Sermon: The Voice of Your Beloved

Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)

13th Sunday After Pentecost
August 30, 2009

"The Voice of Your Beloved"

Song of Songs 2:8-13

Prayer:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our minds and hearts gathered here this day be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.  Amen.  

What a great Sunday for my husband to be the scripture reader!  Here he comes, my beloved, “leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.”  He literally did arrive that way to outdoor worship, with our new puppy leaping and bounding down the hillside ahead of him.  Did you know that even though Song of Songs is a love poem between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, it was ultimately included in holy scripture as a reminder of God’s passionate love for us?  It’s actually one of the most controversial books of the Bible:  God isn’t mentioned even once in 8 chapters, so some ancient rabbis thought it should be left out of the official canon. And in the Common Lectionary, the preaching calendar for most mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, this dialogue between Sheba and Solomon is the only snippet of Song of Songs included in the entire 3-year reading cycle.  It’s a shame, because its poetry is really entertaining.  I’ve always encouraged my Confirmands to read it, because some of it is seriously “R” rated.  Once they read the whole thing, they’ll never again be tempted to say the Bible is boring.  In Chapter 4, verse 1, Solomon describes Sheba like this:

4How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful! Your eyes are doves behind your veil. Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead.

Seriously Solomon?  Your hair is like a flock of goats?  How is that exactly?  “Ah, my love.  How your hair flops and bounces!  How it sticks out, every which way, all gray and white upon the brown hill of thy head!”  I thought Solomon had the gift of wisdom; perhaps not so much with the ladies!  But get this, when he moves on to verse 2:

²Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing, all of which bear twins, and not one among them is bereaved. 

Teeth like cleanly washed sheep – that’s good enough.  But you just have to pity the people of the ancient world when it’s a great beauty compliment to say, “Oh my dear, how lovely and white are your teeth, and not one of them is missing!”  And this line:

⁵Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies. 
(Song of Songs 4:5)

So Solomon loved her brown and freckled cleavage, but why would a respectable church ever want to read these verses out loud?  Like any public display of affection, we kind of want to just look away and move on.  In the Jewish tradition, where they also read through their scripture in a yearly cycle, the rabbis decided this book wasn’t suitable for public reading at all, but for private contemplation during Passover.  And in my preparation for this sermon, one Lutheran scholar warned pastors to not even try to preach on this book – that it would get us in too much trouble.[1] 

Let me just say that I will proceed with care, because I think this is a sermon important enough be heard – even if it makes us a little bit uncomfortable.  I’m not alone in thinking this is one of the greatest books of the Bible.  In the age of the great Medieval Monastics, the Song was discussed more than any other Old Testament book. Bernard of Clairvaux, in the 1300s, wrote 86 sermons on the Song.  (That made one modern preacher quip that if you ever want to take ALL the joy out of sex, just preach 86 sermons about it!)[2]  The great teacher and mystic Rabbi Akiba made the best case for the book when some ancient rabbis tried to ban it as no more than a raunchy drinking song. He said, "The whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies." [3] 

The Holy of Holies, we remember, was the one place – at the dark and veiled center of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem – where the High Priest could encounter the living God face to face.  So the rabbi was saying this text could mystically bring us into the very presence of God.  That makes it worth a closer look, don’t you think?  After all, you could argue that it was the mission of Jesus to bring all of humanity into that sacred space of intimate relationship with the Holy, right?  He broke down the barriers of the rigid laws and purity codes that kept his people feeling unclean and alienated from the One Jesus had come to know as a loving “Abba,” or “Papa,” God. 

My Old Testament professor in seminary was Jesus scholar Marcus Borg.  And he was a great advocate of this kind of passionate love poetry in the Hebrew Scriptures, for the very reason that he thought it better captured for us modern Protestants what would have been the shocking intimacy of that “first name” familiarity with God that got Jesus into so much trouble.  The thing is, many of us are so comfortable with church language about our “Heavenly Father” that we have lost our sense of what was shocking to ancient religious authorities about it.  For us, we might associate God the Father with a kind and gray-haired grandfather – someone with whom we would have a warm and respectful, but somewhat reserved, relationship.  “Father” sounds like someone we might offer a kind of stiff Victorian handshake.  Song of Songs evokes instead the soul’s deep desire for God – like a kiss full on the lips.  It is love that longs for intimate pillow talk in the night – love naked and unashamed, as for a spouse.

Even though the New Testament is full of images of the church as the beloved bride of Christ, we modern Christians don’t typically think of church in such romantic terms.  We’re more likely to view church more as a mundane civic institution, and God as someone we choose to visit there from time to time.  I remember how shocking it was for me, and my seminary classmates, to discover these texts.  God our parent was living a respectable distance away; we could call home when we wanted, and we might expect God to call us every now and then. But God as a lover might want to text-message us 50 or 100 times a day; God as a lover might be jealous of our other diversions and hobbies.  That God was someone who might want to hold us close and not let go! 

And yet, the medieval mystics were inviting us to say “yes” to God’s courtship – that is, to draw our souls closer into relationship with the Holy One who calls us “beloved.”  Bernard of Clairveaux was unafraid of using erotic language to describe his soul’s longing for God, quoting Song of Songs as in this 2nd verse of chapter 1:  “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” For Bernard, that kiss is not something dirty, but is a metaphor for the possibility of our mystical union with God in prayer.  Bernard writes that the Song expresses, “the mounting desires of the soul, its marriage song, an exultation of spirit poured forth in figurative language pregnant with delight.”[4] Isn’t that beautiful?  Reading the Song, he says, can lead the “thirsting soul” to rediscover the power of love to redirect our love back to God and, through the direct experience of God’s grace, restore our ability to love others.[5]  He writes: “What a great thing is love, provided always that it returns back to its origin; flowing back again into its source, it acquires fresh strength to pour itself forth once again.”[6] The soul is always trying to find its way home to its wellspring and source in the blessing of God’s unconditional love. 

Falling in love is not the metaphor most of us would associate with our prayer life, or our relationship with God, but it is one that this text invites us to consider.  And whether our orientation is hetero- or homosexual, whether we’re single or married – there’s something in each of us, I think, that longs for a great and passionate love affair.  And the good news that those celibate monks discovered in the Middle Ages is that we Christians, like the Jews before us, have been freely invited into this kind of intimacy with God.  Instead of turning away from the intensity of Divine Love with shame and guilt, as Adam and Eve did and as some organized religion would have us do, through the grace of Jesus Christ we have been invited to draw closer to the Holy One, even to become his beloved bride.  As this new church year is beginning, I invite you to consider saying “yes” to God’s proposal.  Give God a little more of your heart.  Come to worship more often; join a group or take a class; learn to pray on your own with greater intimacy.  At least sit down and read all 8 chapters of Song of Songs.  Bring your soul closer to its home in the world of Spirit and allow yourself to fall more deeply in love with God as God has already fallen for you.  Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

Song of Songs 2:8-13

⁸The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. ⁹My 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. ¹⁰My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; ¹¹for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. ¹²The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. ¹³The 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.