Absent Fathers – Johnny Cash Sunday – First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

October 6, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Is there any among you, who, if your child asked for bread would give a stone, or if your child ask for a fish would give a snake instead of a fish?

(Luke 11:11 NRSV)

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, today we’re sitting here celebrating a man’s music and a man’s life. It’s important to remember that this man was full of human foibles and wasn’t exactly in the business of hiding them. We may not agree with his theological assumptions, or like his music, or even think that such a service is appropriate. Doesn’t matter.

This morning we celebrate a man who was willing to stand up for those who have lost their ability to stand for themselves. Our jail populations keep growing each year – more and more of those who should be receiving attention for their mental health problems are ending up in our prisons, our jails, the places we put folks that we’re just not quite sure what to do with them.

In a world where notoriety leads those in the public eye to aggrandize themselves and walk on their fans we give thanks this morning that there are men and women whose fame raises up others besides themselves. No, fame does not legitimize a perspective, but whenever anyone within the public’s attention draws that attention from themselves and to those less fortunate, let us all say a silent, Amen!

And just because it is Johnny Cash Sunday I want to say something for Johnny. Johnny Cash believed that Jesus Christ was his Savior, and I don’t know about you, but that’s just fine with me.

As a matter of fact, it’s fine with me that a whole bunch of folks believe that same thing. As far as I’m concerned there’s simply nothing wrong with that notion. If it serves you, then by all means be served by it.

If it’s minorities and those out of public favor that need to be held up, then I’m holding up all UU’s today. We’re a minority. As Dr. Loehr reminded us not four months ago, more people believe that they have been abducted by aliens then are actually members of the UUA. If we’re not in a minority, I don’t know who is.

And I’m also reminded of Don Smith and what he has to say about diversity. The word diversity means what it says, various in form or quality. I challenge anyone in this congregation to find me another congregation – that is not a UU congregation – that is more diverse, more varied in form and quality than we are.

We’re a bunch of people who are so unlike each other that to know one of us is certainly not to know us all.

And I say, congratulations to us! I’m glad I’m not like you, and you should be thrilled you’re not like me. The thing that we do have in common is our uncommon ability to rest easy with this diversity.

Easy Does It as the bumper sticker used to say. So maybe you don’t like Johnny Cash, maybe he’s Mr. Monotone to you, well, rest easy, the Mozart and the Chopin will return, in the mean time, there’s somebody on your aisle that tapping a foot and sporting a grin.

In the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON

Introduction: This is an absent Father’s Sermon. This is a sermon about parenting – both present and absent. How present can anyone be in today’s society? And then, there’s the disturbing notion that we are the only Industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t openly support parenting.

There was a time in our culture, and the older members of this congregation can remember it, and some of the younger ones have heard stories about it, when parenting wasn’t the job of simply the mother and the father of the child. There was a time in this culture when parenting was a town’s job, a community’s job and an extended families? job.

But times, sadly, have changed. We are one of the most mobile societies on record. We have computers that we carry with us, phones that we carry with us, electronic appointment books, and we are on the go constantly. The Interstate Road System passed small towns by, Agricultural Mega Farms bought up small farms, churches fell to leisure time and family values have become a weapon to be wielded by politicians.

We pretend that we are in control and that all this technology has opened up new horizons for us, while in truth we are powerless. We scream that we are the most powerful nation on this earth, but this is a scam, a sham – we are dependent, a part of a web that makes the world-wide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

So this morning I want to tell you a story, a parable if you will. It’s important to remember that “While parables, like fables, allegories and myths, are stories with hidden significance, they are clearly distinguished from these other kinds of stories because of their peculiar characteristics.” (C.H. Dodd suggests) “At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” So here’s my parable. I call it the “Parable of the Mismatched Deck.”

Once upon a time there was a man who liked to take evening walks in New York City. He was a big man so he wasn’t afraid of walking while it was getting dark and late. Sometimes he’d walk for hours. He walked every day, but some days when he was troubled or thoughtful, his walk would take him into the night. His wife understood.

Before he started walking he was a worrier and at times not easy to get along with. So – she never said anything about his habit of walking, and she didn’t ask to go along. If he wanted her along surely he would have asked her. About twice a year – when the colors of fall were coming in and after the first snow fall they would take a walk around the neighborhood together.

The first playing card he found was the three of hearts. He saw it lying there on the sidewalk and he walked passed it, but then he stopped, turned around and picked it up. Yep, it was the three of hearts that’s what it was. He put it in his left shirt pocket and thought no more about it.

When his wife was doing the laundry she found it in his shirt pocket and placed on his dresser, right where he put his change and other stuff from his pants.

The next morning he saw it again. There it was the three of hearts. He smiled remembering the walk he’d found it on. He picked it up and kissed it. He didn’t know why he did that. Then he placed it back in his left shirt pocket – right over his heart.

The years went by. The man walked hundreds, maybe thousands of miles. Once he started looking for playing cards, they seemed to be everywhere. He’d memorized the ones he had and he remembered the walk he found each one on. Sometimes, he’d see another three of hearts, but he’d smile and think about how it had started his collection of the 52-card deck.

When the man died his wife came home from the funeral and took the elevator to the 8th floor. She walked down the hall to their apartment, walked in, closed and locked the door behind her. She took off her coat and hat and turned the kettle on for tea. Then, she went into their bedroom and opened the top right drawer of his dresser.

There it was the mismatched deck of 52 that he’d found over the years. Once he’d found all 52, he shuffled the deck a couple of times and placed it in the drawer, and on the evenings after that, when he did walk, odd, even though he looked, he never saw another playing card – not a one.

She took the deck from the drawer, sat down on the bed, and thumbed through them. Once before he died when he was sick, he took the deck and went through each card for her, where he’d found it, what the weather was like, and where he’d walked that day.

She opened the window that overlooked the street below. She threw the cards out with a fanning motion. Some of them caught the updraft from the street below and blew higher than the building next door; some of them went down to the street fast like they had been waiting to escape. The rest were scattered to the wind.

She was smiling when she heard the kettle whistling. She shut the window, shuddered with the cold, put on her sweater and went into the kitchen to call a friend over to have some tea.

I got a letter from my son, Ian, recently. He was worried about his neighborhood. It’s pretty violent. On the day he wrote me someone was scrubbing blood off the walkway in front of where he lives.

There are loads of police-types in the neighborhood, but it seems they are beating up on the people in the neighborhood just about as much as the so-called criminal element.

He starts his letter with, “What’s up, Preacher?!” He then says he hopes everything is fine with me and I know that this is a lead in to things aren’t great with him. And they aren’t. There’s also an element in his neighborhood that’s simply crazy – they maim themselves and wear their scars like metals. My son, Ian, only gets to see his daughter, Emily, once every two months. He and his common-law wife don’t live in the same city. It’s tough on him. She was three years old when this separation happened. The same age he was when I left him with his mother and the friend who wouldn’t go away.

You see, he’s always held it against me that when he was three years old I walked out on his mom and him. He doesn’t know the stories and they weren’t his stories anyway. His story he’s got down. His father walked out of the house when he was three and he never came back. Well, he never came back to stay. His mother married a honest to God Marxist political science professor who quit his job to drive a cab, who then quit the cab business to run a bait shop. I think he was demonstrating Capitalism in reverse. It worked for me.

The Political Science Professor wasn’t even the reason I left. His mother had fallen in love with one of my friends and she wouldn’t tell this friend to go away. It was as simple as that. My whole writing career started out by me writing a story in which I was going to kill this SOB and be done with it. That’s when I discovered the power of story and writing, how you only imagine you’re in charge and when it came time for my character to kill his character it got twisted around and my character ended up dying.

We are dependent, a part of a web that makes the worldwide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

In the story I tried to change it back the way I wanted it to be. Me killing him, but it didn’t read right that way. The story had its own logic and reason. The story only made sense when my character died. That’s when I realized that if a writer can’t even control his imaginary characters how in God’s name are we as fathers, mothers, sons and daughters supposed to control any of this stuff we call life.

My son admits to me that he’s told his wife, Jennifer, not to let Emily be with me. He’s told her that because he believes that I have called him a bad father for moving away like he did. In all honesty I never said anything like that. I think it must have gotten back to him that I found it ironic that he thinks I’m a bad father for leaving when he was three and here his daughter, Emily, is three and he moves away from her. Irony appeals to me because it is literally words, deeds and acts meaning the opposite of what they obviously are. In other words when I say I love George Bush, you know that’s irony.

It’s irony that on October 23rd 1883, when Sarah Bernhardt was on her way to America for the first time that she and an older woman were knocked down by a wave that rocked the French ship L’Amerique and it was only through the strength of being an actress trained in the theatrical arts, juggling, dance, fencing, and stage fighting that the divine Miss Sarah was able to jump for that secured deck chair and grab hold for dear life, and it was only because she was a strong and agile actor that Miss Bernhardt was able to reach out then and save the older woman. And was the older woman dressed in her widow’s weeds – as formal mourning wear was called in the 19th Century – was she in the least bit grateful that her life had been saved? No, she wasn’t because she did appreciate irony. For it was ironical that an actor had taken her husband away from her and now it was an actor who was keeping her from going and joining him in his heavenly rest.

After that morning onboard the L’Amerique, Sarah Bernhardt suffered the loss of one of her more famous fans, Mary Todd Lincoln.

My son goes on in the letter to tell me how bad the food is that he’s served. He’s got a room and board type arrangement. He’s lost down to 190 pounds. He probably looks better – he was a little heavy the last weekend I spent with him.

It was the first time I ever saw my granddaughter. He had warned me that she wouldn’t go to strangers and that if I tried to pick her up she would scream bloody murder.

Her mother drove into the driveway and stopped the car. Emily Rose got out and took off running toward her father, Ian. She ran and jumped into her daddy’s arms and he hugged her real good and she kissed his neck.

The first card he found was the three of hearts. He saw it lying there on the sidewalk and he walked passed it, but then he stopped, turned around and picked it up. Yep, it was the three of hearts that’s what it was. He put it in his left shirt pocket and thought no more about it.

Ian, my son, then told his daughter that the guy standing at the end of the driveway was his daddy. Emily put her little hand up to shield the Florida sun from her eyes. We looked into each other’s eyes. She said something to her dad and he put her down.

I didn’t know what to do, so I bent down and held out my arms.

She never hesitated. She ran from her dad to her granddad and she jumped in an arc into my arms and her little arm went around my neck and she gave me a neck squeeze. I can still feel that little arm around my neck.

We are dependent, a part of a web that makes the worldwide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

My son, Ian, tells me he could sure use a couple of extra bucks a month – with that money he could buy some better food at the cantina – at least better than they serve at the boarding place. I make a mental note to send him a Western Union Money Gram once a month. He may be 36 – but he’s still my boy, right?

I remember when Serhan B. Serhan’s father was interview by one of the networks shortly after Bobby Kennedy had been killed in that hotel kitchen in Los Angeles. They asked him why his son would do such a thing. The old Arab just looked at the camera and said, “How should I know?”

A father and a son; a father and a daughter. They’re not the same people. One affects the other. The other affects the one. But the one doesn’t cause the other to do anything that the one doesn’t choose to do. Isn’t that right?

There it was the three of hearts. He smiled remembering the walk he’d found it on. He picked it up and kissed it. He didn’t know why he did that. Then he placed it back in his left shirt pocket – right over his heart.

The rest of the letter from my son, Ian, concerns his appeal. He’s appealing to a court system that put him somewhere that he doesn’t want to be. He’s saying what we nearly all say from time to time, “This isn’t fair, I don’t deserve this, Many have done more and are not punished.” He sees his crime as nothing, it’s nothing, I’m in here for nothing. Then he howls as we all have howled from time to time, “Do all you people really feel I deserve this – that I did something to deserve this!”?

Is there any among you, who, if your child asked for bread would give a stone, or if your child ask for a fish would give a snake instead of a fish?

We are dependent, a part of a web that makes the worldwide web look like child’s play, and without one another we are lost.

Conclusion: The last words in his letter are words of love. He is in the penitentiary, my son is locked up like an animal and from this place of incarceration he sends me love. He puts it just like this; “I will always love you for you are my father! But I don’t understand you! Ditto probably! Take care of yourself! Your Son, Ian. Then he adds an “X? and an “O? an “X? and an “O.”

Getting back to the Parable of the Mismatched Deck, how many of you didn’t like the wife when she threw the cards out the window? Maybe she resented all those walks her husband took without her? Maybe she thought he’d had girlfriends and simply collected the cards to remember them by.

So – when she did this, when she scattered his cards of the heart to the wind what did that mean? Was she simply destroying an accidental life’s work, or was she sending 52 other persons, the rest of the neighborhood, out on their quests for completion?

She was smiling when she heard the kettle whistling. She shut the window, shuddered with the cold, put on her sweater and went into the kitchen to call a friend over to have some tea.

The old days are gone. We can’t go back, and we may not be in control, but we are still dependent upon community. That’s what you’re doing here this morning. You are a portion of the lucky few that share community. This is your extended family and it validates your children and it connects them to something greater than the parental unit – something sacred and holy, yes, a web of life that’s vibrant, growing and trustworthy.