To live in Love

 

Song of Solomon 2: 8-13
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
September 1, 2024

Photo of a young person with light tawny skin and medium length dark hair and dark eyes, head to one side, looking at the camera with a slight smile, a "come hither" look, lying in a huge pile of flowers of varying shades of pink.

The older I get, the more I am challenged to be thankful, the more I want to be thankful that I am indeed getting older, body changes and all, especially given my family history. I’m currently in the middle of my first adventure with a podiatrist, which now includes physical therapy.



If you’ve ever had physical therapy you know that everyone is in one room and sometimes you hear other people say things you wish you hadn’t heard. On Friday, while I was doing my ten minutes on the recumbent bicycle, one of the other therapists, a woman, remarked to a client, who looked to be in his early sixties, about his 5 yr. old granddaughter that he had brought with him.



“She’s going to be something when she starts dating. Look at her, she’s so cute!”


The grandfather grimaced and made a low grumbling sound.


“Oh, I pity the first boy she brings home!” she joked.



The grandfather then went on not too jokingly at all about how he will be on his guard, how he will greet such a young man, how he will be cleaning his gun the first time his granddaughter brings home a boy who is dating her. “I have several”, he said. The woman therapist laughed, apparently amused by this painfully typical display of patriarchal masculinity.



I thought to myself, “What if she brings home a girl?”



How awful that neither one of them thought it was perverse to bypass her childhood and sexualize a 5-year-old girl. How ironic that this man assumes that any boy, every boy who would date his granddaughter would be unworthy of her, would treat her as an object, would be disrespectful, because he knows how boys and men are, as displayed by his very behavior.



Contrast this scene with the exquisite love poetry in the Song of Solomon. While many scholars have tried to interpret it as an allegory of the relationship between the Holy One and Israel or between Christ and the Church, more than likely it is poetry purely about the uninhibited delight of the pleasures of love and the natural world. 1st century Jewish scholar Rabbi Akiva declared, “If all the writings are holy, the Song of Songs is holy of holies.” Even so, the Song of Solomon is included in the 3-year lectionary cycle only once and here it is—a tame sample of what is a profuse and passionate love affair.



How is it that more than 2,000 years later we are still in an embattled relationship with our bodies, our sexuality, our gender, and our relationship with pleasure and with the Divine? If anyone uses the phrase “Old Testament God”, they’re probably picturing that grandfather. They really haven’t read much of the Hebrew scriptures and they certainly have forgotten about the fulsomeness of this text. The verses in the Song of Solomon are all about mutuality, interdependence, desire, fulfillment, and love. What are we so afraid of? In our fear we keep certain people ignorant and resort to domination, control, and often violence.



What if we read this passage as though it was God who desires us? Not just our soul but our body, our whole self? God calling us beloved. To be beloved is to live within another’s heart. We live within the heart of God, the heart of all that is good, holy, and true. All of who we are lives within the heart of God. And there is nothing, nothing that will kick us out. And then us in reply, saying to that unlimited, unmerited, unconditional love, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”



People who are steeped in this love, who are not dependent on others for this love, who embrace pleasure in whatever form despite the pain we all live with, are free, liberated, and thus, much harder to control. Like joy and hope, pleasure and love are a form of rebellion and resistance. Like joy and hope, pleasure and love are a spiritual practice. Not a reward for hard work, but the foundation for why we are able to do hard things.



The psalmist tells us, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” What if not only at this Table but at any table, we remembered the words “this is my body, this is my blood”? When we cook and taste good food, we know the goodness of God’s love. What if we allowed love to flow through our veins and throughout our bodies whenever we experience pleasure of any kind? When we get into the bathtub or shower, we immerse ourselves in love. When we slip between clean sheets or put on clean clothes, we wrap, we clothe ourselves in love. When we spend time in nature, we root ourselves in love. Spending time with our pets, with people we love—whether in person or online or who have passed on, or in solitude with the enoughness of ourselves, we begin to liberate ourselves with the love available to us 24/7.



This is what Communion is all about, to commune not only with Jesus’ death but also with the love that raised him in life and liberated him from death. There are times the disruption at this Table we need is the disruption of our self-pity, despair, withholding, and shame. God’s ultimate desire is that we would be liberated to love and to be loved, to liberate others and the creation and enjoy it all, all of us together. Beloved. Arise, my love, my fair one and come away. Amen.

Benediction

O taste and see that God is good.
Immerse yourself in unlimited, unmerited, unconditional love
That is there for you whenever you have need of it.
May this love give you pleasure.
May it bring you joy.
May it fill you with courage, hope, and peace.
Amen.