and that Cash causes all the trouble. “They fight,” he said.

***

Advent is a time two things come alongside each other. It is a time of waiting in hope, waiting in hope because we look around, and we look at ourselves, and we know things just aren't right. So we wait hopefully upon a God who we know is making all things right. Jeremiah speaks to this waiting in hope, writing that "the days are surely coming . . . when [the LORD] will fulfill the promise [He] made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah." What Jeremiah is speaking to is the hope of justice and righteousness.

I think that we also long for this justice and righteousness, but we long for this justice and righteousness knowing that the promise has been fulfilled. Advent is, at the same time as it is a time of hope, it is also a time of remembering, of knowing that salvation has already been fully accomplished, because we know this promise of justice and righteousness has been fulfilled in Jesus. We know the completeness of salvation has already been accomplished in the crucifixion and resurrection.

This is the paradox of Advent: that the promise spoken by the prophets, like Jeremiah, has been fulfilled in Jesus, but that we still wait for that saving event to finish unfolding in our lives and in the life of the world.

This is why our gospel begins with a description of a world falling apart, but despite the fact that the world is falling apart, we are nevertheless "to stand up and raise or heads, because our redemption is drawing near." Our gospel begins with hope among the fragments of a world falling apart.

But the gospel doesn't leave us simply waiting. This gospel also reminds us that the fullness of salvation is already accomplished. The Kingdom of God has come near, and the Kingdom is as present to us as summer is present when the trees start to grow their leaves. And that first generation of listeners to this proclamation saw that salvation was accomplished, just days after Jesus spoke, in the crucifixion and the resurrection.

***

Johnny Cash could sing about trying to walk the line, about murder, and tribulation, and apocalypse and judgment, because he knew something about Advent. He knew the world was falling apart, partly because his life was prone to falling apart. Johnny Cash could sing about the trumpets and the pipers and about one hundred million angels singin'; he could sing about a pale horse, a rider named Death, and the Hell that followed with him; he could sing about the beast within, the one that is caged by frail and fragile bars; yet he could also sing about being grafted onto the tree of life by the life-giving blood of the cross. Johnny Cash could sing confidently about salvation and sin because he knew, in his own life, that destruction and despair sit along side knowledge that the saving acts of God have already been accomplished.

Baptist theologian Russell D. Moore wrote this when Johnny Cash died: "While other Christian celebrities tried -- and failed – to reach youth culture by dressing in heavy-metal get-up or feigning teenage street language, Cash always seemed to connect. He recorded Nine Inch Nails songs lamenting the ultimate futility of pursuing an "empire of dirt" that will come to nothing at death. When other Christian celebrities sought to down-pedal sin in favor of upbeat messages about how much better life is with Jesus, Cash sang about the haunting tyranny of guilt and the certainty of coming judgment. An angst-filled youth culture may not have understood guilt, but they understood pain. And, somehow, they sensed Cash was for real. He didn't sugarcoat or "market" the Gospel like a game show host. Instead, he resonated honestly with human pain and pointed to the climax of history coming in the triumph of Jesus of Nazareth."

An Anglican might have said it differently. But not that differently.

An Anglican might very well have said that Johnny Cash was a man who walked the line, who was prone from falling from that line, but because of his honesty about sin he lived out the truth of Advent better than anyone. The truth of Advent is not something that results in the anxiety of a Jerry Lee Lewis or of an Elvis, it is a truth that results in the confidence of Johnny Cash. We can sing about a world, and of lives, that are not what they are supposed to be. We can sing about waiting in hope for the coming of justice and righteousness. Yet we can also sing about this final unfolding with confidence, a confidence abiding in the triumph of Christ and of our salvation, a salvation already complete in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.