St Margaret s Church, Binsey Evensong on Sunday 6 th May 2018 [Easter 6] Revd. Professor Martin Henig

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1 St Margaret s Church, Binsey Evensong on Sunday 6 th May 2018 [Easter 6] Revd. Professor Martin Henig Psalm 45; Song of Songs 4:16-5:2;8: 6-7; Revelation 3: I slept, but my heart was awake. Listen: my beloved is knocking. Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one; for my head is wet with dew, my locks with the drops of the night. [Song 5:2] + In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Today s theme both at mass this morning in the fifteenth chapter of St John s gospel and this evening with the Song of Songs is love. Jesus tells his disciples: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. That love is totally unconditional. Jesus gave his life for us, so what are we expected to respond? Surely with love, surely with joy, surely not with long faces but with songs of joy. Our morning psalm, psalm 98 was an ecstatic paien of praise, sing to the Lord a new song, and musical instruments and the whole world of nature join in. This evening s psalm 45 is a royal wedding song, an epithalamion, replete with music, rich robes and perfume which lead us towards our first reading couched in the same vein. What are you expecting to hear from this pulpit, or from any pulpit? Certainly, you are not surprised by the words of our Lord telling us to love one another, though too often we divorce spiritual love, Agape, from the physical manifestations of powerful emotion, Eros. As E. M. Forster warns us in Howard s End we are too ready to separate the prose of daily living from the passion which invades our thoughts and dreams and our physical longings. The subject is one that has exercised lovers, poets and philosophers, not to mention ordinary people from 1

2 early times, and apart from Judeo-Christian thoughts about love, we have amongst other writings the great Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus and the Symposium which have a particular resonance with me, as well as classic works from India and beyond..and there is love poetry from everywhere. And we might remember that other animals experience love, experience devotion for one another, and who knows for God too. Our text tonight is taken from the Song of Songs, a series of poems with clear erotic overtones which was interpreted. by early rabbis as being concerned with God s love for Israel while Christian commentators most especially the Cistercian, St Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached many sermons on it saw it as a narrative expressive of Christ s love for the Church. There is nothing wrong with treating these texts as metaphor, if the reader is clear that this series of highly erotic poems, of great brilliance and beauty, are actually an amazing survival of ancient Hebrew Love poetry, probably to be dated as late as the 3 rd century BC, though possibly containing some older elements. The poems been thought to have been influenced by Greek love poetry and may have been composed in Transjordan under the Hellenising Tobiads, As the Israeli scholar Athalya Brenner affirms in the Oxford Bible Commentary they are intrinsically secular. The very short -all too short-snatch you have heard tonight is only a taster, a couple of the verses will in any case be familiar from weddings. These poems, then, occupy in the Hebrew canon the same sort of place as for example the finest love poetry of the Late Elizabethan and Jacobean era, and I cite here Shakespeare s Sonnet 18.. Shall I compare thee to a summer s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature s changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, 2

3 Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow st, Nor shall death brag thou wand rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to Time thou grow st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Of course the culture is different and the Song of Songs is in places, as here I think, more explicit but both, beautiful and refined in language, give secular expression to the joy of human love. Both the Song and Shakespeare rejoice in nature and the seasons. I have been reading the last two verses of tonight s Hebrew Bible reading from the Song as a canticle at Morning Prayer each day in place of the triumphalist Song of Miriam which gloats over the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. There is another point to make, from the lucky intrusion of these poems into the canon. Religious people are often rather too ready to divide sacred and secular, as though only the latter is important and God is only interested in the hour one might spend in Synagogue, Church or other place of worship. If you are truly Easter people every hour, every minute and every second of your life is consecrated to God: Remember that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath! There is,indeed, no fundamental distinction between sacred and secular. In the Marriage service one vows With my body, I thee worship. And I believe the self-same reverence obtains in every other genuine relationship. One lives and dies in the blessing of God. To reject such beneficent gifts of the Holy Spirit is to be like the Laodiceans, neither hot nor cold. John Donne s poem, The Sun Rising is another wonderful, secular love poem: Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late school boys and sour prentices, Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride, Call country ants to harvest offices, Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. Thy beams, so reverend and strong 3

4 Why shouldst thou think? I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink, But that I would not lose her sight so long; If her eyes have not blinded thine, Look, and tomorrow late, tell me, Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me. Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay. She's all states, and all princes, I, Nothing else is. Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world's contracted thus. Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that's done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere. Remember that Donne was a divine, a great religious poet and writer and that some of Shakespeare s poems, too, are self-evidently spiritual. but I am doubtful that anyone short of being an anchorite immured in a cell within a church can perform most of their service to God in the holy hour or so they spend in church, and it is certain that it is only a tiny portion of all that God gives us. The morning service is commonly called the mass because of the last words spoken by the priest or deacon: Go in the peace of Christ! (with at this season the added ;Alleluia! Alleluia!).. We are sent out to serve the Lord and the many forms of love are none other than ways of serving God provided they are not narcissistic and always outward looking and generous to all creation. So what message am I to leave with you? You cannot fulfil your prayer-life, you cannot return Christ s love for you, immured all the time in a dark church upon your knees; get a life. First the whole world of nature proclaims God s glory; in the words of the Benedicite: O all, ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever. You find the same message in many of the lovelier psalms. In psalm 104,,always my favourite, God provides food and shelter for the other animals and for humans bread, olive oil and wine. He wants us to have a good time, and was not that how Jesus enjoyed himself with his companions? 4

5 Go ut! Be loving to all other creatures; Christ s love for us implies living in harmony with nature and at peace with one another. And please, please, do not reject any of the gentle joys of life, one of which might be to sit in a sunny garden and read and pray the Song of Songs, sometimes attributed to King Solomon, traditionally the wisest of the Hebrew kings, whom myth would have it even knew the language of animals and the myriad secrets of the natural world. Christ has risen! He has risen, indeed! Alleluia. 5

Name Class AP/DC Date. Briefly sketch the structure of each of the following. Be sure to label the parts of each. Key Words.

Name Class AP/DC Date. Briefly sketch the structure of each of the following. Be sure to label the parts of each. Key Words. Name Class AP/DC Date A Brief Overview READ Chapter 4: If It s Square, It s a Sonnet from Thomas Foster s How to Read Literature like a Professor Considerations As You Read What poetic forms does Foster