“I Will Always Love You”
Sermon Preached on Christmas Eve, 2023 at First Presbyterian Church-Memphis.
Well, here we are. We have arrived at the culmination of this season of Advent. Christmas Eve. Every five to seven years, Christmas Eve and the fourth Sunday of Advent fall on the same day. While some might say, “Great! That’s fewer trips to church during Advent this year!”, the reality is that it means we have a lot more ground to cover on this Sunday together. So buckle up!
This is the 4th Sunday in our Wisdom of Dolly Advent preaching series in which we are looking at select songs and stories from the life of the iconic Dolly Parton and tying them together with the themes of Advent and the Christmas story. For Hope, we looked at the very sad songs from Dolly’s early catalog and we talked about the origins of Hope being in the very sad places we sometimes find ourselves. For Joy, we talked about Dolly’s recipe for being a joyful person and how she points us toward the ways that we can cultivate the conditions in our lives so that when Joy pops up, we are able to see it, welcome it and experience it more fully. For Peace, we talked about how Dolly Parton doesn’t do politics in the way that the rest of the world does politics, but instead she aims to root for the best in everyone, pray for everyone, help everyone along, and how she refuses to take someone down with her words or the power she yields as one of the most successful entertainers of all time.
Some of you may be wondering why we are tying the Holy season of Advent to the life of Dolly Parton. I realize it’s an odd pairing. We’ve all heard the stories and scripture texts that comprise the Christmas story many times – some of you know the lines by heart. One of the challenges of the church, and for me as a pastor, is to always look for ways to tell this story in new ways, and teach us all how we can look for Advent in the world around us. Learning how to see the Hope, Peace, Joy and Love of Advent in the world makes the story of God real, and more accessible.
So that brings us to the 4th Sunday of Advent, the Sunday where we will light the candle for Love.
There’s a piece of wisdom I bet many of you have heard that says, “Start with the end in mind,” and that’s what I did when envisioning this journey through Advent through the lens of Dolly Parton. I started here, on the fourth Sunday of Advent with “Love.”
When I think about the story of Christmas, this is the first word association that comes to my mind. “Love.” And when I think about Dolly Parton, there is one song that comes to my mind first and foremost – a song that communicates so much about the kind of woman she is, the incredible songwriter she has been for over 60 years, and a song whose origins link so well to the Christmas story.
In 1973, on the same day she wrote the iconic song “Jolene,” Dolly wrote “I Will Always Love You.” Now I confess to you that I am of that shameful generation who did not know that Dolly Parton wrote and recorded this song because as a child of the 80s, my introduction to this song came in 1992 when one of my favorite artists of all time – Whitney Houston – released a version of this song for the soundtrack of the film “The Bodyguard.” I was 13 when this song began its journey to the number one selling female single of all time, and I can remember still remember so clearly singing it (badly) at the top of my lungs with my friends, and standing against the wall praying that someone would ask me to dance when it came on at the Jr High dance.
My friend, and it is only a Memphis thing that I even get to say he is my friend because in what other world do I get to call him friend, the Rev. Kirk Whalum, played the saxophone solo on Whitney’s version of this song, and I am still pinching myself that he agreed to be here today when we talk about it. Thank you does not capture it.
Many of you already know that this song was written a breakup song, but not a romantic breakup. Dolly had been the “pretty girl sidekick” on the Porter Wagoner show for 7 years when she realized that if she wanted her career to continue to grow and evolve, she needed to leave his show and strike out on her own. Because she had become so popular, and their albums sales and show ratings were doing so well, Porter didn’t want her to leave. He had discovered her. He had given her this big break that had given her the platform for this success. To put it plainly, both Porter and Dolly had a vision for her career, and they were not the same vision. She wanted to be a star on her own – to write and record her own music.
Dolly wrote “I Will Always Love You,” to Porter Wagoner as a way of expressing her gratitude for everything that he had given her, and also as a way of saying, “I am leaving and this is how it has to be.” Dolly reports that he cried when she sang it to him, told her it was the best song she had ever written and said, “You can go as long as I get to produce that song.” And he did.
Dolly’s popularity continued to grow as a solo artist and film star, and she has now reached the status of global icon. Her relationship with Porter Wagoner remained rocky. As her star continued to rise, he sued her for breach of contract, and she settled by agreeing to pay him $1,000,000, which took her some time to pay off. As a gesture of love, she signed over all of their unreleased duets and allowed him to make money off of another album of their music together a number of years after she left.
All the while, she never spoke an unkind word about him, even as he would do interviews slandering her as selfish and untrustworthy. When Porter fell on financial hard times later, Dolly purchased the publishing rights to his catalog and gifted them back to him because, as she says, “I wanted his children to have that.”
In 2002, Dolly was at Porter’s bedside on the day he died in Nashville. She held his hand and again told him how much she appreciated everything he had given her and that she owed the launch of her career to him. In an award-winning article about their long and storied relationship, Carley Bagly wrote, “To Dolly Parton, ‘I Will Always Love You’ was more than an exceptional, money-making song. Rather, her song was a solemn and sacred promise she never broke. She never, ever stopped loving Porter Wagoner.”
So what does this have to do with the Christmas story, specifically the Love that was brought into the world by the birth of Jesus Christ? How does “I Will Always Love You?” relate to God incarnate?
I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot over the past several weeks. We talk so much about what the arrival of Jesus was – the inbreaking of God into our earthly realm and the arrival of the Messiah who could save us from ourselves and from our own destruction.
What we don’t talk about much during this time of year is what the arrival of Jesus wasn’t. It wasn’t the solution that Israel had imagined it would be. The Messiah did not arrive as a warrior-king, conquering all of those who had oppressed God’s people once and for all. The Messiah was a newborn baby, arguably one of the most vulnerable and dependent of all living things, born to immigrant teenagers – not a powerful family, born in a barn – not in a palace.
The arrival of God in Jesus was not what Israel though it would be. It was not a quick fix to all of the struggles of the Jewish people. The birth of Jesus was not an instant fix for any of the problems in the world. God’s arrival to humanity alone did not set the world right – and it still hasn’t. Even though God walked where we walk, gave us in-person instruction, followed his mission to death only to conquer death once and for all, our world is not fixed. We still have wars, genocide, oppression, hunger, poverty, racism, sexism, xenophobia, hatred, killing, greed and selfishness around us all of the time. The arrival of Christ alone did not eliminate all of the bad stuff.
We all like a quick fix. We are a week away from the start of all those New Years resolutions, the overwhelming majority of which will fail because most are based on this idea of a quick fix. The arrival of Jesus the Messiah, the in-breaking of God into our world, did not offer the people of God the quick fix for the evils, sins and problems we face. What the inbreaking of God in the form of the birth of Jesus did was it gave us the most powerful tool and weapon to allow us to fix this world ourselves. It gave us the only tool that can fix the brokenness of this world and all of its inhabitants. Love. Love.
Love is the only thing that can save us. Jesus Christ brought us and taught us the Love of God – the most powerful force, the only force capable of fixing our brokenness. And God’s Love in Christ didn’t fix us and fix our world on its own – no – the Love shown to us by Jesus also places upon us the expectation that as recipients of this incredible gift of Love, we are the ones who will be doing the fixing.
God’s Love, given to us in the arrival of this very special baby, gave us the powerful tool to be healed, and to heal our world, to overcome evil, and to save us from our tendencies toward destruction.
This is the story of Christmas. Love. When God tells us, “I Will Always Love You,” God means it – and as a demonstration of that Love, God came to us and showed us what this Love looks like in action through the life and teachings of Jesus.
“I Will Always Love You” is a song about making the decision to always lead with Love. To act with Love. Speak with Love. Offer Love. In the songs and stories we have looked at over the past several weeks, we have seen that Dolly Parton seems to be someone who understands what it is to always use this incredible gift of Love to help fix the a little of the brokenness of our world. She’s not perfect, just like all of us, but she offers great examples of what it looks like to take this gift of perfect Love, and offer it to others – whether it’s a jealous business partner or the three million children receiving a free book each month in their first five years of life through her Imagination Library.
We’ve all heard the scriptures and stories of Christmas many times. We know the themes of Advent well – Hope, Joy, Peace and Love. This year, I want you think about both what the birth of Jesus did and didn’t give us. The birth of Jesus the Christ did not offer us the quick fix for a broken world. The birth of Jesus brought to us the perfect Love of God, a Love that has always existed but was outside of our earthly grasp until our savior was born. Perfect Love – a Love that is intricately woven into the Hope, Joy and Peace we celebrate together. When we light the Christ candle in just a little bit, and as this light is shared around the room, remember that this Love has come to us – it is yours, mine and ours to take in and offer out in God’s healing work, as together we fix this world and build God’s Kin-dom together.
Amen.
