Country Music, Sin, and Grace: Sing Me More Songs About Jesus (Terence Sweeney, July 30, 2026, Church Life Journal)
To close, I would like to take up some holy writ from Kris Kristofferson. In his song “Sunday Morning Coming Down”—sung by Johnny Cash—the singer tells us about waking up Sunday morning depressed and hungover. He groans, “The beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.” In short, he ain’t doing too well. But he is not just hungover. He suffers from the sense that “there ain’t nothing short of dying half as lonesome as the sound . . . of Sunday morning comin’ down.” Soren Kierkegaard would say that the singer knows he is in despair, which puts him in a better position than those of us (including some in church pews) who do not know how far we are from God. The singer describes seeing a boy playing in the street, a father and a child, and smelling frying chicken, all of which “took me back to something that I lost somehow along the way.” What has he lost? What anyone in despair has lost. He has lost Sunday. He has lost being in relation to God and to others. Even if he looks for solutions in getting stoned, he does so in a prayer: “I’m wishin’ Lord that I was stoned.”