The Passion of the Poet First Baptist Richmond, August 29, 2021 Song of Solomon 2:8-13 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 turtledove is heard in our land.” I’ve been looking forward to sharing one of my favorite poems with you. It’s a love poem, and to get you in the right frame of mind let me ask you to imagine that you are a farm boy from the Midwest, maybe Wisconsin, and that you’ve just loaded your prize-winning heifer onto the trailer after taking a blue ribbon at the county fair. But your girlfriend, Denise, is not so happy. She came in third in the beauty pageant, and now she sits in the passenger seat of your pickup truck, pouting. There’s a long silence, and then you clear your throat and say this, just to cheer her up: Well, I don't care, Denise, if you didn't win the Dairy Princess Pageant. By the time we're married next spring, the new house on the farm will be finished, with a double garage for your car and my pickup. We'll panel the basement with walnut veneer or maple and tear down the old house when my old man moves to town. There'll be a new steel barn and another Harvestore silo. You know as well as I do, Denise, you could hardly ask for a better deal. You're beautiful, Denise, 1 and I think if I bit into your shoulder right now, you'd taste like a watermelon. That’s called, “The Love Nest,” by Leo Dangel, and it may be the perfect love poem. It’s got beauty, romance, passion, and maple paneling in the basement. It may also be the perfect introduction to a sermon from the Song of Solomon, because it, too, is a love poem, in which the poet praises his beloved’s beauty, and hints that if he bit down on her shoulder she would taste like a pomegranate (4:13). So, what’s a love poem doing in the Bible? I don’t want to spoil the Sunday school teacher training session I’m doing in a couple of weeks, but this may be a good time to remind everyone that the Bible is not a book, it is a collection of sixty-six books: a small library. It’s got books of poetry, books of history, books of wisdom, books of law… In fact, the word Bible is simply the English version of the Greek word biblia, meaning “the books.” So, we’re in the poetry section this morning, and there, right next to the multi-volume Book of Psalms, is the Song of Solomon. It may not be your favorite poem. It’s certainly not one we read in church very often, but if not it’s only because it is so…what’s the word? Passionate! Yes, this is a passionate poem. It’s about two young lovers who can’t seem to stay away from each other. Tim Mackie from the BibleProject ® introduces it like this: “One of the basic themes uniting the poem is the intense desire that this couple has for each other expressed through their constant seeking and finding. So, after the opening poem they’re separated but on the hunt for one another. The woman calls out as she’ll wake up from a dream or go looking for her lover and more than once they’ll find each 2 other, they’ll embrace, and then right when things start to get a bit racy the scene will suddenly end and the new one will start. They’re separated, looking for each other, and on it goes. “Another repeated theme,” says Mackie, “is the joy of the couple’s physical attraction for one another, so, multiple times, they’ll pause and describe each other with these elaborate metaphors. Here it’s very helpful to know that these images and metaphors in Hebrew poetry are not primarily visual. If you try to paint a picture of these people based on the metaphors you will end with something that looks very, very strange [a woman with eyes like doves, for example, with hair like a flock of goats, and teeth like a flock of sheep]. What you’re supposed to do is reflect on the meaning of these images as they relate to the man and woman. “So, you’ll read through the poetic cycles and the tension will keep building, and their desire and joy and attraction, and this spiraling repetition is a poetic way of heightening and focusing on the mystery and power of [their love for one another]. It all comes together in the conclusion,” Mackie says, “which pauses to summarize what these poems are all about: Love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. 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 (8:6-7). “The poem highlights the power and the intensity of love, how it is both beautiful 3 but also dangerous. Like fire, love can destroy people if it’s abused, or it can be life- giving if it’s protected. Ultimately,” Mackie concludes, “love expresses the insatiable human longing to know and be fully known and desired by another.”i In a book called The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis describes this kind of love—the kind in the Song of Solomon—as eros. “By Eros,” he writes, “I mean of course that state which we call ‘being in love’; or, if you prefer, that kind of love which lovers are in.”ii I felt the first stirrings of that kind of love when I was in fourth grade. I described it in a sermon I preached here in 2009, after talking about how painful it was for me to move from Virginia to West Virginia, and how much I missed my old friends. “But the next year,” I said, “we moved a few miles up the river to another little town and another elementary school. I was unpacking my pencil box on the first day when Bamma Donohue walked in. “When I saw her I felt something inside me I had never felt before. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She sat one row over and two seats ahead of me, which was the perfect place for me to notice her without her noticing me. I stole glances at her straight brown hair, her slender neck, her unbelievably long eyelashes. The only word I could attach to the feeling I was having was love: I was in love with this girl. I carried it around inside me quietly, stoically, never letting on and hoping she couldn’t hear my heart thumping when we ended up in the lunch line together.”iii If you were here for that sermon you may remember that Bamma once gave me a second-hand valentine, the one she tried to give to Mike Gordon, the one he refused by saying, “I don’t want that old thing!” She snatched it up off his desk and said, “Well, then!” and marched around to my 4 desk and gave it to me instead. I did want it. I didn’t care if it was slightly used. I was in love. C. S. Lewis would have described it as eros, “that state which we call ‘being in love.’” He would have distinguished it from venus, the physical expression of love, which I was too young to know anything about.iv But not for long. Somewhere around the sixth or seventh grade a whole new set of feelings began to wake up inside me, feelings I tried to describe in a sermon I preached here just last year, during a series on the Seven Deadly Sins. I talked about taking one of our Clydesdale horses to water when I was in my early teens, and making the mistake of filling his feed box before I did it. I practically had to drag him to the watering hole, but once he got there he dropped his head to drink and I climbed on his back thinking it would be fun to ride him back to the barn. But as soon as he finished drinking he whirled around and began to gallop back to the barn, thinking about those oats in the feed box. I had no saddle, no bits, no bridle, but I squeezed his massive body between my knees and held on tight to his mane as he thundered along that narrow path. I kept my head down as he galloped under low- hanging branches. But when he got to the barn he took a sharp left turn and I bounced off the open barn door before dropping to the muddy ground, groaning in pain but mostly just grateful to be alive.”v In that sermon I said, “That experience was a good analogy for what was going on in the rest of my life.” As I said, there were feelings waking up in me that I had never felt before. They were exciting, but more than a little bit scary. When I sneaked a peek at the ladies lingerie section of the Sears and Roebuck Catalog I began to have thoughts 5 and feelings I was pretty sure a good Christian boy shouldn’t have.