St. Dolly of Appalachia

Sermon for Aug. 30, 2026
Romans 12:9-21

Like probably 80 or 90 percent of the rest of American preachers this morning, I want to reflect a little on the passing of Dolly Parton.  Now, I am only a marginal Dolly Parton fan; for years, I’ve admired and respected her artistic and philanthropic work, but I couldn’t name more than a handful of her songs.  But, like many of the rest of us, I did stop in my tracks on Tuesday as a staff member called out from his desk that Dolly had died.

          What’s really struck me this week has been the response to her passing.  It hasn’t been so much a surprise as a holy reassurance.  Across social media, we’ve seen post after post praising Dolly’s giftedness, her heart, and her faith.  People lauded her stunning artistic achievements, in quality and quantity – I can’t imagine writing more than 3,000 songs.  People praised her literacy initiative, the Imagination Library, which puts books in the hands of 3 million children each month.¹  People thanked her for giving away millions of dollars in other ways, too, including funding COVID research, AIDS research and awareness, and recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene – as well as supporting individuals who lost their homes in Tennessee wildfires.  People also witnessed to her unshakable faith and her commitment to living it out.  One post quoted Dolly saying, “We’re supposed to love one another and love our neighbors as ourselves. It doesn’t take much to be kind.”  Several posts named her as St. Dolly of Appalachia, complete with icons.  A post from the satirical Babylon Bee captured the moment nicely:  It read, “Apocalypse Draws Near as Last Remaining Universally Beloved Human Being Passes Away.”²

Of course, despite the way people have come together around Dolly’s passing, our world is still on fire, in a hundred ways.  Or, more precisely this week, it’s under water.  One day after Dolly Parton’s death came news of astonishing flooding and landslides in Tibet and Nepal.  The video takes your breath away as water, mud, and rocks roll over Himalayan villages, and people scatter like ants before the wave.  Initially, reports said an earthquake had triggered a melting glacier to give way.  Later, the U.S. government confirmed that, instead, the rush of water, mud, and rocks was so powerful as to mimic a 4.4-magnitude earthquake.³  As of this morning, about 800 are confirmed dead and 3,000 still are missing – mostly residents of the villages, as well as pilgrims and hikers from around the world.⁴  It’s devastation on a scale I can barely comprehend.

This isn’t really a why-bad-things-happen-to-good-people sermon, but I do think it’s worth saying this much:  The theological term that applies in situations like this is “theodicy.”  Interestingly, that word doesn’t mean, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”  It means a defense of God, in a legal sense.  It’s less “why?” and more “how could you allow that?”  So, taking the presumptuous position of rising as God’s defense attorney, I’d just say this:  It wasn’t God who melted that glacier enough to collapse.

Of course, the world is burning in many other ways, too.  And we could burn a lot of time debating who’s to blame for this or that particular dumpster fire.  I think it’s more productive, and more holy, to turn instead toward how we might put them out.  

But solutions can’t come without first having the right orientation, the right relationship.  To put out the fires raging around us, we first have to turn and face them together.  And that tremendous change of orientation begins with an even bigger change of heart – deciding to see ourselves, first and foremost, as children of God called to love the other children of God around us … whether we like them or not.

The apostle Paul lays it out for us in today’s reading from Romans.  Now, remember, Paul is the guy who first committed his life to judging those who disagreed with him, literally locking them up, even stoning them.  Paul was the original true believer in the worst possible sense, the kind of person you want to stay as far away from as you can.  But in this soaring statement of just how far his heart had turned, Paul says to the believers in Rome:  Put Love first, and let it guide everything.

Of course that’s true about relating to other followers of Jesus.  “Let love be genuine,” Paul says to the Roman Christians.  “[L]ove one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor” (12:10).  Cool; we can get behind that.  It’s even true about those beyond the boundary of your faith:  “[E]xtend hospitality to strangers,” Paul adds (12:13).  OK, that’s fine.

But then comes the crazy talk.  “Bless those who persecute you” (12:14).  Wait, what?  No, really, Paul says; “Do not repay anyone evil for evil….  Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God.” (12:17,19)  Want to see your enemies suffer?  Here’s how, Paul says:  “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing that you will heap burning coals on their heads” (12:20).  Paul’s point is this:  Don’t follow the world’s model by trying to destroy those who oppose you.  Instead, fight back with the strongest weapon there is, the weapon of Love.  “[O]vercome evil with good,” Paul says (12:21).

One of the things I really admire about Dolly Parton is the way she embodied this countercultural ethic St. Paul lays out.  Now, most of us don’t have $500 million to donate to the work of Love in the world, so how it looks for us to overcome evil with good probably won’t bring us internet sainthood when we die.  But we can each take inspiration from St. Dolly of Appalachia, as well as St. Paul of Tarsus, and look for ways to overcome evil with good in our own lives.

Maybe that’s through gifts of time.  Maybe it’s through gifts of talent.  Maybe it’s through gifts of treasure.  Or maybe it’s through another “T”: telling the truth.  And I don’t mean that in the sense of using your truth to bludgeon others.  I mean following the model of the Old Testament prophets: telling truth that points people toward a divine reality.  That’s the prophet’s calling, after all – to be the one to speak for God, the one with the guts to say, “Look, this path we’re on is leading to our destruction.  Let’s turn back.  Let’s go another way – God’s way.”

That’s what I hear St. Paul saying in today’s reading from Romans, too.  I imagine him grilling a witness for the world’s model of destroying those who oppose you, the old us-versus-them:  St. Paul asks, how’s retribution working out for you?  How effectively is vengeance solving your problems?  Just maybe there’s a better road.  How about this? “Live in harmony with one another; … do not claim to be wiser than you are….  [S]o far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” (Romans 12:16,18)  And, for St. Paul, “all” incudes even them – whoever qualifies as “them” to you.  

It’s not just in Scripture that we find God’s prophets.  We find one in our saint of the week, Blessed Dolly of Appalachia.  Dolly Parton didn’t just have a great voice; she had a divine voice.  She refused to get drawn into us-versus-them debates; instead, she insisted on speaking and acting in love.  Doing that, St. Dolly spoke for God, the One who made her and redeemed her and sustained her.  That didn’t mean being a sweet Southern girl.  It meant shining light into the darkness we create for ourselves.

So, I want to give St. Dolly the last word this morning.  Now, I’d like to play a song for you; but last time I did that, the gods of the internet shut off our livestream.  So, I’ll just leave you with prophetic words from St. Dolly’s 2023 song, “World on Fire”:

Liar, liar, the world’s on fire,
Whatcha gonna do when it all burns down?
Fire, fire burning higher,
Still got time to turn it all around. 

I ain’t one for speaking out much,
But that don’t mean I don’t stay in touch.
Everybody’s tripping over this or that –
What we gonna do when we all fall flat? …

Don’t get me started on politics.
How are we to live in a world like this?
Greedy politicians present and past –
They wouldn't know the truth if it bit ’em in the ass.

What is truth?  Have we all lost sight
Of common decency, of wrong and right?
How do we heal this great divide?
Do we care enough to try? …

Can we rise up? Can we show some love?
Do we just give up – or make a change?
We know all too well we’ve all been through hell.
Time to break the spell, in heaven’s name.⁵ 

1.        “The World’s Largest Study of Shared Book Reading Reaffirms: Early Literacy Begins at Birth.” Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. Available at: https://imaginationlibrary.com/international-research/. Accessed Aug. 29, 2026.

2.        “Apocalypse Draws Near As Last Remaining Universally Beloved Human Being Passes Away.” The Babylon Bee. Available at: https://babylonbee.com/news/apocalypse-draws-near-as-last-remaining-universally-beloved-human-being-passes-away?fbclid=IwZnRzaAT9MEpwZG9mBWZkaWQWUNR_GGBjmd2CrthRFmLC72QcPVWDFmV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkCjY2Mjg1NjgzNzkAAR7RIhOLk0U-IDY-8Zc-GdNO3RqW9S6H4YCZ4Qs2JMV4WireZy7NoOLzqBY2EA_aem_eRq-LBTHrbE-2ZcfGIwUtA. Accessed Aug. 29, 2026.

3.        “Nearly 1,400 missing, mostly tourists, after Nepal-Tibet flash flood kills at least 356.” The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/what-caused-nepal-flash-flood-glacial-collapse-tibet-border. Accessed Aug. 29, 2026.

4.        “Nepal flood death toll reaches 800, with more than 3,000 missing, as poor weather hampers rescues.” CBS News. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nepal-flash-flood-death-missing-americans-rescue/. Accessed Aug. 30, 2026.

5.        Parton, Dolly. “World on Fire.” Available at: https://tasteofcountry.com/dolly-parton-world-on-fire-lyrics/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral. Accessed Aug. 29, 2026.

 

Bearing Heaven

Sermon for the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, transferred
Luke 1:46-55
Aug. 16, 2026

This morning, as we’re celebrating the feast of St. Mary the Virgin, which was yesterday, it seems like a good time to ask:  What does Mary have to do with me?   

Maybe, if you’re of a certain age, you might identify with Mary from the Beatles’ classic “Let It Be,” speaking words of wisdom in times of trouble.  For many Episcopalians, especially with Roman Catholic roots, we might know Mary as our intercessor, the one who understands our suffering and brings our needs before the throne of grace. 

For the past 2,000 years, the Church has been trying to figure out how to understand Mary – who she was, what happened to her when she died, and how to see her now.  In the 400s, early Christian theologians settled on calling her the theotokos, “the one who gave birth to God”¹ – a poetic way to capture the real point, which is that is that her son, Jesus, is both human and divine.  But giving Mary that title of God-bearer led the theologians to wonder about Mary’s role beyond Jesus’ life.  In the Roman Catholic tradition, there’s the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary, the belief that she didn’t die but was taken physically into heavenly glory, like Elijah in the Old Testament.²  In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, there’s the doctrine of the Dormition of Mary, the belief that she did die but without human suffering, like falling asleep, and that she rose physically into heavenly glory after three days, like Jesus.³  And in heaven, however she got there, the Catholic and Orthodox traditions would say Mary is now ruling with her son, the queen mother of the sovereign Lord Christ. 

For us Episcopalians, this morning’s feast day isn’t named for the Assumption of Mary, or the Dormition of Mary; it’s just about Mary.  We don’t worry so much about the details of how she got to heaven or what she’s doing there,⁴ focusing more on her earthly story and what that says about us.

In Luke’s Gospel, we meet Mary as a teenaged peasant whose life is about to hit the wall.  She’s minding her own business in Nazareth one day when the angel Gabriel appears and says she’s been chosen to bear God’s Son, the one who will “be great” and rule over Israel, and “of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:32-33).  Mary, engaged to a nice older carpenter, has now just lost out on that engagement for having become pregnant – and she’s lost any hope for her future, since she’ll be an outcast in a society with no place for single mothers.  Yet, from the start, Mary shows herself to be anything but the meek and mild young woman in the nativity paintings.  Instead, she asks Gabriel some pointed questions about how she’ll come to be pregnant, and then she accepts God’s assignment:  “Here I am,” she says, “the servant of the Lord.  Let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)

Despite the debates across the centuries, pretty much all Christian theology agrees on what that word theotokos tries to capture: that Mary gave birth to the One who is both fully God and fully one of us.  So, what does that have to do with you and me today?

Well, of course, our situation is not at all the same as Mary’s, but I would say this:  We, too, are graced with the chance to bear the reality of heaven in our own lives.

Because God has a great sense of timing, on my early-morning walk this week, I was listening to the podcast Turning to the Mystics, featuring writer and teacher James Finley.  He was talking about Teresa of Avila, the 16^th-century Spanish mystic and author of The Interior Castle, among other things.  Teresa compares the spiritual journey to moving from room to room in God’s heavenly mansion.  Now, when I say, “heavenly mansion,” many of us probably imagine it being “up there” somewhere, the Father’s dwelling where Jesus promises to “prepare a place” for each of us (John 14:3).  Of course, we know “up there” is a metaphor when we talk about heaven, reflecting an ancient cosmology of a three-tiered universe.  Given that we’re on a ball spinning through space, “up” doesn’t really mean much once you’ve left the spinning ball.  But the point is that we usually think of heaven as being far removed from us – the distant land to which we travel, God willing, once this chapter of eternal life is done.

But Teresa of Avila, and probably all the mystics, and certainly Jim Finley, would encourage us to see heaven differently; and you hear that in the title of Teresa’s book: The Interior Castle.  The idea flows from Jesus, in the Gospels, telling his followers that “the kingdom of heaven is within you” (Luke 17:21).  The journey toward union with God is not about going somewhere beyond the world and the self we know; it’s about imagining our true self, the soul, to be “vast, spacious, and plentiful,” as Jim Finley puts it.⁵  The dwelling place of the divine, the place Jesus is preparing for us – it’s here and now as well as later, within each one of us in this frame of life, if we choose to seek it.

That has profound implications for us as we seek to live in the fullness of God’s love.  As Finley says, “We think of ‘heaven’ as a word we use [for] where God lives,” right?  Well, “if heaven is where God lives, and if God is living inside of your soul, your soul is God’s heaven.  So, your soul is heaven in miniature.”⁵

But wait, Finley says, there’s more. If it’s true that our souls are heaven in miniature – that our steps toward union with God take us through our own interior castle – then, Finley says, “this earthly embodiment of God’s heaven, which is my own soul, is vast, beyond what I can compare.”⁵  So, this process of growing in relationship with the Love that gives us life – it’s a journey we take now, day by day, seeking always to know just that much more vividly the heavenly Love that’s never farther from us than our own hearts.

Pretty good stuff, right?

So, what does all that have to do with Mary, the mother of God?  We don’t know anything about Mary’s spiritual life, neither as a Jewish teenager under Roman occupation nor as the mother of the One whom God sent to save us.  But we do know that, tapped into the Love that fueled her life, Mary wrote the poem we’re each still learning, the theme song of the true self that is our soul.

We hear Mary’s song, the Magnificat, in our Gospel reading today; but first, we need some more backstory.  This very young woman has done nothing special, nothing to earn God’s favor, other than simply being whom God created her to be.  I imagine she must have been a deeply authentic person, someone who knew herself well enough to stand before an angel and ask just how this divine pregnancy was going to work, anyway.  Her heart must have been open enough to imagine not just God’s saving love for humans in general but God’s deep love for her – this particular teenager in this particular backwater of the Roman Empire.

And that gift of knowing her own belovedness is too stunning to keep to herself.  So, Mary heads out to visit her aging, childless relative Elizabeth – whom, it turns out, God had also given a unique role in salvation history, being pregnant with the child who’d become John the Baptist.  Mary greets Elizabeth; and in their shared wonder and delight that Love has come to dwell in their own bodies, Mary sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” – not just because God cares for the people of Israel in the abstract but because God “has looked with favor” on her.  God has “done great things for” her, and “shown strength” through her, and “lifted up the lowly” through her.  This teenaged nobody carries heaven itself.  And, empowered by God’s Love welling up inside her, she receives a foretaste of how Love lifts all the lowly, and fills the hungry, and sends the dominating powers packing.

The stunning thing is that God wants to give us that foretaste of heavenly Love, too.  This song of the true self, this song of the soul, is not just Mary’s but ours to claim, as well.  Pregnant with Jesus, Mary literally bears God within her.  But pregnant with Love, so do we.  Go back to the words of the writer Jim Finley:  Your soul is heaven in miniature, one of the millions of mansions in which God is pleased to dwell.  That’s what we’re made for – not just to be productive, not even just to be good, but to be vessels of heaven on earth.  In Jesus, God’s Love “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14); and that pattern continues in you and me.  Who am I to host heaven, you might ask?  Who am I to bear the Son of God, Mary definitely asked.  And God says, “You are worthy because I made you.  You are worthy because I love you.  You are worthy because I want nothing so much as for you to love me back.  The more you explore heaven within,” God says, “the more you’ll find my home is yours, as well.” 

Incarnation was no one-and-done magic trick.  God still comes seeking a dwelling place deep within the beloved.  The shock is, that beloved is you.  Your soul exists to hold heaven itself.  It just might be worth opening the door to that interior castle and spending some time going room to room.

1.       “Theotokos.” Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3^rd edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1997. 1607.

2.       Armentrout, Don S., and Robert Boak Slocum, eds. “Assumption of Mary.” An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church. Available at: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/assumption-of-mary/. Accessed Aug. 15, 2026.

3.       “Dormition of the Mother of God.” Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormition_of_the_Mother_of_God. Accessed Aug. 15, 2026.

4.       Armentrout, Don S., and Robert Boak Slocum, eds. “Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Saint.” An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church. Available at: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/mary-the-virgin-mother-of-our-lord-jesus-christ-saint/. Accessed Aug. 15, 2026.

5.       Finley, James, and Kirsten Oates. “Dialogue: The Second Mansion.” Season 2, episode 5 of Turning to the Mystics from the Center for Action and Contemplation. Available at https://cac.org/podcast/turning-to-the-mystics/. Accessed Aug. 15, 2026.