Loved By Love

"Loved By Love"

Song of Songs 2:8-13
August 13, 2009

The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
Look, there he stands
behind our wall,
gazing in at the windows,
looking through the lattice.
My beloved speaks and says to me:
‘Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;
for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtle-dove
is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.

Folks, I’m going to talk about love this Sunday, and it’s not even February, not even
Valentine’s Day. When I looked over my choice of Scriptures to preach from for this
Sunday, I just couldn’t pass up this beautiful text from the Song of Songs, or sometimes
called the Song of Solomon. This book is one of those texts in the Jewish and Christian
canon that seem like such a surprise—a surprise because it’s simply there, because
some ancient figures way back when decided that this text was holy, that this text could
tell us something about who God is and who we are in relationship to this God. And the
fact of the matter is that this Song is ultimately a beautiful love poem between two
people, two persons that are reveling in the passion and goodness of their love, and
their bodies. Sure, the church has tended to spiritualize the text, tried to make it an
allegory for the love between God and the church, or between God and the soul, and
for Jews, it was a love story between God and the people of Israel. That was the
certainly a way it could justify including it in our Bible, in our canon—I mean, it had to
have a deeper meaning, a deeper spiritual meaning, if it was going to get through the
gatekeepers who decided on what could be included for us to read thousands of years
later. And I’m not saying it isn’t those things, a love song, an allegory, between God
and the church, or God and the people of Israel, but sometimes it can be taken too far,
this attempt to de-sexualize, to de-sensualize this simple, powerful erotic love poem. As
an example of going a bit too far, it is said that one of the great mystics of the church,
Bernard of Clairvaux preached 86 different sermons out of only the first two chapters,
and three verses, and so today, I would like to announce a five year sermon series on
the Song of Solomon—if he can do it, surely I can!

Maybe not, but there is something to be said for actually just reveling in the text as it is,
as a text that celebrates the goodness of love, of sex, of life together, of great passion,
especially that great passion found early in the emotional and sexual dance between
two people. I don’t know if you can remember your first love, or whether or not you are
married to that person but there is nothing like that first blush of love, that first moment
when desire sweeps you off your feet, when you feel heat rushing through your body,
and that heat is connected not simply to sexual desire, but to an emotional longing, an
emotional desire, that first gets expressed in your attraction to that one particular
other. It’s startling thing, really, if you recall it, to want someone so much, to wish for a
connection with them that is deep and complete. I certainly remember that moment,
that time, and I also remember when it was gone, and how difficult it was to get over it—
and how every relationship afterwards was never quite the same as the first one, they
never had quite the same power and never seemed that complete, that overwhelming.

But the irony of that first experience is that the relationships that came afterwards, the
next relationships were often much better than that first relationship, that first stumble
upon love. You grow up, so to speak, and you realize that you need more than passion
and desire and even connection—what most of us realize—not all of us, but most of
us—what we come to realize is that you need more than attraction and desire—
fundamentally, you need commitment, and an understanding that love is more than
passion and desire, more than a heart that skips a beat because the love of your life
walks in the room. Love is about commitment, and about saying yes, even when the
easy thing would be to say no, and it’s about jouneying with someone through the good
times and the bad times, as best as you can. You grow up and your understanding of
what love is grows up as well, and what seemed exciting at 19, seems like a whole lot of
work nowadays. One of my friends of almost twenty years said to me recently, he said,
“I just don’t want to date anymore, because I just can’t stand the “getting to know you
phase,” the heavy romance, the insecurities, and all that—I just wish I could skip over
that, and get to the good stuff, the place where you know each other, and you know
what type of ice cream they want for yet another movie night on a quiet Friday
evening.” After awhile, friends, you come to appreciate the solidness of a person,
rather than the drama of those moments of dizzying romance, right?

In our text today, what we have is not what my friend wants so badly—here, what we
have is that first blush of love, or at least, it seems that way. Tradition has it that King
Solomon wrote this text to one of his hundreds of wives, but, to be frank, that is likely
not true—that it probably wasn’t Solomon who wrote the text. What we do know is that
this is one of those texts that truly did get into our canon by the skin of its teeth, just
barely, and there was a grand debate amongst the Jewish religious leaders in the first
century about whether or not this book would dirty one’s hand—and they don’t mean
literally to get dirt on one’s hand, but in a spiritual sense. We don’t know what that
quite means, but if a book that was being debated was found to have dirtied one’s
hands spiritually, it would then be included in the list of sacred books that eventually
became our Old Testament. Go figure, right? It was controversial to include this
incredibly erotic and sensual poem in the Jewish Scriptures, and it was only included if
it could be claimed to be spiritual in some way, that it had meaning beyond just the
passionate ode of one lover to another, no matter how beautifully expressed. And so
two traditions, the Jewish and Christian, have tended to spiritualize the text over the
past 2500 years, though we mustn’t miss the simple beauty of two people falling madly
in love with each other in this book. There is something to celebrate here, human
passion, in this first blush of desire and love, and the Bible does a great job of honoring
it by including this book in it.

But there is something to be said for the kind of love that my friend wants so badly, the
love that comes after the poetry has passed and the bills come due, and the garbage
has to be taken out. That too is something to be celebrated, the kind of love that
comes after months and years of falling in love with each other in a whole different
way. But many of us take for granted what my friend wants so badly, the ordinariness
of love, the boring parts that disappoint those of us who love the Song of Songs a bit
too much.   In her book, The Passion, Jeanette Winterson warns us about the
consequences of not treasuring the kind of love that is marked by years, rather than a
constant and always fiery passion. She writes:

There was a man in our village who liked to think of himself as an inventor. He spent a
lot of time with pulleys and bits of rope and off cuts of wood making devices that could
raise a cow or laying pipes to bring river water right into the house. He was a man with
light in his voice and an easy way with his neighbors. Used to disappointment, he could
always assuage the disappointment in others. And in a village subject to the rain and
sun there are many disappointments.

All the while that he invented and re-invented and cheered us up, his wife, who never
spoke except to say, “Dinner’s ready”, worked in the fields and kept house, and
because the man liked his bed, she was soon bringing up six children too.

Once he went to town for a few months to try and make his fortune, and when he came
back with no fortune and without their savings, she was sitting quietly in a clean house
mending clean clothes and the fields were planted for another year.

You can tell I like this man, and I’d be a fool to say he didn’t work, that we didn’t need
him and his optimistic ways. But when she died, suddenly, at noon, the light went out of
his voice and his pipes filled with mud and he could hardly harvest his land, let alone
bring up six children.

She made him possible. In that sense she was his god.
Like God, she was neglected.
(The Passion 27-28)

I think Winterson is right, that we so often neglect the great love of our life, that we take
for granted the one who have made us possible, our spouses, our companions. And
she is also right about the fact that we treat these ones like we treat God as well—we
take them for granted, this one who stays by our side, who makes us possible, in so
many unseen ways. If the great interpreters of this text, the great rabbis and mystics
and theologians are right, that this Song of Songs is as much about are relationship
with God, as it is about a romance between a man and a woman, an ancient couple
long lost to the grave, then it may matter to us that we attend to that great romance in
our lives, the one between us and God. Don’t get me wrong—the first passion and
blushes of romance are there, they remain deep within any relationship but they
eventually get transformed into something deeper, something even more powerful,
more important. But it doesn’t happen overnight, and it takes time and effort, and a
million moments of picking up the socks off the floor, and putting up with stuff you never
thought you would ever, ever tolerate. You can’t transform romantic love into
something deeper without a whole lot of work—but you all know that.

And so it is with our relationship with God—it too must be attended to, it too must not,
must never be neglected, even though many of us, including me, have often fallen prey
to ignoring the One who made us possible, taking for granted the one who has made
me and you possible. For love to move from giddy excitement, to wonder, to something
deeper, to a peace that passes understanding, for love to move in that direction, it
must be worked on—and that means that our relationship with the holiest of holies
requires of us as much effort as we put into those relationships we have with special
people in our lives. We must attend to this great love in our life, because we have
been loved by Love itself, and that is worth the time and effort, I do think.

And I think that is why I have been drawn to do something different here in my fourth
year with you, to this idea that we attend to that relationship with God, that we must not
neglect our great romance with God, with Love itself, and that instead of growing
ourselves upwards, that we instead we grow ourselves deeper, that we grow our roots
deeper into the soil that is the Spirit, the soil that is God, knowing that a tree can’t grow
up if its roots are not deeply embedded in the soil that gives it life. And that is why I am
asking you to be a part of this journey, this Sabbath year, to join one of the three
Circles that will be happening soon. My hope is that everyone of us will be a part of
that first Sabbath Circle, starting in late September, so that we can learn that truth that
is the heart of the Sabbath journey, which is the truth that God, the One makes us
possible, is really worthy of our trust. Next week, we’ll start signing up for these Circles,
and I hope that 80%-90% of the active members and friends of this congregation are in
a Circle. And, frankly, I am not just hoping—I am asking you to participate, as a pastor,
a fellow companion on the journey, and as someone who believes that there may be
yet more romance to be had in that relationship we’ve been having with God for many
years.

And yet, I know some of us can’t remember a time when the romance with God was all
that hot to begin with, so to speak, and others of us are skeptical than you can ever re-
kindle the passion again, that you could ever replicate those burning embers of
spiritual passion.   Well, I’m not advocating that we try to go backwards, to go back to
the Song of Songs, to the kind of passion that you can see so clear in this text,
because I’m like my friend Tony, I want something different than what this text is offering
me, something a bit more drama free—folks, I’m just not interested in a Harlequin
romance, whether its spiritual or emotional. However, what this text reminds us of is
that there is someone who has wanted us that deeply, who has loved us deeply, who
calls out to us, and who wants us, wondrously so. This is a God who is madly and
deeply in love with us, and who does not want to be neglected, and whom we neglect to
our own detriment—not because we will be punished by God for that neglect, but
because we are hurting ourselves by missing out on this deep and abiding romance,
one tested by time and patience and commitment. If we want connection to God, and
we want to trust this God with our heart, we might have to work at it, together with
others, and alone, in our secrets places, in the private places of our lives. To get past
the romance, past the sweaty palm and the stammering, and the newness of it all, so
that we can relax into the arms of this One who we feel we have known for a million
years, well, that takes time, and that takes effort, and it means being there, and it
means picking up the socks, and showing up to those places where we are offered a
chance to deepen that relationship with that One who has beautifully and wondrously
made us possible. Amen.