Song of Solomon 8:6-7
“Set me as a seal
upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
7 Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love
all the wealth of one’s house,
it would be utterly scorned.”
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
7 Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love
all the wealth of one’s house,
it would be utterly scorned.”
Sermon:
Some of you may not know this, but one
of Dorothy’s jobs is to sit and listen to the random and often crazy ideas of
her boss. For quite some time now, I’ve been going on about how I’ve been
wanting to teach on Song of Solomon. And as you might expect, she’ll sit there
and nod her head and give that look that says, “Sure, I understand. But are you
sure that’s a good idea?” When that happens, I usually imagine myself standing
there then laugh and walk back in my office wondering if I should really do
something so foolish. After all, there’s a reason most preachers stay clear of
this book.
But I suppose that my interest in
teaching this book comes from two sources. First, no one ever touches on it.
For me, that’s a fun challenge to be surmounted. There’s something exhilarating
about doing something different and perhaps even a bit scandalous. Second, I
picked up a commentary last year that has had me pretty jazzed. It’s entitled, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and
the Song of Songs and it’s written by Carey Ellen Walsh. If you ever come
to my office I can show it to you, and the first thing you’ll notice is that
the cover is well suited to the content of the book it studies. The cover illustrates the genre of it's subject - religious erotica.
The tipping point in my resistance to
touching on this book of the Bible finally came this week with the celebration
of Valentine’s Day. When I came to the office on Tuesday I had to come up with
a sermon topic so it made sense for me to preach about love. I’ve preached on
love before, of course, but never romantic erotic love. As most of you know,
the Greek New Testament has a number of words for love and each carries a
different connotation. Greek, unlike English, distinguishes between different
types of love. Many of us are probably familiar with the term agape which refers to the kind of love
that God or a parent may have for us. Nearby we have a city with a Greek name –
Philadelphia is drawn from phileo
which is the kind of love one might have towards their close friends, think
David and Jonathan. But there is, of
course, another type of love, namely eros.
So today I want us to think through this kind of love.
In a moment, Marie is going to
start a clip that might help us think through this topic. Some of you may not
be very familiar with some of the references, but I think you will get the
overall message anyway. I think that there’s a central lesson to be learned.
Our society, or perhaps even most
societies, is in a constant state of flux over the question of what love really
means. We don’t really know how to answer the question definitively. It’s a bit
of a mystery really, and yet I think there are some things we can know. First
and foremost, there are always mythologies that play into our concepts of love.
We have the fairy tales where a noble knight rides in in chivalric prose to
save the fair maiden from some sort of evil. We have the idea of soul mates –
the idea that there was one specific person God created for you to marry. We
have the mythology that couples are supposed to feel the same feelings they
felt on their wedding day 40 years later, as though no one ever feels the
seven-year itch or that ‘happily ever after’ somehow comes easily.
In some ways, the Song of Solomon is
like these things. It’s a poem that “portrays erotic love between two young
people who are not yet betrothed and whose union is not yet recognized by the
young woman’s family.”[1]
Pastors aren’t normally drawn to preach on texts that hint strongly at
premarital hanky-panky. But maybe there’s a lesson in our history with this
book. Christians have an interpretative tradition that’s nearly two thousand
years old now, wherein we read this book of the Bible allegorically. In other
words, we have often realized that we can’t really fit this book of the Bible
together easily with our traditional views about what a young couple should be
up to before they get married.[2]
So, we’ve decided to read a rather long poem, unsurprisingly, in a rather
poetic way. We’ve said that this poetry foreshadows the love Christ has for His
Church – that it’s true purpose is to highlight the final union the two will
have when Christ finally returns. This approach harkens back to the famous
phrase Paul gave us when he said, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ
loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25).
I think there’s truth to this point. I
believe that it is an edifying and hopeful lens we can take towards our future.
However, I also think that it obscures the value that the Song of Solomon might
have in itself, some intrinsic worth that it might have apart from our attempts
to explain it away through the words of Paul or other Biblical writers. The
video we just watched talked a lot about how the old chivalrous ideas of love
are falling away in the age of online dating – how ‘excarnation’ is eroding the
concepts of love we developed in the late middle ages.
When
I was much younger it was easy to point out the flaws of the fairy tale love
popularized by Disney movies, but maybe there is a value in the fairy tale even
if it’s not true. Maybe it was never intended to tell the truth we find in
history or science. Perhaps it’s possible that the Song of Solomon was never
intended to serve as an ethical treatise for how we should go about dating,
marrying, or instructing our children. Poetry isn’t usually intended for those
purposes, is it? We don’t go to the Psalms to learn how we should treat others.
If we did, we’d all probably be quite violent! No, we go to the Psalms and Song
of Solomon because they both speak to something in us that is definitively
human – they speak to our souls.
I
think that it is possible that in a day and age when we’re experiencing massive
levels of objectification and ‘excarnation’ we might need the fairy tales to
remind us of the ideals we should strive for. One of my favorite philosophers
is the Swiss-born Alain
de Botton. In his novel The
Course of Love, he writes about our shallow understanding of real-life intimacy: "What
we typically call love is only the start of love."[3]
And yet this is one of the cruelest games we play on young couples. We suggest
that this transitory high is supposed to last, as though it will never change
with time, experience, and strong personalities. It’s as though we don’t want
to tell them that they’re going to be tested. It’s as though we don’t want to
let them in on the secret that they’re going to have to work hard later on.
Sometimes, I wonder if it’s as though no one wants to spoil the surprise.
For most of the people in this
room, this was the big challenge. Most of us have had to face the crumbling façade
of expectations that we thought we knew, only to be challenged to rise up to
the occasion of trying to figure out what love means beyond the fairy tales,
beyond the myths, and beyond the images of our youth. On the other hand, those
of us who are a bit younger are facing a completely different monster. I, like
most of the millennials here, have live not only at the tail end of the chivalric
period we all share but also the beginning of the new era that we just learned
about in that video. Our society has moved away from the dreamy land of shiny
knights and fair maidens and landed in a world where we draft lists of what we
want in a partner. As the video pointed out, these lists can often reflect an
element of our own narcissism. Or, if we set aside our dreams, we shut
ourselves off emotionally and go through the dating process trying to stimulate
ourselves without becoming emotionally vulnerable. I think that it’s fair to
say that we haven’t really made any progress. We’ve just added a bit of
sophistication to our chaos.
This is why I wish more people told us about a
deeper kind love, the long-term kind. The one forged by compromise, patience
and accepting other people as they are, not as we wish them to be. I’m
particularly drawn to the words of Paul, where he says,
“Love
is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or
rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it
does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love
never ends.” (1 Cor. 13:4-8)
This is why the canon is so important. As Christians, we
read our texts in the context of the whole Bible. If we stuck to the words of
Song of Solomon alone, we probably wouldn’t have much of an ethical outlook on
how we can erotically love someone ethically. We’d have some really explicit
erotic literature, but we wouldn’t have a larger context to place it into.
More than
anything else, love is an act. It’s something we choose to do. Up behind me
there are four quotes, one of these is from the French Existentialist Albert
Camus. As you can see it reads, “What does love add to desire? An inestimable
thing: friendship.”[4] I think this is, perhaps,
the most essential lesson. It’s easy to figure out that the two most important
things for a marriage are kindness and empathy.[5]
This is true not just for romance, but for all relationships. Love isn’t just
about chemistry. Chemistry is a great start, but it’s not the most essential
part. Love is about building something beautiful.
This may
be a but abstract, but I think it’s pretty essential. Beauty and love are
intricately connected and I’m not just referring to how good looking the person
next to you might be. No, I’m talking about what you can build with the person
next to you, your spouse, your friends, your children. There’s a reason the
Bible often refers to the beauty of Creation when everything is going well and its
ugliness when God’s mad at what we’ve been doing. There’s an inherent value in
what we can build together. That’s why we gather here together in this place,
or with our families, or with our friends. We’re trying to live into the
possibility of building something beautiful to live within both in the present
and in the future.
I don’t
want to get into Plato too much this morning, although I’m sure that you all
know that I’m tempted, but I think this is important. Why would the creator of
the universe create our world at all? He certainly doesn’t need us. Perhaps the
answer is the same as the answer any artist would give. Beauty is always
valuable, particular when it’s present in relationships – be they romantic,
fraternal, familial, or even church-based. As one author, I read this week
wrote:
“Beauty either of an
individual, or indeed of anything else we value as supremely beautiful, is the
creative environment in which we try to secure some share of whatever we deem
to be of value for ourselves.”[6]
All of us here together, that’s
beautiful. It’s valuable. When we build something together with our partners
that too is beautiful – it has inherent value. It’s made stronger by the
guidelines and teachings that we can find through the Bible.
But I think it’s important to remember that beauty isn’t
just about ethics. It’s not just about our lists of what to do and what not to
do. Beauty can be the thing that drives our efforts to do the right thing. The
act of creating can push us in the right direction. So perhaps it makes sense
that we get the Song of Solomon before we ever get Paul. Maybe we’re human
before we’re ever civilized. Maybe we need fairy tales to guide us through the
long lonely nights and push us towards the kinds of acts that make us a better
species. Maybe we need a weird little book smack-dab in the middle of the Bible
to remind us that the ideals and naivety behind a little hanky-panky might
actually be what makes us truly beautiful. Should that be guided by wisdom and
experience? Of course, but maybe there’s a little wisdom in the Song of Solomon
after all – a testament to the ideals towards the passions that should drive us
all to make the world just a little more beautiful. After all, I’m pretty
convinced that God is in the business of transforming broken things into things
of wonder. May we all strive to live and love into the example Christ gave us –
to be moved to build and create relationships of beauty. Amen.
[1] Michael V. Fox,
“Introduction to The Song of Solomon” in NRSV Study Bible.
[2] Many of these traditional views
aren’t actually drawn from strong Jewish sources, but Stoic ones that began to
influence the Ancient Near East roughly 200 years before Christ, culminating
around 200-300 AD. This was, in a sense, a sexual revolution. See: Michel
Foucault, The Care of Self: Volume 3 of
The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books,
1988).
[3] Alain de Botton, The Course of Love (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2016), p. 8.
[4] Albert Camus, Carnets III (1951-1959).
[5] Emily Esfahani Smith, “Masters of
Love: Science says lasting relationships come down to – you guessed it –
kindness and generosity” in The Atlantic,
June 12, 2014; and Jake Newfield, “Why Empathy Is Key for Your Relationships”, The Huffington Post, November 20th
2015.
[6] Frisbee Sheffield, “Why There Is No Such Thing as a Soul Mate: Reading
Plato on Valentine’s Day”: http://www.thecritique.com/articles/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-soul-mate/?utm_content=buffer1d699&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer