(A message delivered on Sunday, February 8, 2015)
You’re here today for an historic event. Never before have I preached from the Song of Solomon. I wonder if anyone else has from this pulpit. I hope so, but that would be unique throughout our churches. I also wonder how many of us discovered the Song of Solomon the way some people have, often by accident, while thumbing through our Bibles or looking at the table of contents. Or maybe you memorized all the titles of the Bible’s books in Vacation Bible School and then wondered, “Why have I never heard a sermon from that book between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah,” or had a Sunday School class, or been in on a Bible study group of the Song of Solomon?” So you start reading it, and a chapter or two into it you start to wonder, Is it warm in here or is it just me? And then you realize, “So, that’s why we haven’t had many sermons or Sunday School classes from Song of Solomon!” Because it’s about the love which brought us all into the world.
Maybe it should be called The Songs of Solomon, plural, because it contains various songs and poems like what you’d hear in ancient Palestinian wedding celebrations. They were celebrating, again, the love that brought us into the world.
If we are embarrassed by that, we may wonder, Why is the Song of Solomon even in the Bible? I believe that when Jesus said, “Scripture cannot be broken,” and “It is written,” and “Search the scriptures, for they speak of me,” that he included the Song of Solomon among the inspired writings, and that he had no trouble with it. It was widely in use even then in Jewish life.
We don’t have any direct quotes of Jesus from the Song of Solomon, like we do from other Old Testament writings. But there are some indirect connections, such as when Jesus said to the disciples in John 14: “I go to prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” That was the language of courtship, addressed to his bride, the church. Back then, when a couple was engaged, the bridegroom had to first build a home for his bride. When his father said that the house was ready, and the wedding feast too, then he gave the son permission to go fetch his bride. Then there’d be a religious ceremony, followed by a big party, with the kinds of songs you hear in the Song of Solomon. Jesus then likens his mission in the world to courtship and a young man’s preparation for marriage.
Jesus’ first recorded miracle occurred at a wedding, in Cana, where there would be dancing and the singing of songs very much like those of the Song of Solomon. Using the newest tool of biblical research, Youtube, I found such a celebration. Though it’s in a modern setting, it continues ancient traditions from the Middle East that are reflected in the Song of Solomon.
A little background: After the religious ceremony, the bride and groom are ushered by musicians and dancers into the hall of feasting, where the community is gathered. As the groom enters, the singers, dancers and musicians do something like this (3:30 to 4:00):
On behalf of the bride, they may be singing something like:
2: 8 Listen! My beloved! Look! Here he comes,
leaping across the mountains, bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice.
10 My beloved spoke and said to me, “Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, come with me.
11 See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me.”
Then, the bride enters:
I looked through English translations of some Arabic wedding songs, and saw that they may well be singing something akin to:
6: 4You are as beautiful as Tirzah, my darling, as lovely as Jerusalem,
as majestic as troops with banners.
5 Turn your eyes from me; they overwhelm me….”
But the bride and groom are not the only persons involved in the wedding and the marriage. Speaking for the community, the singers may also be singing something like: “Eat, friends, and drink; drink your fill of love,” from Chapter 5:1.
So the community speaks, blessing the love and the life that the couple will share. Or is it God speaking? Maybe both. For we don’t create blessings. God does. We merely transmit them.
Some people have said that The Song of Solomon is in the Bible because it’s really about the love between God and Israel, or between Christ and the church. But other scholars would say, “No, it’s the prophets who speak of God’s marriage to his people. Song of Solomon is part of the Bible’s Wisdom Literature, along with Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. The prophets give us God’s Word to Creation. Wisdom literature gives us God’s Word through Creation. Therefore, the love that brings us all into the world reveals something about God.
But I think there is both wisdom and prophecy in the Song of Solomon. Not that it predicts anything about the future. Rather, like the prophets, it confronts the world’s way of looking at things and challenges us with God’s viewpoint.
Which brings me to the first question in the outline: What did the Song of Solomon challenge in the time of Solomon? In its own day, it challenged at least two things: the treatment of women as mere property, and polygamy, the practice of having multiple wives.
About that first challenge, to the objectification of women as things to be given like merchandise, we saw some of that in West Africa, where arranged marriages were still happening. At such weddings the young bride might actually be crying in sorrow and terror, while her family was celebrating all the benefits they were going to get from their new connection to her husband-to-be and his family, often a much older man, maybe with other wives already. They might even publicly upbraid her for her tears, and tell her to just, “Buck up, you’ll get used to it; and at least he’ll keep you fed. Us too.” Meanwhile, a young man who really loved her, and whom she loved, is catching the bus for the big city, never to return, so embittered and heart-broken is he. The churches of Burkina Faso have taken up that challenge and are teaching against arranged marriages, polygamy and female circumcision.
In Solomon’s Song, the bride is an equal partner in the poetry and drama; her desire and delight in her groom are just as important as are his delight and desire for her. That’s one thing that Song of Solomon says Yes to. And so it brings us back to the Garden of Eden, before sin spoiled the mutuality, equality and interdependence of man and woman.
But what about the challenge to polygamy? You don’t get very far into the love songs before you start to wonder, “Yeah, right. Which of Solomon’s thousand wives and concubines that we read about in I Kings is this song about? Is this really sweet love poetry or just the lechery of lustful old man?”
Solomon was the patron of Bible’s Wisdom literature, but the Bible also tells how far away he wandered from the wisdom which God gave him. That made him also the most foolish man of his time, because he knew so much better. The Song bearing his name bears a rebuke to him in Chapter 8: 11-12: (please project) “Solomon had a vineyard at Ba′al-ha′mon; he let out the vineyard to keepers; each one was to bring for its fruit a thousand pieces of silver.” [which refers to his harem. The song goes on to say] 12 My vineyard, my very own, is for myself; you, O Solomon, may have the thousand, and the keepers of the fruit two hundred.”
That’s a veiled, poetic way of saying, “You royalty and celebrities may do as you like, but we are oriented toward the Garden of Eden, when one man and one woman were the full complimentary reflection of God’s image, together, in their mutually supportive and dignifying relationship, as representatives of the Creator and his interests in his realm. The two of us are the real once-and-future royalty. That’s another thing this book says Yes to.
As for the next question, “Historically, what has The Song of Solomon challenged?” By which I mean, in us, the church. Over 20 centuries of church history, the Song of Solomon has been something of an embarrassing challenge for Gentile Christians of the western world because we are the heirs of that Greek philosophical tradition called, “dualism.” Dualism means that, mentally, we tend to divide the world into two warring realms: matter versus spirit, with the spiritual good and the physical bad. Allegedly then, the whole point of spirituality is to rise above the evil material world and escape from it. That’s why no less a spiritual giant than St. Bernard of 11th Century France wrote pages and pages of sermons trying to interpret the Song of Solomon as just an allegory about God and the Christian soul, because surely, he thought, no book in the Bible would be about human love and sex.
But our Hebrew spiritual ancestors did not think of the material, physical world as something to despise and escape, but as something to sanctify and so move back toward its state of original blessing. We are still called to sanctify the material world through worship and obedience to God. That sanctify-able material world includes bodies, babies and the love that brought us all into the world. All throughout our history, then, the Song of Solomon has challenged our dualism and our disdain for the physical, material Creation of God.
As for the third question, “What does the Song of Solomon challenge today?” You’d almost think that now we’ve gotten over our dualism so well that we seem to be in an opposite kind of situation. Now it seems that bodies and sex are worshiped and idolized, and everything spiritual is under suspicion, unless it’s some do-it-yourself version of privatized consumer spirituality. But today I suspect that we are every bit as much the dualists as was St. Bernard, just in reverse. While he might have said, “Deny your bodies and hate them, because they’ll drag your spirit down,” today’s dualist says, “Worship your bodies and indulge their every whim and want, because that won’t affect your spirit.”
But that’s just another kind of dualism, the false segregation of body from spirit. Both kinds of dualism, the prudish, puritanical kind, and the loose, libertine kind, are unbiblical. Just by being in the Bible, the Song of Solomon tells us how spiritual is our sexuality, and how close spirituality and sexuality are, how they are just a hair’s breadth apart, like two wires in a house or a car, so that energy from one can easily arc from one to the other.
That’s why, to cultivate the closest, most nurturing and meaningful physical intimacy, we must also cultivate the closest, most nurturing spiritual and emotional intimacy. Its also why we must be all the more careful and cautious about the risk of sexual abuse in the church, because intimacy of soul and spirit can easily be hijacked for wrongful physical, sexual intimacy. Throw in spiritual symbolism, authority, religious emotions and experiences, and the opportunities for abuse are all too rife. Solomon’s song then challenges today’s lewd and libertine kinds of dualism, too.
Another modern tendency that Song of Solomon challenges is the separation of sex from love, especially in today’s hook-up culture. That’s why I changed the title of this, the last message of the four part series, “Body and Soul: Healthy Sexuality” from “Honoring the Gift of Sex,” to “Honoring the Gift of Love.” For as I read the Song of Solomon, nowhere do I find the word, “sex,” not as it is used today. By “sex” we usually mean the act of lovemaking and reproduction, as though that were totally independent and isolated from other aspects of a relationship. Throughout The Song of Solomon, I find the words, “love” and “passion” and “desire.” Elsewhere throughout the Bible the powerful, perceptive words, “knowing” and “to know” one’s spouse. Sometimes, the Biblical phrase might be, “to lie with,” often when the activity is morally questionable. But mostly, the Bible speaks of the love that brought us into this world in relational terms, not in technical or mechanical terms. And it is only a gift to be celebrated when it is accompanied by love, as an expression of committed, covenant love.
A third modern tendency that the Song of Solomon challenges is the individualism of this age, by which we so often insist that our bodies, our desires and our behaviors are entirely our own personal business. The individualistic spirit of this age says, “Keep your morality off my body; it is mine alone to do whatever I want with, with whomever I want, whenever I want.”
We are each personally responsible for how we use the awesome power that God has entrusted us to create deep, intimate bonds, and sometimes, even life. I neither have nor want the power to force my morality on anyone else. Even if we could, we have enough trouble directing ourselves. But the people we just saw gathered in the video celebrating the wedding, and the community which speaks and sings in the Song of Solomon, all attest to the fact that, though sex is very personal, it is never completely private. Not if it creates exclusive and powerful bonds of loyalty and intimacy between two people; not if it can even bring the blessing of children into our lives and communities. Whenever we say our baptismal vows, or our membership vows, or vows of child dedication, we cannot then say, “Sure, I want your support, but I don’t want your counsel; I want your blessing and affirmation, but I’m not taking any probing, personal questions.” The Song of Solomon challenges such individualism. It says Yes to the community’s role and responsibility in each marriage and family.
A fourth modern thing that Song of Solomon challenges is pornography. Pornography has been around ever since humans first learned to write and make art. Today, its one of the world’s largest businesses in terms of sheer dollars and cents, right up there with food, tourism, drugs and weapons. But where people used to have to go looking for it surreptitiously, now it comes looking for us, and not just online. Films that would have been X-rated 20 years ago are now R or less. Or its all on TV. It’s partly why a college education now includes date rape prevention and response.
By contrast, the Song of Solomon gives us a language for love that is not contemptuous, gratuitous, offensive nor exploitive, the way pornography is. It gives voice to desire, but without being demanding. The lovers celebrate each other, and not just certain acts with each other. With just the right mix of clarity and modesty, It is reverent and poetic in the way it leaves some things to the imagination, or compares them to other aspects of creation that are life-giving and beautiful.
The Song of Solomon does give us some guidance and direction, too. Several times throughout the songs we hear the words, “Do not awaken love until it so desires.” In other words, this is powerful stuff that entails much responsibility; don’t play around with it or provoke it for its own sake.” That may be one reason why we so often feel confusion and even dismay when we first learn the facts of life: (“Aw, Yuck, Mom and Dad! Surely, at least the stork brought ME?”): It’s a signpost saying that childhood is not forever. So, let the power and the responsibility come at the right, with the right person.
Yet that is exactly what pornography does not do. And its exactly why we must teach the facts of love and life before the pornographers do. Like a sexualized version of crack cocaine, it artificially provokes the power, the passion and the pleasures of love, without respect nor regard for the persons, or for only some unreal fantasy version of persons against whom no one can compare. That leads to an addictive cycle of isolation and estrangement.
In The Song of Solomon, by contrast, the songs and poems celebrate the persons, and then the power, the passion and the pleasure of their bond. That’s another thing this Song says Yes to. And its quite the challenge to the global business of pornography.
All of God’s No’s in the Bible only make sense in light of the wonderful things to which God says, Yes. Too bad we haven’t been as clear about God’s Yes-es as we have about God’s No’s. I’ve already touched on the last question on the outline, “What does The Song of Solomon say Yes to? It says yes to sexual love within the context of a committed, covenant love. God also says Yes to supporting that covenant, committed love within the context of a wider community that will respect it, support it and protect it, like the church. That’s why the Elders, Jana and I are exploring resources for a marriage mentoring program for Zion Church.
God also says Yes to the equality, mutual dignity and the interdependence of men and women, not just in marriage and parenting, but by extension, in all relationships. Finally, the Song of Solomon is another way in which God says a resounding Yes to each one of us, for we came into the world through this same love.
That is one way in which the Song of Solomon speaks as well to the unmarried, and to those who experience attraction to their own gender. For all of us, married or single, need and deserve the support of our church community if all are to live responsibly and with sanctity in our bodies. If, as Psalm 68 says, “God puts the lonely in families,” do we only think of biological families? Why can’t that also be the church family? What do we need to do better, or differently, as a church, in order to truly support the single, the widowed, the divorced, for now called to live in celibacy?
If this brings up painful personal feelings and memories about how far short we have fallen from the ideal, or about the temptations we experience and have fallen to, remember that there’s nobody in this sanctuary this morning but sinners. And as far as I know, the one speaking is “the chief of sinners.” Whatever our struggle, whenever we fail, do not forget that we are still and always being pursued and courted by a Love even warmer, fiercer, more insistent and persistent, more realistic about us and yet more hopeful and forgiving, than even the passionate human love that the Song of Solomon celebrates. If it is true among us mortals that “love is as strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave; Its flashes are flashes of fire, a most vehement flame,” if, as we heard before this message, that “many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it,” how much truer is that of God’s love for us? And if the bride, the groom and the community of Solomon’s Song find and feel so much delight in each other, how much more does God delight in every one of us, his Beloved sons and daughters?
Maybe St. Bernard was not entirely off track in his effort to connect the Song of Solomon with every Christian’s pilgrimage. We quote some of Song of Solomon in our hymns, such as the one we sang earlier: “Where does Thou, Good Shepherd, resort with thy sheep, to feed in the pastures of love?” Maybe some of us have sung, “He’s the Lily of the Valley, the Bright and Morning Star, the fairest of ten thousand to my soul.” Or, “Jesus, Rose of Sharon, bloom in radiance and in love within my heart.” Or, “He takes me to his banqueting table, and his banner over me is love.” And not without reason.
Other songs may have a more distant connection, like, “O Love, That Will Not Let Me Go,” and “thy love, so tender, so possessing, is life to me, and every blessing.” I shall close by paraphrasing those songs in a prayer, for I think I hear in them echoes of what Jesus might be praying for us even now: “May my bride, the church, be united to me in the fullness of the Father’s love for me and mine for him, which we share through the same Spirit, and in our love for each one of them. And may they receive this love even as they share it, in every relationship in the church, and in every church within each church, the church of the family, the church that is each marriage, the church within every heart and home among us.”