The Song of Solomon

Today's sermon, on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, was preached at All Saints Church in Worcester on this text from the Song of Solomon.

When I was a second-year seminarian, in 1986, I arrived at the wedding of a two college classmates, Frank and Marta. I was asked on the spot if I would read the Old Testament reading and I agreed to do so. 

Those of you who serve as lectors know this is almost never a wise idea. You could get stuck with one of Paul’s run-on sentences or you could end up with some unpronounceable Hebrew name. But I was not prepared to blush. I had no chance to look it over. At the appropriate time, I stood up and read some of the same words we heard a few moments ago:

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. (and so on and so forth…)  

Looking up at my friends, I thought I’d been “Punked.” I had not been to very many weddings at that point in my life beyond my own. I thought I knew the Bible pretty well as a United Methodist with a Baptist grandmother and summers worth of Vacation Bible School – but trust me, this had never came up in any of those contexts. And even though, by this point, I’d taken an Introduction to the Old Testament class in seminary, the truth is that Wisdom literature still takes a backseat to the Torah and Prophets in those classes, even today. And mostly it’s ignored by the lectionary except for this brief end of August moment every three years. Since it really is part of the Bible, however, let’s dive in: the Word of the Lord…thanks be to God! 

During the last five or six years that I was the rector at St. Francis in Holden, I was able to teach one required Intro to the Bible course a semester at Assumption College, and I made sure that my students at Assumption knew something about it by the time we finished spending a semester reading the Bible together. I juxtaposed John Meyer’s song, “Your Body is a Wonderland” with these words from the fourth chapter of the Song of Solomon, where the poet is celebrating the physical beauty of his lover, from head to toe:           

       How beautiful you are, my love,       
         how very beautiful! 
       Your eyes are doves behind your veil.
       Your hair is like a flock of goats, 
         moving down the slopes of Gilead.
        Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes 
            that have come up from the washing, 
            all of which bear twins,
            and not one among them is bereaved.
        Your lips are like a crimson thread,
            and your mouth is lovely. 
        Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil.             
        Your neck is like the tower of David, built in courses; 
            on it hang a thousand bucklers,            
            all of them shields of warriors. 
        Your two breasts are like two fawns,    
            twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies…         
        You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.

I suspect it will be a very long time before that reading comes up in the lectionary or even in someone’s wedding liturgy, although that is most likely the precise context in which those words first arose. So what do we do with this text?

An allegory conveys a meaning other than the literal or obvious meaning, pointing beyond itself to something other than itself that is being represented. Traditionally, that is how the Song of Solomon has been read first by Jews and later by Christians, at least the ones who have paid any attention at all to it. Which is to say, it has been read as a way of representing God’s covenantal love for humankind. God is crazy about us, this reading suggests, and wants that love to be reciprocated. In particular, Christians have read this text in a way that makes Jesus the groom and the Church his bride. Biblical faith that takes this allegory seriously might be more passionate and less about following the rules; more poetic and less dogmatic. You can therefore see why conventional religion has been a little nervous around it. 

It is a fair interpretation as far as it goes. But I think there is a danger in moving too quickly toward allegory. That way of reading too often dismisses what the text is in fact actually celebrating: human love. While the text may mean to suggest that God and humanity are in fact like two lovers, any reading of the text which skims over the fact that the Song of Solomon is actually celebrating two human beings who are madly in love will miss the point. It’s why I always come back to that reading at my friends’ wedding when they were so young, so in love, so hopeful.

That raises the question: is there another way to read this text than just as an allegory? I think there is. In the Book of Genesis, “God creates humankind in God’s own image: male and female God created them.” (Genesis 1:27) These human beings are not created as “spiritual” beings trapped in “sinful” bodies, even if this is the kind of sexual ethic that Christians have sometimes believed is our inheritance. The text says that they were “naked, without shame.” God, in other words, sees the body as “very good” and human sexuality as a holy gift. 

In the Gospel of John the bold (and scandalous claim) is made that the Word became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. That is to say, that God became human, embodied. And “we have seen his glory.” (John 1:14) That is not an allegorical statement for Christians, but a radical theological claim that goes to the heart of Christian faith. Jesus wasn’t masquerading around Galilee as if he had a body! Jesus really was born of a woman and he really was thirsty and he really did die on a cross and on the third day he really was raised from the dead. He was, as the creed insists, fully human. Why? Because God so loved the world…

In Greek there are a variety of choices to speak about love. Agape is the favored word among the theologians, the one used most often to refer to the love we see on the cross: a self-sacrificial love that is willing to lay down one’s life for a friend. It’s human love but it’s seen as closest to what divine love is like. A close second, a word we discover in Paul’s writing especially, is philia (the root word in the city named Philadelphia, the city of “brotherly [and sisterly] love.”) That is to say, philia is about platonic, non-sexual, friendships.

But there is another word, the one that conventional religious piety tends to shy away from: eros. Eros is about passion and sexual attraction. Eros is about desire. Too often, at least since St. Augustine, the Church has tended to see this aspect of human love as something shameful or at the very least as something that needs to be “tamed.” But that is what makes Song of Solomon so unique: it is an unbridled celebration of human, erotic, physical love.

We sing that ubi caritas et amour, deus ibi est. (“Where love and charity are, there God is.”) That is to say, where we see human love we behold the presence of God. What if “where we see love and charity, there God is” refers not only to agape and philia but to eros as well? What if the Song of Solomon means to be not first and foremost an allegory that “symbolizes” God’s love for humankind but a map that points us to God in the first place and a celebration of love wherever it is manifest? If you want to find God, then look to human love—agape, philia and also eros.  

In the desire that two lovers feel for each other—in their desire to be “one flesh”—there we see signs of the presence of the “living God.” That desire is not shameful or embarrassing, but holy and good! It is even sacramental: when two people take vows to be faithful to each other no matter what comes, we see the image of God in their faces. That’s what the marriage liturgy is all about. Technically speaking, this is not a radical idea. I’m not going to be brought up on heresy charges today or if I am, I’d win the case! But at best we have tended to speak in whispers about it and so it may sound pretty radical. I have sometimes wondered if it is because of our confusion and our embarrassment and our misunderstanding around human sexuality that we ended up having all that confusion and embarrassment and misunderstanding about how to fully include LGBTQ folks in the Church. Because we have made no room for eros we got fixated on marriage for procreation. That may be a longer conversation than I have time for today. For today, it’s enough to say that love is love and where we see love we see the face of God.

I miss teaching at Assumption. My current job just does not allow for me to build that into my schedule. I miss being able to not only teach but learn from young people encountering texts for the first time. Sometimes on first reading, my undergraduate students would confuse the language of the Song of Songs for lust or even pornography. They would giggle and blush a bit the same way I did at my friend’s wedding. They have grown up in a culture that sends them way too many confusing signals about human sexuality. They and we live in an “unsteady and confusing world” and there is no doubt that there are all kinds of ways that human sexuality can be misunderstood and misused. Yet the deafening silence of the Church only adds to that confusion. Don't we want to teach our children and grandchildren a healthier sexual ethic than most of us received from the Church? 

Sometimes a student might initially feel that the Song of Songs objectifies women. But even my most ardent feminist students quickly realized once they delved into the text that it is hard to read the Song of Solomon as sexist, for it not only celebrates female beauty but gives voice to female desire as well. After all, it is the woman who is speaking in today’s reading, she who is so attentive to her lover who is running to be with her, like a gazelle or young stag. She can’t wait for him!

There are at least two very practical implications from all of this, I think. First is the trajectory that leads to the Epistle of James which we'll be reading from for the next six weeks or so. We cannot just be hearers of the Word; we need to be doers of the Word. Why? Because "thoughts and prayers" is never enough. Because we need to respond to real human needs like poverty and hunger and gun violence and homelessness with real-life embodied solutions. 

The other has to do with our prayer itself. Years ago, I had a spiritual director who was French, a former Jesuit who had become an Episcopal priest. I would often tell him my prayer life wasn’t disciplined enough: I would tell him I needed more structure and focus. My Germanic tendencies appalled him.  He would say, "Richard, romance isn’t about needing more structure: when you are passionately in love you want to spend every waking moment with the one you desire." He believed that our relationship with God needed to be more like that, that our prayer is a yearning for God and that yearning is reciprocated. That we should be running toward God like a gazelle or young stag and that even more radically, God may already be running to us as well.  

He gave me a way into the Song of Solomon that did not rush toward allegory. He saw, and he helped me to see, that this desire, both human and divine, can be holy and good and beautiful. And that wherever we find love - including eros - there we see the face of God.

Something new, and something old

This past Sunday evening, August 15, I was the guest preacher at the Cuttyhunk Church Vespers Service. I preached on a text that does appear in the lectionary once every three years (and only in Matthew's Gospel) but it comes up in Year A. (We are currently in Year B.) An advantage of preaching in an ecumenical setting is the preacher gets to pick their own text, and this one has been on my mind throughout the pandemic. So this sermon is on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-54.

When Matthew says “kingdom of heaven” he means the same thing that Mark and Luke mean when they say “kingdom of God.” It’s just that Matthew represents the most Jewish of those three first-century faith  communities, and as you may know Jews refrain from speaking the name of God out loud or even writing it. Why this matters is that none of the three synoptic gospel writers are talking about “heaven” out there somewhere as a place where we go when we die. They are all speaking about the ways God is made manifest and known here on earth, in places like this island and in our daily lives: in our homes and around our tables, in our workplaces, and on our streets. It’s about God’s activity in our lives so if you don’t like talk of “kingdoms” then reign is better than realm, because it’s more activity than place. The reign of God – that’s what Jesus is teaching about. 

Jesus teaches in parables to uncover, reveal, imagine and then re-imagine the ways that the reign of God is, as he says, among us and in our midst. Even now. Even here.

I want to teach you one of my favorite words. It’s not found in the Bible but it is used by some Biblical scholars. I tend to prefer to stay very close to Jesus’ words rather than the theologian’s words, but this is one of the handful of exceptions. The word is proleptic. Or, more precisely, proleptically. The meaning is to use a present tense description to describe something in the future. So you might say a person is a “dead duck.” They are still breathing but you say, in present tense, what is about to happen – they are in big trouble.

When it comes to the Reign of God, we experience it proleptically. It’s already, but not yet. Jesus speaks about it in present-tense as something already real, yet not fully realized. So we pray for peace on earth and good will to all, sure signs of the God’s Reign. But we go with what we got. We look for places where it's happening. When a dad runs out to welcome his long lost child home and everyone sits down for veal piccata, the reign of God is experienced proleptically and we get a taste of something even greater - a heavenly banquet. We seek places of healing and reconciliation and new life and when we do, we experience the Kingdom proleptically. 

Are you with me? I think this is all prologue to how we hear Jesus teach about the Kingdom of heaven. It’s like a mustard seed, a tiny little seed that when it grows is, well, let’s be honest, basically a weed. To call it a shrub is very generous. But Jesus is a very clever teacher. The point remains: where do we look for the Reign of God? We look in small places for proleptic signs and see there the potential for birds making nests. We dare even to not let the weed label put us off. We might even dare to say that when Jesus says consider the lilies he’s just as interested in us paying attention to the dandelions which have their own beauty. It’s all around us. But we have to learn to look and pay attention and even be surprised that labels about what counts for beautiful in God’s good creation are human constructs.

But you all know this, you are spend time in this thin place where God is all around us.

We also heard Jesus say that the Kingdom of heaven is like yeast. When I was a parish priest I used to bake communion bread with our fifth-graders when they were learning more about what it means to be part of a Eucharistic community. I was always amazed about how many of them had never before done this at home. Little hands kneading flour and salt and water and oil and yeast. “What does that do?” I’d ask them. Well usually at least one knew that it makes the bread rise. It’s what makes it bread as we know it and you don’t need much, but it’s crucial. In another place Jesus says the Church is called to be like yeast, and like light, and like salt. But here he says you glimpse the Reign of God proleptically every time you make a loaf of bread. Or maybe even when you eat the bread someone else has baked and you bless it and break it and give it to remember that though we are many, we are one bread, and one body.  

Notice these are all similes. I think that’s because you can’t pin down the Reign of God into a creed or a doctrine. Because it’s like stuff. It’s like a mustard seed. It’s like yeast. It’s like a hidden treasure in a field. It’s like a fine pearl of great value. It’s like a whole school of fish swimming right into your net! Jesus teaches ordinary people where to look for signs of God’s reign right where they are: doing yardwork, in the kitchen, out fishing. It’s the same for us. Where is God? Pay close attention to your daily life, to the work you do and the people you are sharing this journey with and to what is happening in the neighborhood.

So I wonder, where have you seen signs of God’s presence this day? This week? In a world that often feels like it’s coming unglued, Jesus says, pay attention. Pay attention to your life and learn to look again, and again. Or as Mary Oliver has put it in one of her more famous poems: “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is, but I know how to pay attention.” I think Jesus would say “amen” to that.

I’m running out of runway, so let me get to the sermon I really want to preach tonight. I’m finally there. It’s those last verses we heard. Jesus asks his friends: “have you understood all of this?” Like good students they say yes. Like good members of a congregation when the preacher asks for an “amen” they give one. But we know these folks. They don’t usually get it and when they do, they often forget. One of my favorite stories in all of the Bible is when Jesus is telling this same crew that he’s going to prepare a place for them and they know the way where he is going and there is silence and maybe some nods until Thomas speaks up and says, “Jesus, we have no idea where you are going or what you are talking about!”

Do you understand all that Jesus has said? On my best days I get it a little bit. I keep on keeping on nevertheless because I have seen enough to go on. I have experienced the Reign of God proleptically enough to know it’s the path I want to be on. “Have you understood all of this?” Absolutely! Alleluia! Amen! Pass the gravy, please!

Then, Jesus says this (and it’s only recorded in Matthew): “Every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” This is what the sermon tonight is on if anyone asks you what it was about! Every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of heaven is like (see the pattern, another simile!)…like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new, and what is old.

One Biblical scholar I consulted this week said the order matters: something new comes first and then the old has to settle into that new reality. Otherwise we create old boxes that leave little room for what is new. And yet so many Christians (or at least the Episcopal Christians I spend most of my time with) love what is old and tolerate a little bit of what is new. We like those old prayers that make us feel like we are in Elizabethan England. We like the old to help us interpret the new, to make sense of it. But what if the new doesn’t fit with the old, with what we already know, with what we learned in Sunday School? Then what? Do we dismiss it out of hand? The scholar I consulted said the order matters: the new raises new questions and in so doing invites us to reconsider the old. And therein lie the seeds of possibility for new life, for transformation – for experiencing the reign of God. At least proleptically.

I think it’s safe to say that no one here tonight lived through the last global pandemic in 1918. So as we moved through this one we were all figuring it out along the way, including how to be the Church. And we learned some new things even if we were kicking and screaming the whole way. Now what? Do we go back to the same pews and the same old familiar ways, to what is old, to what is tried and true? No!

Some preachers (and I include myself here) actually discovered the Scriptures coming to life during the pandemic. We saw things in the Bible we had either never known were there or forgotten were there. We found something new – hard to be sure but what was new made us go back and revisit what was old. And it came alive! Words like “plague” that were easily skipped over before jump out at you, to offer just one example.

Now I’m going to move from preaching to meddling. Many of us were raised to read American history through a certain lens: Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, right? And discovered America? Is that the right verb? We thought it was for a long time. I was taught that it was. But it turns out that the story is a lot more complicated. So, too, with the founding of this nation and the compromises that were made to keep slavery intact. And it all came to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century and again in the middle of the twentieth century but it’s still with us, isn’t it? America’s original sin. Black neighbors ask white Americans to look at it all again with new eyes and take a closer look; to question what we learned and when we open ourselves to new insights and to listen to the experiences of others. When that happens, we can grow and change and love our neighbor in new and more faithful ways. And let’s acknowledge that is not always easy.

The people I have known who are most alive are the people who are the least afraid of learning something new. They have inquiring and discerning hearts. I can’t say they never say, “back in the day when I walked to school uphill both ways” but they say it less often and more tongue in cheek. And they inspire me. They give me hope. They are witnesses to the gospel. I want to be more like that when I grow up!

Followers of Jesus are called to be like scribes who, like the master of a household bring out what is new, in order to reinterpret what is old. In so doing we come very close to the living God, who it turns out is a whole lot more interested in doing new things than most of us are. People who recognize this light up the room, and they light up the world. They leaven the whole loaf.  And they help us to experience the Reign of God, here, and now, on this night, in this time and in this place. Even if it’s just proleptically. May it be enough to go on as the journey continues.