Turn On Those Sad Songs!

Well, here we are again… The first week of Advent 2023 - what the folks with the cool church lingo call “Advent 1.” The week we focus on “Hope,” as it is the first candle in our Advent Wreath that we light on this Sunday, December 3rd. On Advent 1 this year, I also began a four week preaching series called “The Wisdom of Dolly,” which will tie together the Biblical stories that surround the birth of Jesus to the life of one of our greatest Tennessee Treasures, Dolly Parton.  

So the big question… Why am I talking about Dolly Parton along with the story of the arrival of Jesus - God made flesh, our Emmanuel? How in the world do these two humans relate to one another as we enter this holy season?

Well, because like the candles on the Advent wreath, the stories of Jesus and the stories of Dolly are both filled with the themes of Advent – Hope, Joy, Peace and Love. We begin with Hope, which is where every Advent journey must always begin - with a people who are Hopefully waiting for the light of God to burst forth into the world. We always start from this place of expectant waiting in Hope that God will appear among us and rescue us from whatever evil, or sadness, or hurt the world is inflicting on any given day.

To begin with Hope I want us to think about where hope comes from. What is the birthplace of Hope? The origin of Hope? While Hope can be directed in many different ways and we can Hope for many different things, Hope always begins with discontent. Hope always begins with sadness or heartache. Hope begins with injustice or oppression. In short, Hope begins with things being some way that we don’t want them to be.

We Hope for an end to violence and war, because we live in a world with violence and war. We Hope for good health because we are either sick, or keenly aware of the possibility that we may get sick. We Hope for everyone to have the necessities of life – shelter, clothing, food, safety – because we live in a world where we know that too many lack these things. Even my daughters, they Hope for Santa to remember to visit them on Christmas as an affirmation that they have been “nice” partly because we live in world where they have had to learn at a very young age that not all people are kind.  

Hope is a kind of faith that I can only explain as being part of our Imago Dei – part of our being made in the image and likeness of God - because Hope is the proof that somewhere deep down in all of us, we believe that things can and should be better than they are. Hope is one of our pieces of evidence for God because it could be completely rational to look around at the brokenness of this world, the brokenness of ourselves and of those around us, and just shrug our shoulders and accept that brokenness is just how it is. We certainly could look around this messed up, violent, unjust and often unkind world we live in and think that’s just how it’s supposed to be. But we don’t. We have Hope. There is something in us that believes, that knows, that things can and should be better. Hope is an act of rebellion, born from a place deep inside of us that is a place that only God could have formed.

But here’s what’s interesting about this extraordinarily beautiful, God-given thing called Hope – It is born and exists in this world BECAUSE of the brokenness. If things were always perfect or even always “good enough,” why would we need Hope? If the world looked like the Kin-dom of God that Jesus describes to us in the New Testament, what would we have to Hope for? Would Hope exist at all? Think on that a little.

Let’s talk about Dolly Parton for a little bit. Now, when you think of Dolly Parton, I can already guess some of the images that come to your minds. The big blonde hair and bright makeup. The sparkly outfits. The high-pitched voice that never seems to hit a bad note. The woman who plays some 20 instruments and can write multiple songs in one sitting. The movie star. The Imagination Library founder. The songstress of the Smokies. An American treasure.

When we think about her music, many of her biggest songs are simply iconic. There is nothing like the fast-paced opening guitar chords of “Jolene.” Or 9 to 5….  Who doesn’t know those lyrics? Who doesn’t hear the line “tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition,” and just smile? Or “I Will Always Love You,” arguably one of the best songs every written. We’ll get to that one a little later in our preaching series.

Dolly’s songs bring so much joy. So many smiles. Evoke so many feelings. But… Have you ever listened to her earliest songs? Have you listened to the songs she wrote in the 1960s. They are DARK!  They are super sad. In the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, creator Jad Abumrhad, called the first episode “Sad Ass Songs,” because that is how Dolly herself described her early songs in the podcast.

The opening lines of some of her early tunes include:

“(It May Not Kill Me But) It’s Sure Gonna Hurt…” – a song about heartbreak.

“Put It Off Until Tomorrow, whoa-whoa, you’ve hurt me enough today…” – a song about being left.

“If I had any sense at all I would have been gone by now..” – a song about a woman being mistreated but too in love to leave.

Dolly’s earliest songs were largely about her life growing up in the Smokey Mountains. And while certainly there is plenty of beauty in that life, she clearly saw a lot of sadness and hardships. In the podcast, she also notes the musical influence of what are known as “murder ballads,” songs sung throughout the world but that were very prominent and commonly sung in Appalachia. One of the most famous that Dolly recalls from her youth was a song called “Knoxville Girl,” where a man is walking with a girl he decides he doesn’t want to marry and so he picks up a stick, beats her death and throws her in the river. Imagine singing your kids to sleep with that one!

So many of us don’t realize that Dolly has some really dark, depressing songs, often about death. She wrote, “Daddy Won’t Be Home Anymore” at the height of the Vietnam war. She wrote “Jeannie’s Afraid of the Dark” where parents are singing about their only child who has died. She wrote “Down From Dover” about a woman who is impregnated by a man who leaves her, and the child is stillborn. She wrote “Daddy Come and Get Me,” which she claims was inspired by one of her own family members, where a cheating husband locks his wife away in a mental hospital and she’s begging her father to come get her out. And, in my opinion, the darkest of the dark is “The Bridge.” The bridge is about a woman who met a man at the bridge and they have a passionate love affair. He impregnates her and then he abandons her, so she finds herself back on that bridge and at the end she sings the line, “Here is where it started, and here is where I’ll end it….” And the song just stops cold – symbolizing that she has jumped to her death.

Sad, sad songs. How can this be the same sparkly Dolly Parton? The woman always smiling and bringing joy to literally billions of people? Make it make sense.

In her memoir “Storyteller: My Life in Lyrics,” Dolly wrote, “As a songwriter, I love to write those mournful things and put myself in those situations. It comes from those early days with all of the old songs I grew up with. I loved feeling all the sorrow in a song.” What I hear and what I understand in this part of Dolly Parton’s story is the same thing we are talking about – Hope.

Few would argue that Dolly Parton, her art and all of who she is, is a ray of light in this world. Through her work she is often in the position of inspiring Hope and giving Hope to others. But even Dolly Parton’s beautiful Hope had to have an origin. It had to be born somewhere. What her music tells us is that she has seen, experienced, and felt the pain and sadness that comes from the brokenness of our world. When Dolly says “I loved feeling all of the sorrow in a song,” I am reminded that it is because of that sorrow that she herself has been able to tap into that God-given Hope that this world can be a better place.

We need the happy songs, the fun songs, but even Dolly understands that sometimes we need to sing the sad songs. We sing them so that those in hardship know that they are seen, and feel less alone. We sing them so that those not in a moment of hardship are reminded of those who are. If life is a full spectrum of experiences, then In order to have joy, we have to have the sadness too. And Hope is the faith-filled vehicle that takes us from one end of the spectrum to the other.    

Hope starts from the place of realizing that things can and should be better than they are. Hope is born in the dark places – in sadness, loneliness and in feeling “Hopeless.”

We begin advent by lighting a candle of Hope because as people of faith seeking to draw nearer to God, we start by recognizing we need Christmas to come again because God feels very far away for so many. We begin by surveying a broken world filled with a lot of bad things, and remembering that Christ has painted a picture of a Kin-dom that looks very different from where we are. Hope is what leads us to take the first step toward Christmas morning every year. Hope is what moves us forward, closer to the moment where we again acknowledge and celebrate how God entered our earthly realm.

So, my friends, put on those sad songs. Dolly has a lot of them early in her catalog. Feel the sorrow. Turn on the news for just a few minutes. See the brokenness. Because it is from that place of acknowledging how far we are from what God has imagined for us that Hope ignites, and begins moving us toward the Kin-dom.

Amen.