Song of Solomon 2:8-13 Continuity August 3, 2014 Ordinary 18 J. Shannon Webster First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham Sermon Series: The Singer and the Song, #8
“The time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.” It eventually had to come to this. We cannot do an entire sermon series on “The Singer and the Song,” 8th installment this morning, without dealing with that most famous song in Scripture, the Song of Solomon. I confess I don’t remember ever preaching from this book before. It is one preachers avoid, because it is graphic love poetry, large sections of it erotic and sexual. If you were in worship on a certain Sunday a couple of years back, you may remember that I did talk Zana Free into preaching from Song of Solomon, to prepare for her ordination exam in Bible. Before she read the text she said to you, “I’m about to read some words I’ve never said in public before.” It didn’t help that she had to read it because just before Scott Owens, who was liturgist that day, had read a particularly lurid piece of prose from the wrong chapter. There was some blushing in the pews that day, but Zana preached a good sermon.
Interestingly, the Song of Solomon is the only place in Scripture where romantic love is shown plainly for its own sake, and not subordinated to child-rearing or social and political concerns. That may not be unrelated to the theme of the goodness of Nature, which runs throughout the book. No matter how dark or dire the winter seems, it gives way to the beauty of Spring. Some scholars have noted that the book of Genesis describes the events of the Garden of Eden in the rise of sin as alienation – the alienation of humans from the natural world, the alienation of woman from man, the alienation of humans from God. This Song of Solomon, describing love between the man and the woman, the praise of life found in creation, and the sacredness in it all, restores us in verse to the Garden of Eden.
There are a couple of different ways to read this book. Christians, especially medieval scholars, have usually seen it as an allegory. Everything stands for something else. The “beloved” is almost animal-like – a gazelle or young stag who comes bounding over mountains. Mystics of the Middle Ages saw the text movement inward, to the interior spaces where we meet God. The lover calls the woman outward, to exterior spaces where God’s love goes out to the world. Jewish Midrash understood the lover gazing through the latticework as God behind the Western Wall in Jerusalem, keeping watch over the people God loves. In Christian analysis, Bernard of Clairvaux understood God outside the wall, “a hidden watcher of hidden things.”1 It went so far as to imagine the “flowers that appear on the earth” as the Saints who flourish in the life of the church. Most modern commentators, on the other hand, view it as mere love poetry, a wedding song, an Egyptian drinking song, or even soft-core pornography.
The underlying question on this challenging book may be as simple as whether human sexuality is at heart a source of shame or a source of grace. Our culture gives mixed messages, conflicting messages, about sexuality. The church has done the same. Certainly there is sexual sin in the world, and it happens not when someone does something unconventional, but when someone is exploited – usually women or children. Abuse, human trafficking, predators who stalk children. That is the dark side; it happens when sex is turned into a commodity, instead of a gift from God. The other side is when we recognize it as a God-given part of human life, and if the Song of Solomon is right, here in our scriptures, something to be enjoyed, celebrated, and recognized as part of our integral make-up. I think that perspective was with the General Assembly in Detroit, when they recognized that if the companionship and joy of marriage is a blessing for straight folks, it ought to be a blessing for gay and lesbian folks as well. 1
One of the great debates among theologians of the early church was whether there was continuity or discontinuity between the Christian faith and the Jewish faith, between Christian knowledge and that of the Greek philosophers in the secular world. It was most famously put by Tertullian, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Some say, even today, “nothing. The secular world has nothing to offer the world of faith, and probably it should be, if not avoided, relegated to a low status and dismissed in importance. But Justin Martyr and other early theologians saw continuity between the insights of the philosophers and the insight of Christianity.
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Everything, as it turns out! As a more contemporary theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, wrote: “There are not two histories, one profane and one sacred, ‘juxtaposed’ or ‘closely linked.’ Rather, there is only one human history, irreversibly assumed by Christ, the Lord of history.”2 So I don’t think the Song of Solomon is either a tortured allegory or soft-core porn. Perhaps it is incarnation theology at its best, at the same time what is most delightfully human and most powerfully divine.
In a 3rd century church in Jerusalem there is an ancient bas-relief carved into the walls of the sanctuary, showing Biblical scenes. One is Jacob, who fell asleep and had a vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder between earth and heaven. In the bas-relief that ladder has 4 rungs. No more. Heaven isn’t that far from the mud we stand in. At Iona in Scotland the old Celtic theology still has some life, and they describe their island and other sacred sites as “thin places” where the membrane is so permeable that heaven leaks through.
And since we’re talking about songs, my favorite theologian - Kris Kristofferson – has been known to pray, yes pray, to an earthbound angel, Help me make it through the night.3 And also to proclaim to a love in doubt about the future: And if you will, if you’re up for the thrill of a lifetime, maybe we’ll tear down the walls between heaven and here.4 A few weeks ago we took up in the sermon the “Hallelujah” Psalms, and dealt with Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, a deeply religious modern psalm where sex and love and religion were closely linked – because in both places we human beings find experiences that take us out of ourselves, beyond ourselves, into something bigger than us that we barely have words for, so we have to sing it. That is what is going on in the Song of Solomon – faith and intense erotic love blend to the point where the boundary is no longer distinct. Heaven leaks through into our world. God shows up in the back of the room, when we are not at prayer or not being religious, not even trying, but shows up nonetheless and we are startled and stunned by grace. My man Kris summed it up this way: Life is the question and life is the answer, and God is the reason and Love is the way.5
I do draw this distinction: there is a style of songs in Christian music which I refer to as “Jesus is my boyfriend, I want to kiss him on the mouth” songs. I have no idea what those are trying to do. They do not do what either Solomon or Leonard Cohen are doing. The Jesus-my-Boyfriend songs feature crassly-drawn lyrics that make no approach to God, but ask God to stand in for a gigolo. There is in them no sense of wonder, awe or reverence. I wrote my own song about those songs once, after hearing one on the only radio station I could get driving across West Texas. The middle bridge answers such singers: “There’s so many people at the center of the universe; seems all but one have got to have it wrong. Playing back-slap buddy with the one who made the world, seems a tad familiar to the one who made this song. God is not your boyfriend, girl. Just what did you expect? I believe I’d get down on my knees and show some damn respect.”6
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The opposite of the frivolous is Ray Wylie Hubbard’s title cut to a song he wrote a few years after coming out of a prison sentence for drug charges, dropping from high on the charts in the 70’s to obscurity, drug use and prison. He was rescued, he says, by the transforming power of love. Literally redeemed by the agency of a good woman. He sings of being a gunslinger - I had a darker heart and a younger face, above the law, outside the bounds of grace. He tells that after her intervention, I have met a woman who is in my breath and bone…she prays to a God who does not hurt or hate. Since I left my revolver in the dirt, I have known peace from that hour.7
Just so, we sidle up to one another, and in that living encounter find that God snuck into the back of the room, when we weren’t looking, perhaps inhabiting someone who would be otherwise familiar, and we are stunned by grace, transformed by Love, ours and God’s. Billy Collins was Poet Laureate of the USA from 2001 to 2003, and last year published a poem called “Love.”
In the poem, our narrator watched a boy on a train who seems to be expecting someone. When she arrives, she is carrying a cello, looks a little bit like an angel, and a bit formal, so that his happiness to see her seems awkward. Collins tells us the reason he is writing all this on the back of an envelope is because when she turned to lift the cello onto the overhead rack,
I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of the saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.8
Bernard Clairvauz. Sermon 55, II.4, On the Song of Songs, trans. Walsh & Edmonds, Cistercian Pub. Kalamazoo, 1979, p. 86. 2 Gutierrez, Gustavo. Cited in A Theology of Liberation, Inda and Eagleson, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1973, p. 153. 3 Kristofferson, Kris. Help Me Make it Through the Night. Kristofferson, Monument Records, 1969. 4 ibid, Heaven and Here. A Moment of Forever, Justice Records, 1995. 5 ibid, Love is the Way. Repossessed, Mercury Records, 1986. 6 Copyright J. Shannon Webster, Feral Word Music, 2002. 7 Hubbardm Ray Wylie. Dangerous Spirits, title cut, Rounder Records, 1997. 8 Collins Billy. Love, Aimless Love. Random House, NY, 2013, p. 21. 3
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