Peter & Dolly
Last week, Peter was the star pupil in the disciple’s class.
When asked by Jesus, “Who do you say that I am?” he replied, “You are the christos,
the anointed, the messiah, the Son of the living God.” Right. Now do me a
favor. Do not tell anyone. And that’s where we left it.
And now, the rest of the story. Jesus began to show his
disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands
of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third
day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God
forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to
Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are
setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Poor Peter. It’s been a rough week. First, the failure at
walking on water, and now this. He gets the right answer, and is the only one
to state who Jesus is. Suddenly, he is “Satan.” We need to remember, when all
this was written down, Satan was understood as an employee of the God of
Israel. To be “Satan” is to be a tester or an inspector – someone who checks
you out to see if you are still on God’s program. And to “get behind” Jesus is
simply another way of saying, “Follow me,” which of course is how this
adventure began back when Peter was a fisherman.
Where Peter went wrong in Part II of the incident at
Caesarea Philippi is that he could not accept Jesus as christos could
possibly face mortal danger in Jerusalem. The christos, the anointed
one, the messiah Peter and others expected would be a fierce warrior king like
David, or an almighty judge, who would drive the Romans, the current Goliath,
out of Israel once and for all. You’ve got his all wrong, he seems to be
saying. Those things cannot happen to you. Set aside that it appears he missed
the part about being raised on the third day altogether, Peter says in effect,
No, you cannot be that person you are describing.
It is safe to say, Jesus knows who he is, and knows exactly
what he will face once inside the walls of the City of Shalom, Jerusalem. This
is where I suggest Dolly Rebecca Parton comes in. She had tons of talent as a
song writer, singer, and entertainer. She was a smart and even shrewd
businesswoman. She could do concerts, movies, stage, and television. But her
most important quality of all was her intention to accept everyone for who they
are. In interview after interview, she would say something like, “We are here
to love one another, not judge one another. Judging others is God’s business,
not ours. And sure enough, I am not at all equipped to do God’s business. But I
can love my neighbor – all neighbors. As far as I am concerned, if you are
straight, you are straight. If you are gay you are gay. If you are trans, you
are trans. And I accept that, and let’s all get together and make the world a
better place for all God’s people.”
And it turns out, she not only talked the talk, she walked
the walk. She knew what it was like to grow up in a remote town in Appalachia,
and saw just how illiteracy could hold people back, like her own father, who
could neither read or write. Rather than make money writing a book about the
challenges of growing up in Appalachia, she created a nation-wide and
world-wide program to send age-appropriate books to children every month from
birth to age five so that when they went to school they were prepared to learn.
When fellow entertainers and the U.S. government stayed away from the HIV-AIDs
epidemic, Dolly was one of the first to step forward and support the LGBT
community and raise money to help find medical interventions for them. She
stood up for marriage equality; for better working conditions for women at work;
took the royalties from one of her first songs made a world-wide hit by Whitney
Houston, I Will Always Love You, and invested the millions of dollars in the
African-American community in Nashville as a memorial to Whitney Houston’s
name. And most famously, when she got wind that drag-queens were holding
contests to see who could most look and act like Dolly Parton, rather than try
to put a stop to it, she anonymously entered one such contest. And lost! She
found it hilarious that there were contestants who somehow looked and acted more
like her than she did herself! And when COVID-19 struck, she contributed one
million dollars to the development and trials of the Moderna vaccine which went
on to save millions of lives. I submit, this is what it means to carry her
cross and follow Jesus.
All because she would wake up early every morning, and the
first thing she would do is ask God, “Lord, what do you want me to do
today?” Over and over again, it turned out that God wanted her to help
people to be who God made them to be. Because long before her first appearance
at the Grand Old Opry at age 13, where she got three standing ovations, she
grew up singing in church, and she, unlike Peter, knew exactly who Jesus was
and what it means to follow him.
Jesus was all about accepting people for who they are and
what they are. Jesus was all about inclusion, including everybody no matter
what. Dolly would tell others, all others: There’s never been a better you, and
there will never be another person just like you. And you’re the only one who
is capable no matter where you’re from of becoming whatever version of yourself
you want to be. And you don’t need to be ashamed of it, even if others make fun
of you, it does not have to be embarrassing if you don’t let it be. That part’s
up to you. It takes a lot of bravery to totally be who you want to be to the
world.
Which is exactly what Peter gets wrong. Jesus knows who he
is and what he has to do. And he knows there will be opposition from all fronts
in Jerusalem. It took a lot of bravery to walk from Galilee to Jerusalem,
meeting opposition all along the way. Peter could not accept that, but it turns
out Jesus knew what it meant to be God’s anointed, God’s Son, God’s beloved.
And in her own way, so did Dolly Rebecca Parton.
Is it a coincidence that Dolly died just as we are given
this confrontation between Peter and Jesus at Caesarea Philippi? We will never
know for sure. Is it a coincidence that our opening prayer asks God: Graft in
our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with
all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; the very week that
we learn the degree to which Dolly Rebecca Parton was doing all of that without
telling anyone but the people she was helping day in and day out? We will never
know. What we do know that is that she loved God’s name, had a deep
understanding of true religion, and that her Jesus brought forth in her good
works. So many that we may never know the full reach of her care for all sorts
and conditions of humankind. She knew what it meant to pick up her cross and
follow Jesus.
Scripture tells us that Peter continued to struggle with
what it means to accept and include others – all others, no exceptions. This
episode at Caesarea Philippi, and the events of the past week, suggest that
when it comes to honoring the invitation to follow Jesus, it is better to be a
Dolly than a Peter. And that in doing so, life becomes much more meaningful,
and as Dolly showed us year after year, a whole lot more fun! Amen.
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