Earthly Love

Selections from Song of Songs

July 22, 2007

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

It’s really hard to talk about love relationships between individual human beings in church for a whole variety of reasons. We can talk in great generalities pretty safely and rather vaguely say that we should all love one another, and when that is expressed in sappy love songs or children playing with each other or people helping folk after floods and famines, we all come to agreement. But some of you have been so wounded in love relationships that the pain is palpable. Beyond that, the church has this rather odd history with talking about the love between individuals, particularly when that love is expressed not only with our minds and hearts, but with our bodies, when we include sex in the conversation.

Our Roman Catholic kin teach that the only reason why human beings should engage in sexual activity is to produce children, and that the only time children should be produced is in the context of a church-sanctioned marriage between one man and one woman. Monastic groups claim that all sexual activity is inappropriate for their members, and so they take vows of celibacy, feeling that this will free them to serve God more completely, thus seeming to imply that physical love is somehow a lesser expression of love and one that God does not value as much as those who renounce it.

Yet most of the time the church simply doesn’t talk about sex at all, except to condemn those who are engaging in it in what is perceived to be a “wrong” way. Thus leading many an adolescent to come to the conclusion rather comically presented to me by a friend in my own adolescence as “the church believes that sex is dirty, so we should save it for someone we love.”

Into the midst of this odd history comes this small book that is tucked in between the Psalms and the Prophets, a collection of passionate, and somewhat graphic (read the rest of it) love poetry in which the name of God never occurs. One’s first response to Song of Songs might be “what is it doing in the Bible in the first place?”

My answer to that is that I think the inclusion of Song of Songs is the best argument that the Holy Spirit actually had something to do with the formation of the set of books we call the Bible. So although the typical church ignores this book happily, except at the occasional wedding, it is meant for us to read and enjoy. I do NOT believe that it was left there to be read as an allegory, although there are certainly centuries of church tradition (written mostly by people who had themselves renounced human love, romance, marriage and sex) to support the allegorical interpretation. I don’t think Song of Songs is in the Bible to teach us about God or about marriage (the lovers in this book are not talked about as husband and wife or even bride and groom). I don’t think it is here to teach us about anything, I don’t think there is any moral to the story here.

I think the book is here to help us celebrate the love that human beings can find for one another and its expression in our hearts, minds and bodies. Just so I am clear, these poems are about the love of what we usually call two consenting adults, a mutual, equal expression of love, actually unique in the Bible for the equality and power given the woman’s voice in the poem. Like the best love poetry, Song of Songs calls us to wonder at the mystery of falling in love and staying in love. And, as the French Philosopher Gabriel Marcel once wrote, “Those who reduce mystery to a problem are guilty of perversion.”

I want to highlight two mysteries of love at the center of these poems today. The first mystery brings me, of course, to Harry Potter. No, I haven’t finished reading book seven, so there are no spoilers this morning! The story of Harry is centered in the mystery proclaimed by the second part of this morning’s reading, “love is strong as death….many waters cannot quench live, neither can floods drown it.” Love between people, when allowed full reign, can bring a power stronger than we can imagine. In Harry’s story, his mother’s love for him created a spell strong enough to defeat the attempts of the most powerful evil wizard in his world to destroy Harry. The love of Harry’s friends and mentors has strengthened him to continue facing evil. J.K. Rowling has left us enough clues to surmise that the love of Harry and his friends will play a large part in the end of this saga.

But this is not just fantasy story material. Jim Loder, one of my seminary professors, tells a story about a time he and his wife vacationed in Canada. As they were driving, they saw another driver pulled over and trying to flag down help. Dr. Loder stopped and got out and, seeing the problem was a flat tire, went to the woman’s car trunk to look for her jack.

At that moment another car, going way too fast, hit his car from behind, thus pinning him between the woman’s car and his own. No help was available except his wife, barely five foot tall. Her love for him and trust in God, she believed, gave her the strength to pick up her car to give her husband enough room to squeeze out between the two cars. Her love and God’s strength saved her husband’s life. As Thomas Mann once wrote, “it is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

But lest we get too deep and serious this morning, our poem calls us back not to a dissection of love, but to a celebration of it. A second mystery at the heart of this kind of love, and at the center of the poem, is how the lovers find one another beautiful. Chapter four begins, “How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful.” Over and over in the poems the lovers describe each other with such words of praise and appreciation. Each part of their bodies is described in loving and delightful terms. “How graceful are your feet in sandals, O queenly maiden,” he says, and she says, “His eyes are like doves beside springs of water.” As these lovers think of one another, they constantly see what is good and sweet and precious and, yes, holy. Love gives them eyes to see beyond flaws and imperfections.

So because I am a preacher and therefore cannot resist just a little teaching this morning, here is what I would have you take away from our brief time with Song of Songs. I would hope that we could look at one another with even a tiny amount of the appreciation these lovers have for one another. I would like to hope that we do not need to be “in love” with one another to see that each part of our bodies, our minds, our spirits is so beautiful, such a gift given to us by God. So often the world, the advertising business, the human competitive instinct, pulls us to look at one another, and, dare I say, at ourselves, and see all that is not, in terms of the world, “beautiful.”

But you are beautiful, each of you. If you have ever been in love in your life and learned to look at another person and see them as so beautiful, or had someone look at you in all your imperfections and see you as beautiful, as these lovers in these poems have, then reach into that place in yourself this morning and see if there is a way that you can look at everyone with those eyes. Don’t look in lust to seek to possess or control, that definitely is NOT what these poems are about. Look with sheer joy, which is what we celebrate about these biblical lovers.

One of my UCC colleagues, Rosemary Maxey, writes “we give and love too often out of obligation or duty and not out of joy.” Today is for joy, joy in power, joy in beauty, joy in love.

Thanks be to God for the gift of love. Amen.