Meditation on Matthew 3:13-17
Rev. Dr. Karen Crawford
First Presbyterian Church of Smithtown
Baptism of Our Lord
Jan. 11, 2026
I have always been an admirer of Dolly Parton. Any Dolly Parton fans in here?
What songs do you like? I like “Here You Come Again,” “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” and “Coat of Many Colors,” which is a true story from her childhood in the mountains of East Tennessee. She recalls, in the song, how her mother made her a winter coat from scraps of cloth and compares it to the coat that Joseph wore in the Bible. While other children tease Dolly about her coat of rags, she draws strength from the love and dignity of her mother. She sings, “Although we had no money, I was rich as I could be, in my coat of many colors my mama made for me.”
For Christmas, my husband bought me Dolly’s most recent autobiography. Published in November, the book is called Dolly Parton: Star of the Show: My Life on Stage.
Dolly was born on January 19, 1946, the fourth of 12 children. Her father, a sharecropper, did not have money to pay for her birth, so he gave the doctor a sack of cornmeal. She often quips that she’s “been raking in the dough ever since.”
Her first stage was her front porch. She ran a tobacco stick down the cracks and put a tin can on top for a microphone. “I sang my heart out on that porch, and I did it time after time,” she says, “always dreaming of one day singing in front of a bunch of people, even though it was mostly the other kids and the animals that I was performing for back then.”[1] Holding onto a vision for the future, she was constantly making up songs and writing them down, planning for that day when she could go out into the world and sing them.
She wrote her first song when she was 5. Little Tiny Tasseltop was about a corncob doll that her mama had made for her. Growing up, she saw herself as a kind of musical evangelist in training. Her grandfather was a “hellfire and brimstone Pentecostal preacher.” She has always been a believer, but not in the same way as her grandfather. She sees her relationship with God a little differently.[2]
The foundations of her sound were developed by her gospel upbringing. One church played an especially big role—an “abandoned chapel with broken windows and a beat up piano that didn’t hardly play at all.” Fascinated by “those black and white keys,” she says, “I’d sing by the piano and even took some of the strings from inside it to create my own makeshift dulcimer. In that church, I talked to God directly …. I told him about my dreams of being a star.”[3]
Not all her church experiences were good, however. “I remember when a few of my sisters and I started singing on the sanctuary circuit,” she says. “Daddy would take us to different churches around East Tennessee. And he’s waiting in the parking lot while we sang for the congregation. At one stop, the worshippers got all worked up, and they kept reaching toward the stage. We were wondering, Are we really that good?
“Well, not quite. When we glanced behind us, we saw that the minister had three snakes in his hands, and he seemed to be teasing them, agitating them, daring them to bite…. Thankfully, Daddy decided this was a day that he was going to come into the church and hear us sing. When he saw the preacher dangling poisonous serpents and moving in our direction, he ran up, grabbed us, and whisked us out the door.”
When she was 8, she received her first guitar from one of her uncles. It was a small model made by Martin. She called it her “baby Martin” and treated it like it was her baby. Her great grandmother was also a musician. She played dulcimer and banjo.
Uncle Bill introduced her to Cas Walker, who had a radio show in Knoxville. He hired her to sing on the show in front of a studio audience. She was only 10 and tired of working on her daddy’s farm. She was nervous, but by the end of the song, she was “full-throated Dolly Parton.” The audience clapped so long and so loud that she had to do an encore. She’d only prepared one song. Her Uncle Bill yelled, “Sing it again!” So she did.[4]
Today, as we recall how Jesus was baptized, we recall with joy our own baptisms, and what this means for us.
As Jesus comes up out of the water, he hears God calling him “Beloved son” and telling him that he is pleased with him. When we are baptized, we are forgiven and claimed by Christ, and, giving up our former identities, we take his identity as our own. We, too, are God’s Beloved Children! God is pleased with us!
I heard a story that wonderfully illustrates what this death to our old selves is like and what it’s like as we try to live out our faith.
Have you heard of the French acrobat Charles Blondin? He walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope in the 19th century. After a few trips, he asked for a volunteer to ride on his back. No one stepped forward. Finally, his manager, Harry Colcord, accepted the invitation to ride on his back across the falls. Blondin told his manager as they began, “Look up, Harry… You are no longer Colcord, you are Blondin. Until I clear this place be a part of me, mind, body, and soul. If I sway, sway with me. Do not attempt to do any balancing yourself. If you do, we will both go to our death.”[5]
This sounds much like Paul’s explanation of his spiritual formation in Galatians 2:20. “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Sisters and brothers, faith is a drawing near to God and the walk is like a tightrope. We encounter danger and risk as we seek to walk with God. The important thing is that we cling to Jesus along the way. And in the end, if our hearts are firmly fixed on the One who is Faithful and not on ourselves—our strengths or shortcomings—we discover that “it is not we who are holding onto him but he who is holding onto us.”[6]
While our journeys of faith are unique, the one thing we have in common is that we each have a calling from the Lord. We each have a ministry that is a gift from God, who knows the number of our days before we live them and has engraved us into the palm of God’s hand. God knows everything about us—everything that makes us who we are. And the God who knows us completely and is with us always loves us unconditionally.
Dolly Parton, whose musical talent and passion were evident as a small child, nurtured her relationship with the Lord, and never lost faith that music was God’s calling for her. What I didn’t know about her is that “throughout her artistic life, she has focused on improving the experiences of Appalachia, women, and children.”
People didn’t always take her seriously. Her own advisors laughed when she had the idea of creating a theme park in, about, and for the people of the Smoky Mountains in the early 1980s; 3.5 million people now visit Dollywood each year. The park brings $1.8 billion to the region annually.[7]
In 1988, she organized the Dollywood Foundation with profits from the theme park. The foundation, in the beginning, sought to help struggling students and provide scholarships. By 1995, she was sending free books to young children in Sevier County, Tennessee, through a program she created because her father, “whom she deeply admired, didn’t know how to read, and she saw how that inability limited his opportunities.”[8] Today, her Imagination Library inspires a love of reading by giving books free of charge to children from birth to age five in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Republic of Ireland.
Other good works for her community include raising money for a new medical center in East Tennessee in 2010; “the hospital now boasts the Dolly Parton Center for Women’s Services and the Dolly Parton Birthing Unit. After her children’s album came out in 2017, she donated $1 million to the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, another $1 million in 2020 to help fund COVID-19 research and still another $1 million in 2022 for pediatric infectious disease research.”[9] After wildfires caused significant damage in Eastern Tennessee, she raised $13 million for survivors. After Hurricane Helene devastated East Tennessee and western North Carolina, she personally donated $2 million for the recovery.
Friends, you are God’s beloved. The Holy Spirit that came to you in your baptism and blessed you with spiritual gifts is still at work in you.
Knowing God’s love and grace frees us to be exactly the people that the Lord wants us to be and to find God’s purpose for our lives.
So, draw near to the Lord and take risks without fear! Fix your hearts on Jesus and cling to Christ as you walk across the tightrope. And may you sense the loving presence of the One to whom you cling, the One who is carrying you!
Let us pray.
Holy One, thank you for Jesus, baptized though he was without sin to show us the way back to you when we had gone astray. Thank you for claiming us in our baptisms and filling us with spiritual gifts. Thank you for giving each of us a calling, a ministry, in Christ’s name. Grant us a vision for our ministries, dear Lord, as individuals and your church. Strengthen us to trust not in ourselves but in your Son and live bravely into our baptisms, day by day. Thank you that we, like Jesus, are your Beloved and that you, in your grace and unconditional love, are pleased with us. Help us to cling to you as you carry us across the tightrope that is our life of faith, like Blondin and Colcord, walking across Niagara Falls. In the name of Your Beloved Son we pray. Amen.
[1] Dolly Parton, with Tom Roland, Dolly Parton, Star of the Show, My Life on Stage (NY: Ten Speed Press, Nov. 11, 2025), 21-25.
[2] Dolly Parton, My Life on Stage, 21-25.
[3] Dolly Parton, My Life on Stage, 25.
[4] Dolly Parton, with Tom Roland, Dolly Parton, Star of the Show, My Life on Stage, 27.
[5] Glenn Packiam in A.J. Swaboda and Nijay Gupta’s Slow Theology (MI: Brazos Press, 2025), forward, xv.
[6] Glenn Packiam, Slow Theology, forward, xv.
[7] Lindy Vogado, “Glittery. Down-home. Prophetic,” 2025.
[8] Lindy Vogado, “Glittery. Down-home. Prophetic,” 2025.
[9] Vogado, 2025.
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