A Sermon Preached at Christos Metropolitan Community Church, Toronto, ON

and Holy Fellowship Metropolitan Community Church, London, ON

Sunday, August 31, 2003

I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens. As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention toward me was love. Sustain me with cakes of raisins, refresh me with apples; for I am faint with love. O that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me! I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the wild does: do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready! 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. 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. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. Song of Songs 2:1-13

When Anne and I first met, I was living in Washington, DC, and she was living in Kingston, Ontario. And I can reliably report from personal experience that it was precisely 532 miles, door to door. The classic long-distance relationship. Then she moved to Belleville, and it was ANOTHER 50 miles! So a lot of our early relationship developed through emails, and Anne’s wonderful letters, and the occasional phone call, with our actual visits occurring somewhat less frequently. So those early emails were pretty steamy. When I told Anne that I was going to preach on Song of Songs, she suggested that I dig out some of our old emails. But I decided that the biblical text was going to be sufficiently steamy.

When I was in seminary, I took a Pastoral Counselling course on Human Sexuality, which was actually a pretty cool course, with a great prof. And the professor decided that one of our assignments was that the class of about 8 students was going to do one of the Tuesday chapel services for the whole seminary, all on sexuality. And she told us to use something from Song of Songs for our scripture.

And when we sat down to do this little project, we discovered a number of interesting things. One of which is that the scriptures from the Song of Songs only appear in the three year lectionary cycle ONCE. That’s it. One reading from this book, and it’s actually an "alternate" reading. So for folks who use the lectionary, and maybe even more so for folks who don’t, this book of the Bible almost never gets preached. When I was growing up, I don’t think I ever once heard a sermon preached on the Song of Songs. Did you?

And another thing we discovered was that there’s almost no music, no hymns or songs, based on verses from the Song of Songs. So that made it more challenging to construct our chapel service. And the third thing we discovered is that almost all of the Biblical commentaries and resources on the Song of Songs tend to overly "spiritualize" the text, and conveniently overlook all the sexuality issues that we wanted to address. So that added another challenge.

And so it came to pass, that one Tuesday morning in chapel, I found myself standing in front of all of my professors and classmates, in front of God and everyone, talking about breasts. That’s one of the many reasons I’ve always said that I found seminary harder than law school.

The Bible course I took in seminary that studied the Song of Songs was called "Dangerous Little Books," on some of the lesser known, less preached books in the bible. And this dangerous little book, this LUSTY little book, is a collection of some 25 or 30 love poems or fragments of poems, and its inclusion in the bible has been a matter of some controversy right from the very beginning. It offended and scared people, since it's about two folks who are attracted to each other in a very physical way and, to make matters worse, it doesn't say that they’re married.

And its erotic content scared erotophobic ancient Jews and Christians to death. Some of the old rabbis thought it didn't belong in the canon of the Hebrew scriptures. In order to make it more palatable, they said it was the love song God sings to God’s chosen People. It almost didn’t make it into the Christian Bible at all. In the fourth century, it was suggested that it was an allegory describing Christ’s love for the church. In the middle ages, St. Bernard of Clairvaux added a twist to that theory suggesting that the Song was actually an allegory of God’s love for the individual soul. He wrote eighty-six sermons based the Song of Songs, and never got past the second chapter! Eighty-six sermons could take the fun out of anything, and maybe that was the point.

Oh, please! This is an unabashed love poem. It is absolutely ripe with the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of sensual love, physical intimacy. Despite all the trying to make it do something else, the Song of Songs does just exactly what the author, and perhaps God, intends for it to do: celebrate the love of one human being for another.

So before we spiritualize the Song of Songs right out of its body, we need to admit that it’s about love and sex. And it’s in the Bible because sexuality and romance and the passions of our bodies are good gifts from God. They’re nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide away in a dusty old commentary. Or a closet. Now, there are parts of the bible that appear to portray intimacy and passion as being more problematical than promising, often having more to do with the language of "guilt" than with the language of "gift."

But not in this one spot. Here, the cup of love overflows. The Song of Songs is like a rare oasis upon which lovers stumble, just when they think that love is surely doomed, that lovers always get hurt, and passion (which blossoms early) loses fragrance quickly. To which the Song of Songs says: "Look again. It’s there. It’s retrievable. It’s wonderful. It’s goodly. Better yet, it’s godly. If you don’t have it, look for it. And if you’ve got it, hold fast to it." That’s the message of this book.

And this seems to stand in pretty stark contrast with the rest of the bible, doesn’t it? In the rest of the bible, sexuality often seems to be regarded as something requiring careful governing, and female sexuality in particular gets serious restraint. This book is unique in that the protagonist in the Song is the only unmediated female voice in scripture. She’s not speaking through some narrators voice. The Song represents HER thoughts and imaginations and yearnings and words. So in addition to being a lusty little book, it’s a dangerous little book because it makes some very specific assertions about sexuality in general, about female sexuality in particular, and it counters the usual social and cultural notions of beauty.

So why was this book kept in the bible? It’s not because every holy book needs a dose of Danielle Steele to keep the reader awake. I think it’s in the Bible because it "sings the praise of the greatest force in the world.... that which builds the universe from atom to [humanity].... draws individuals together in fruitful union.... forms the foundation on which mutual relations can profitably rest.... organizes societies.... interprets nature.... lifts shining ideals.... and gives the touch divine to all existence." Mind you, I didn’t write that; Nathaniel Schmidt did, but I think that about sums it up.

And what __________ read was actually one of the more tame passages from the Song of Songs. It goes on and on for eight chapters to sing of the delicious details of love’s anticipation, desire, and fulfillment, with no mention of God, and precious little mention even any long-term commitment. There are some very titillating romantic speeches between a woman and her suitor, and their conversations about love and passion and desire and longing for each other. With no lines drawn around them, no restrictions, no pre-requisites. It celebrates an almost transgressive eros, and exalts a passionate love for a chosen lover who is considered culturally and socially alien.

I think most importantly for us in the queer community, the Song of Songs insists in a rather dramatic manner on a person’s right to love, irrespective of prevailing cultural norms, whomever the heart chooses. In other words, the Song of Songs sustains a theological worldview in which all persons have the right to love as they will, according to the dictates of reciprocal love and desire. It exalts a love that presumes not only the inherent worth of human desire, but also its moral sufficiency as a motive for the fullest union of life between human beings.

So for us in the queer community, that’s good news. I happen to think that that’s good news for the whole world! It may be a dangerous little book, but that’s good news. But our work as disciples of Jesus Christ is a constant exercise in figuring out "how do we live our lives in response to all of God’s good news to us?" And for that, I think we need to look at BOTH the Song of Songs AND the gospel lesson that _______ read.

The gospel lesson today from Mark 7 is a story that underscores the importance of authenticity in worship and in daily life. Jesus chastises the Pharisees for confusing cultural and religious traditions, with the laws of god. Jesus reminds his listeners of the words of Isaiah, "This people honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me." He is reminding us that the letter of the law and the spirit of the law are not always the same thing. The spirit can emerge without a temple, a priest, a church or a proper doctrine.

This, of course, is not news to us here in MCC, but I think it is still, always, worth exploring more deeply what it means to honour god with our hearts, to have hearts that are close to God. If we look again at the gospel lesson, we’re given a list of thing to avoid -- fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, and folly. But we’re not given a positive prescription for how to honour God, how to be in relationship with God. How do we honor god with our hearts? What is the real spirit of the law?

And I think one of the best expressions of the spirit of the law is contained in the reading from the Song of Songs. Because it IS an unabashed love song. The lover sings out, "The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills....My beloved speaks and says to me, Arise my love, my fair one, and come to me." Come to me. And we recognize the feelings inherent in that moment. That call echos in our own hearts. It’s a moment of deep longing and intense joy. Come to me. Be intimate with me.

The spirit of the law – a LIVING law – is about having that kind of a real, authentic, intimate experience, one that moves us in our WHOLE being, body and soul. It’s an experience that we can believe in, and commit to, because we’re changed somehow by it.

These verses from Song of Songs remind us of this. They remind us that our relationships – ALL of them – have to be cultivated and nurtured and cherished. Love doesn’t just happen. Intimacy with each other, and with God comes with a cost. It costs us time and energy. It costs us a willingness to be truly present, to remain, to be accountable, to see things through, to come out from hiding. See, intimacy can be frightening, as well as fulfilling. All those things are necessary to nurture relationships.

Lovers can’t take their love for granted, any more than humans can take their relationship with God for granted. This song is about creating those special moments between two lovers. That’s how their love thrives. And you know how we always talk about how God’s love is a good model for how we should love? Well, this is one case where our human love is a good model for how we are in relationship with God. THIS is how we honour God with our hearts. THIS is the spirit of the law. We love. We build that relationship with God. We nurture it. Like lovers in search of the perfect time and place to make love, we might want to put some care into creating an atmosphere in which our relationship with God can thrive, intimately. We might want to give our relationship with God the same mindfulness, and attentiveness, and daily-ness that we give the best relationships in our lives. Because when we do, we find ourselves surrounded, as the lovers in the Song of Songs were, with beauty, and joy, and abundance, and the loving caress of the divine.

Resources gratefully acknowledged: Christopher King, "A Love as Fierce as Death" in "Take Back the Word," Robert E. Goss and Mona West, eds.; Rev. Bob Olmstead; Dr. William Ritter.