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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Richard Beck
Read between
June 10 - July 29, 2020
schools were, for the US government, “a possible solution to the so-called Indian problem. [But for] the tens of thousands of Indians who went to boarding schools, it’s largely remembered as a time of abuse and desecration of culture.”[2]
liberation theology is seen in martyrs like Oscar Romero, who preached nonviolence but spoke out so prophetically about God’s preferential concern for the poor, oppressed, and tortured in El Salvador that he was gunned down at the altar celebrating Mass.
The preferential option says God is not neutral or indifferent in these conflicts. God takes sides. Moses declares to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” The gospel according to liberation theology is emancipation, liberation, and justice.
We also see God’s preferential concern at work in the Hebrew prophets. Amos cries out, “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” Isaiah indicts those who are exploiting the poor but who think, because of their fasting and religious observances, that they will find favor with God. But God blasts their hypocrisy.
Bob Ekblad describes this as “reading the Bible with the damned.”[5]
Bitter Tears is Johnny Cash’s only album that attempts to see the world, from first song to last, through the eyes of those who have been victimized.
And American history looks very different when interpreted from the viewpoint of Native Americans. As Bitter Tears reveals, defeats become victories, heroes become oppressors, and a divinely sanctioned Manifest Destiny becomes a genocide.
So, what is the gospel? It depends upon who you ask. Pay very, very close attention to who you are asking and who you are allowing to read the Bible for you. If you ask the victors, the winners, the rich, and the powerful, you’ll get one answer. If you ask the enslaved, the oppressed, the poor, and the victimized, you’ll get a different one. Good news looks different, depending...
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Cash felt increasingly alienated from his music. He wasn’t being true to himself. The songs lacked grit, authenticity, and emotional depth. He didn’t care about these songs.
From this point on, he began to discriminate between “Johnny Cash songs” and “J.R. Cash songs.” A Johnny Cash song was one like “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” a fun, superficial song meant to sell records. But a J.R. Cash song, by contrast, was a song that meant something to Cash, a song that took him back to his roots. J.R. songs might not sell very well (songs about dying, homeless convicts rarely do), but they gave voice to Cash’s artistic and spiritual vision.
Cash recognized the contrast between the music that sold and paid the bills and the music that was most meaningful to him—the music that gave voice to the outcasts, the downtrodden, and the broken.
As Marshall Grant described it, the thing Johnny Cash was most addicted to in his life was “trying to do good.”[1]
said. . . . “Go put this back where you found it, please,” said my father, and then turned his back and walked back to the car. “Good Lord, John . . . What on earth was wrong with that young man?” “I think he was on drugs, June,” answered my dad. “I don’t even think he knew where he was . . . Let’s pray for him.” And so my mother and father got out of the car and walked over to the man . . . I saw my father bend down on one knee, and then my mother with him. As they prayed, the man closed his eyes and began to cry.[3]
injustices. Being in solidarity gets reduced to being a social-justice warrior.
Solidarity isn’t just expressed in prophetic speech and action but also in acts of tenderness, gentleness, and kindness—like passing on the final request of a man dying alone on the railroad tracks or praying for the addict who just threw a rock through your car window.
The gospel according to Johnny Cash calls us to kindness.
Yet the kindness of “Give My Love to Rose” doesn’t come easily to us. I don’t know if I could have done what Cash did that day in New York. Kindness—at least the sort of...
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“Random acts of kindness”
That is exactly the sort of thing Jesus would have done.[4]
Yes, Jesus’s beauty will save the world, but there is something transgressive about this beauty. Transgressive is a word from the art community, used to describe artwork that goes against our artistic, aesthetic sensibilities. Transgressive art shocks, offends, and startles us. In a similar way, Jesus displays a transgressive beauty, a beauty that moves through the world in a way that shocks, offends, and startles us—mainly because Jesus’s kindness stands in solidarity with people we’d rather ignore and exclude. Jesus practices a transgressive kindness.
And then—they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing. One day she was there, next day she wasn’t. End of story. Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. . . . But still. It bothers me. So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: what I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.[5]
Yet any revolution devoid of tenderness is destined to become depersonalized and dehumanized in various ways. It’s far easier to love issues than actual human beings. I know lots of social-justice warrior types who rage against oppression on social media but are missing in action in their neighborhoods when it comes to loving people in personal, concrete, and intimate ways. For example, I have lots of progressive friends who care a lot—on social media at least—about poverty and income inequality, but who have never welcomed a homeless person into their home for a meal. There is more to
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Our rage needs to be seasoned with love, and the best way to do that is through kindness.
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
Finally, lasting social change is often won or lost in the intimate spaces of a community trying to live in solidarity with others, in the small acts of sharing and serving. Kindness cultivates a joyful, attractive, and sustainable community of resistance. As the saying...
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The kindness of doing the dishes sustains the long faithfulness required to bring God’s kingdom to earth as it is in heaven. All that to say, I’ve come to think that kindness is the revolution we’ve all been looking f...
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find so powerful about the story is how it begins: “In the days when the judges ruled.” That’s a significant opening. Have you read the book of Judges recently? I wouldn’t recommend it. That book is awful. It is the story of Israel’s slow, tragic decline into political chaos and moral depravity. Judges ends with what is perhaps the most horrific story in the entire Bible. (I’ll spare you the gory details, but you can read the story in Judges 19.)
The setting of Ruth during the time of the judges is profound and convicting. During the time of the judges, the world was falling apart. There was moral and political corruption. Evil and chaos reigned. And isn’t that exactly how a lot of us feel about our world right now? The center isn’t holding. All is falling into darkness. Political oppression is everywhere. Moral decay is all around us.
Can kindness really make a difference? Boaz, Ruth, and the Man in Black know the answer. This is the beauty that will save the world.
Cash sang about cotton farming all his life, often describing it to his urban audiences. During his live concert album recorded at Madison Square Garden in 1969, Cash explains to the city slickers how “fair to middling” is a grade of cotton. A cotton crop is graded on the strength, length, color, smoothness, and uniformity of the fibers. “Fair to middling” is an average grade. Cotton farming is the source of the Southern idiom that when you’re doing fine, you’re doing “fair to middlin’.”
Tarantino observes in the liner notes of God, Love,Murder, “In a country that thinks it’s divided by race, where actually it’s divided by economics, Johnny Cash’s songs of hillbilly thug life go right to the heart of the American underclass.”[2]
“economies of exclusion,”
Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? . . . Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work,
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We tend to treat race and class as separate issues in American politics, but the two are deeply intertwined.
Poverty is taken to be symptomatic of inferiority. The poor are looked down on as psychologically or morally broken. The poor are lazy, unintelligent, dishonest, or lacking in self-control. They are addicts and welfare cheats. Why else, in this land of opportunity, would they be poor?
His marriage to June and his relationship with God formed a tether of love that wouldn’t let him go. Cash continued to struggle, but God’s grace helped him hold on.
revives, redeems, rescues, restores, and resurrects my friends behind bars and those, like Cash, who have fallen off the wagon. Time and time again, we revisit the question and answer from Ezekiel 37, which recounts the vision of the Valley of Dry Bones. The prophet Ezekiel stands in the middle of a valley filled with skeletons. And the Lord asks, “Ezekiel, can these bones come back to life again?” If you’ve ever been a skeleton in the Valley of Dry Bones, that’s the most important question of your life. Can I come back to life again? Is there grace, even for me? A new start? A new life? Can
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[Cash] was proud of his own military service and often commemorated American military battles in song. Yet even in the realm of heroic warfare, Cash can evidence ambivalence. His 1972 track “The Big Battle” receives little comment but is a remarkable piece of folkloric but deromanticizing songwriting. It’s the closest thing Cash ever wrote to an outright antiwar song. In it, a young Civil War solider hears the shooting fade out and is ready to disarm, thinking the conflict is done. His commanding officer is more seasoned and rebukes the younger solider. The physical warfare may be done, but
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The church fathers describe sin as a wound. And for the most part, it’s a self-inflicted wound.
When I think of my own sin,
I think about all the damage I’ve done to myself—all the self-inflicted wounds, from small scraps to huge, lacerating cuts upon my heart, conscience, and soul, day after day, year after year. Wound after wound after wound.
Grace comes to us in the suffering of sin. There is a sermon in the damage we have done to ourselves and to others. Pain becomes the doorway to salvation, and our tears are a bridge for the awful grace of God.
