The Gospel According to Dolly Parton
- highlandspcwy
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
I began this week's sermon with a short video clip I'd found online, "reenacting" this Sunday's reading from the Gospel of Matthew.
That’s how Jesus said it, right?
[Cue an uproar of laughter from the congregation.]
Now, this version of Dolly's song "Go to Hell" is from a live performance a couple of years ago, but here are her original lyrics…
Take your wars and your politics, your lust and your greed
And go to Hell in a handbasket 'cause heaven waits for me…
Heaven was indeed waiting for Dolly Parton—and today that is where she is, att eternal rest after 80 rhinestone-encrusted years here on earth.
Dolly leaves behind a world with many grieving the loss of her unmistakable sparkle, her humor, her music, and her enormous heart.
But she also leaves behind a world made better by the little pieces of heaven she brought to earth.
Dolly was exceptionally generous.
She is perhaps best known for the Imagination Library, which in its 30 years of operation has provided hundreds of millions of free books to children across the globe.
She also donated $1 million to COVID-19 research, which helped lead to the development of the Moderna vaccine. People in East Tennessee would ask for the Dolly vaccine.
One story about Dolly I love is that she invested her royalties from Whitney Houston's hit recording of her song "I Will Always Love You" to support a historically Black neighborhood in Nashville. She described it as "the house that Whitney built."
But beyond her financial generosity, Dolly was exceptionally generous in spirit.
She showed her support for LGBTQ+ communities throughout her life, including during the height of the AIDS crisis.
And in 2020, she spoke out in support of Black Lives Matter, saying with her characteristic wit, “Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No! Everybody matters.”
Dolly’s faith was rooted in just this belief: that we are all God’s children. She could see “that little God-light” in just about everybody.
And in that sense, Dolly Parton and the Apostle Paul were remarkably on the same page about what it means to follow Christ.
“Let love be genuine,” Paul writes.
“Love one another with mutual affection.”
“Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.”
Dolly grew up in church, the granddaughter of a Pentecostal preacher. This faith nourished her knowledge of scripture and love for Jesus, but even as a young girl she rejected the hellfire-and-brimstone preaching. It only made her feel afraid.
One day, as a little girl, Dolly found God for herself in an abandoned church. “I would go to that old church, and I felt the presence,” she remembered.
Dolly believed in a struggle between good and evil—a struggle between God’s divine light and the powers of Satan that diminish and corrupt the human spirit.
But for Dolly, that struggle was not between two spiritual beings with humans trapped in the middle.
And it was never a struggle to make people who were different from her more like her.
It was a struggle between our choices to do right by ourselves and others.
For to Dolly, evil was not found in the person or people, but found in the collective choices, systems, and forces that harmed people. Evil was what diminished others' dignity and divided us from one another.
Evil is, as the song goes, our wars, and our politics, out lust, and our greed.
But that evil could be, and must be, resisted. In fact, it was the Christians' duty to do so, by affirming the inherent dignity of God’s children and everyone's freedom to dream and be who they are.
Once asked about her support for LGBTW people, Dolly put it this way:
“If you’re the fine Christian you think you are, why are you judging people? That’s God’s job. We’re not God.”
She continued, saying, “We’re supposed to love one another. We’re not supposed to judge, and we’re not supposed to take vengeance on other people. That’s God’s job.”
On this Dolly and the Apostle Paul were again on the same page.
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” he wrote to the Church in Rome.
Dolly grew up a dreamer in a poor community in the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee—a place that has known generations of poverty and exploitation.
This week, I read a reflection on Dolly’s relationship with Appalachia: the place that raised her, shaped her music, and eventually became the focus of her entrepreneurship and her philanthropy.
The author reflected on how Appalachian people have rarely been masters of their own house—how outside industries have extracted the region’s wealth and resources, leaving behind poverty, a broken economy, and communities devastated by the opioid crisis.
But Dolly didn’t rage about the things ailing her homeplace.
Instead, she invested in businesses that gave people good work.
She put books into the hands of children.
She gave young people opportunities and incentives to get their educations.
As the author put it, "She didn’t didn’t curse the darkness. She lit a candle. No—she built a bonfire.”
That image of the bonfire struck me in particular this week, considering this week's passage from Exodus of God as the burning bush.
In today’s reading we meet Moses after he has been chased out of Egypt and away from his Hebrew people. He now works as a shepherd for his Midianite father-in-law.
While out with his sheep, Moses encounters God in that mysterious fiery bush that would not burn.
Fire is a common Biblical symbol for God’s presence.
As the Rev. Dr. Dennis Olson observed—
The ever-burning shrub out in the wilderness signals God’s merciful accommodation. God comes down from the mountain of God to meet Moses in the bush. At the same time, the inextinguishable flame is a sign of God’s awesome and powerful holiness, a fiery holiness that is both dangerous and attractive, frightening and comforting, untamed but reassuring.
But God has not just shown up as a sort of apologetic move, to just to prove that God exists. God shows up to call on Moses for a task.
God wants Moses to go home, back to Egypt and back to Pharaoh, to lead his people out of out of slavery and into the promised land of Canaan (3:7-10).
As happens with many Biblical characters, Moses resists the call by raising a number of objections. "Who am I, that you would ask this of me?" (Exodus 3:11).
God responds. None of that matters; “I will be with you” (3:12).
So the anxious Moses posits this scenario: "What if his people ask him God’s name? What should he say?" (3:13).
And so God responds with a long explication of the divine name, “I AM WHO I AM.”
As with any great mystery, it is a name that reveals but also conceals.
This transformative encounter with God in the burning bush would fuel Moses for the long journey ahead. It was that fire which helped him to see the light of that clear blue day. (A cheeky reference to Light of a Clear Blue Morning by Dolly, which we opened our service with.)
He would go on to liberate his people. A once-wandering shepherd would lead his people on their own journey through the wilderness and towards that Promised Land.
By almost any measure, Moses becomes one of the great success stories of Scripture.
And we love a good success story.
It is part of what makes Dolly Parton’s life so endlessly fascinating: the poor girl from Appalachia who became one of the most famous and beloved entertainers in the world.
But Scripture is remarkably suspicious of success—especially when it brings with it power, wealth, and status, because even those with the best intentions can become captivated by what success promises us.
Our reading from the Gospel of Matthew illustrates precisely this temptation.
In the preceding section, Peter confesses that he believes Jesus to be “the Messiah, the son of the Living God.”
This confession has secured him his role as “the rock” on which Jesus says he will build his church.
Peter’s expects that the Messiah would come to overthrow Roman rule, reinstate Israel and remain to rule as king. His religious tradition and his experience as a Jew lead him to this expectation.
And perhaps Peter even imagines that Jesus’ victory will secure a place of honor for him—the one Jesus has just called the “rock” of the church.
So he can not accept it when Jesus predicts his own suffering and death.
Peter’s hunger for success as he understands it prevents him from hearing what Jesus is teaching about the way of the cross.
The way of sacrifice.
The way of nonviolent resistance.
The way of love.
And so Jesus rebukes the temptation Peter has placed before him (speaking to Peter, but also maybe the great Tempter?) the ancient temptation to believe that evil can finally be defeated through domination, violence, and the pursuit of power.
Or, as Dolly might put it: “Go to Hell with your wars and your politics, your lust and your greed.”
“You are a stumbling block to me,” Jesus tells Peter, “for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Peter wants Jesus alive so he can conquer his enemies.
But Jesus is preparing to show the world God’s love for them.
And that is precisely the strange, difficult way of life Paul describes in his letter to the Romans.
“do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly;
“If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.”
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
These are not only good pieces of advice to stay safe as a persecuted minority, these are the instructions for Christian living.
Dolly sang that heaven was waiting for her.
But I tend to think she didn’t just believe heaven was waiting for her in the hereafter.
I think she believed that, in some mysterious way, heaven is waiting on us—right now.
Waiting on us to love one another.
Waiting on us to feed one another.
Waiting on us to rejoice in the gifts of all God’s children.
Waiting on us to take whatever little God-light we have been given
and build a fire.
For as Dolly said, " We cannot just hope for a brighter day; we have to work for a brighter day."
Can I get an Amen to that?
Sermon preached by Rev. Delaney Piper on 8/30/26.
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