Arise, My Love First Baptist Richmond, September 2, 2018 The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost Song of Solomon 2:8-13 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 A few years ago I led a retreat called Practicing Resurrection where I made the argument that the resurrection life will be life at its fullest. I still have my notes from that retreat, and in my introduction I asked, How do we practice that kind of life? One way is to use our God-given senses to fully apprehend the life that we are already living. Did you hear that? God-given senses. God has made it possible for us to experience this life through the senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. He gave us those gifts for precisely that purpose. But we rarely enjoy them to their fullest. For example, have you ever been on a long road trip when you pulled over at a fast food restaurant, ordered the Number One Combo at the drive-through, and then just kept going, without ever stopping to savor the flavors? (not that you would; it s fast food, after all). But compare that to a time when you paused long enough to sit down and enjoy a delicious meal with people you loved, when you took the time to smell the aromas, to appreciate the textures, to delight in the flavors. That s a completely different experience, isn t it? And maybe the difference between living and merely existing. So, I said, we ve come to practice resurrection, and I want to begin by sharing some passages from Diane Ackerman s book, A Natural History of the Senses. Ackerman is a poet who has a vivid way of describing the experiences of seeing, 1
smelling, hearing, tasting, and touching. I read a few passages about sight, a few passages about smell, and then I read this passage, from the chapter on touch, where Ackerman stops sounding like a poet and starts sounding like a fourteen-year-old girl. She writes: When I was in high school in the early sixties, nice girls didn t go all the way most of us wouldn t have known how but man, could we kiss! Just before I went off to summer camp, which is what fourteen-year-old girls in suburban Pennsylvania did to mark time, my boyfriend, whom my parents did not approve of (wrong religion) and had forbidden me to see, used to walk five miles across town each evening, and climb in through my bedroom window just to kiss me. These were not open-mouthed French kisses, which we didn t know about, and they weren t accompanied by groping. They were just earth-stopping, soulful, on-the-ledge-of-adolescence kisses, when you press your lips together and yearn so hard you feel faint. We wrote letters while I was away, but when school started again in the fall the affair seemed to fade of its own accord. But I still remember those summer nights, how my boyfriend would hide in my closet if my parents or brother chanced in, and then kiss me for an hour or so and head back home before dark, and I marvel at his determination and the power of a kiss. i When I looked up from that reading I noticed that two of the retreat participants, a couple from Texas, were blushing. The husband said, Whoa, that takes me back! And then he looked at his wife and said, That s just how we used to kiss when we were fourteen! It turns out they had been high school sweethearts who had eventually gotten married and had recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. But apparently they hadn t forgotten how to kiss. When we reconvened the next morning he said, You 2
know, when we got back to our room after supper last night we tried kissing like we used to in those days before we got married, and it didn t take us very long to remember why we got married! His wife punched him playfully on the shoulder and they both blushed again, but for the rest of that retreat they couldn t stop smiling. Those two were practicing resurrection in a way I hadn t fully intended, and yet they made my point: there are times in life when you feel fully alive, when your senses are fully awake. The Song of Solomon describes such a time. Whatever else it may be it is certainly a love poem about a young man and a young woman possibly still teenagers whose senses are just waking up, and who take delight in the sight, the sound, the smell, the touch, and the taste of each other. Listen to the way it begins: Kiss me, she says, full on the mouth. Yes! For your love is better than wine. ii The introduction in my study Bible says, The Song represents an idea and an ideal of love. It shows a relationship charged with erotic energy and a joyous, sensual world in which the land s rebirth in spring is the counterpart of the girl s blossoming into her womanhood. The love portrayed is thoroughly egalitarian and mutual, with both lovers desiring, behaving, feeling, and speaking in the same way and with the same intensity. Love in the Song is seen as a communion of souls, expressed by tightly interlocking dialogue. It is also a mode of perception, for when the lovers look at each other they see a world of their own. Each describes the other s body, dwelling lovingly on each part as if to caress it with words and capturing its essence in striking (sometimes startling) images. iii Wow. That makes me blush. And it makes me wonder: what is this doing in the Bible? In his commentary Michael Fox writes: The Song of Solomon has been understood in radically different ways. In the traditional Jewish understanding, the Song 3
is a religious allegory recounting God s love for Israel and the history of their relationship. For Christians it is an allegory of Christ s love for the church. These allegorical interpretations enabled the Song to become sacred scripture. iv He notes that it has also been understood as a sacred marriage liturgy, as a funeral dirge in which the power of love is set over against the power of death, and as a wedding song that describes an actual wedding, with the two lovers representing the bride and groom. But in Fox s view the Song of Solomon began simply as a love poem celebrating the love between two young people who are not yet betrothed and whose union is not yet recognized by the girl s family, but who look forward to public acceptance of their union and its culmination in marriage. v If he s right about that, then the Song of Solomon describes a kind of forbidden love, where these two are always sneaking off to be with each other, knowing that their parents don t approve, at least not yet. Look at today s text: in chapter 2, verse 8, the young woman hears her lover s voice. She looks out the window and sees him coming, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. He is like a gazelle or a young stag. But he doesn t knock on the door and ask to come in. No, her mother wouldn t allow it! So he stands behind the wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. He says to the girl (or maybe he whispers), Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. Her heart is pounding with excitement, because that s exactly what she wants to do, but can she? Should she? What would her parents think? Can anyone here remember that kind of love? When you wanted to be with your beloved in every conceivable vi way but couldn t? How different from the kind of love where you can be with your beloved in every way, but aren t, because the excitement of 4
forbidden love has been replaced with the familiarity of permitted love. If there were a Song of Solomon, Book II, written twenty or thirty years afterward, the woman might hear her lover s voice at the front door saying, Honey, I m home! And she might say, I m in the den. And when he peeks through the doorway she might notice that he doesn t look like a gazelle or a young stag. Not anymore. Maybe a water buffalo. And she might say, We re going to have to go out for dinner tonight. The microwave s broken. We can t reheat leftovers. And that might be the moment he stretches out his hand and says, Well, then: arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. For Chick-Fil-A is open, and they re having a special on their cookies and cream milkshake. And she might say, You romantic devil! Let me get my purse! It s not bad (those milkshakes are delicious), but it s not what it used to be. And if we re not careful the same thing could happen in our relationship with God. When I was at my first church the deacons used to take up the offering, bring it down to the front, and then, when the Doxology was over, one of them would pray, and often he or she would say, Thank you, Lord, that we live in a country where we are free to worship as we please. Yes. Thank you for that. But it s a little bit like being in a marriage where you are free to love as you please: it can grow stale over time. As I was thinking about that last week I wondered what it would be like to live in a country where you were not free to worship. What if you could be thrown in jail for reading the Bible, or saying your prayers, or singing a hymn? How would it change the quality of worship if you had to read the Bible under the covers at night with a flashlight? If you had to go into your closet, literally, to say your prayers, with your heart pounding at the thought that someone might catch you? If you waited until you were in your car and on the road 5
before you began humming the tune of an old hymn, glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure no one was following you? Back in the early 2000 s I made several trips to Cuba, where the official religion was atheism. Things had relaxed somewhat in those days but even so I had to be careful about how I entered the country. On one trip someone gave me a box full of devotional material that didn t make it through customs. The customs weren t exactly mean but they were suspicious. What s all this for? What are you trying to do? Why are you really here? And yet I visited several Baptist churches while I was there, and it was obvious that things were changing. A springtime of religious liberty was in bloom. As the poet of the Song of Solomon might put it, the winter was past, the rain was over and gone. The flowers were appearing on the earth and the time of singing had come. Those people preached and prayed with passion. They clapped their hands and shouted the hymns. They greeted one another with a holy kiss. It felt so different from some of my experiences of worship in the States, where we are free to worship as we please. It s like being free to love as you please eventually the fires can begin to burn a little low. But when you re not free, when it s forbidden, well! The flames of passion can hardly be contained. That couple at my retreat heard that passage about kissing and sneaked back to their room to try it. They not only kissed, they remembered: they remembered what it was like to be fourteen, when they pressed their lips together with such yearning they felt faint. Maybe that s why the Song of Solomon is in the Bible: not only to help us remember what that kind of love was like, but to remind us of what our love for God was like when it was new, when we were just beginning to understand how much he loved us 6
and wanted us for his own. When I was fourteen I sometimes read my Bible under the covers with a flashlight, not because my parents would have forbidden Bible reading but because it was past my bedtime. In those days I sometimes prayed so fervently sweat broke out on my forehead. I sang hymns with such gusto I nearly lost my voice. It s not always like that these days, and it s nobody s fault but my own. God is still seeking me, still bounding over the hillsides like a young stag, calling out my name, but I don t always respond like I used to in those early days when our love was new. Maybe the Song of Solomon is in the Bible to remind me of those days, to stir up that old passion, to make me long for God again. Let me close with this image: In the winter of 1966 my family was moving from Virginia to West Virginia, but for some reason we didn t have a place to stay yet. We ended up at my grandmother s summer cottage in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, which was neither heated nor insulated. All it had was a big, stone fireplace at one end of the main room. Throughout that bitterly cold winter my dad cut wood and kept that fire blazing. It still wasn t enough to keep the place warm, but it was so much better than nothing. In the evenings he would let the fire burn low, and just before he went to bed he would rake a big pile of ashes over the hot coals. He called it banking the fire. When he got up in the morning in that freezing cold cottage he would get down on his knees in front of the fireplace, brush the ashes away, and find a few of those coals still glowing. He would put a handful of tinder on top of them, and then blow with a steady breath until a flame would leap up from the coals and catch onto that tinder, and within a matter of minutes that fire would be burning bright. 7
Let me ask you to keep that image in your mind, and think about how you might get down on your knees tomorrow morning literally or figuratively and blow on the coals of your love for God until the flames begin to leap up again. You might do it by reading through the Song of Solomon, and believing that it s in the Bible for that very reason: to help us rekindle a fire that may have burned low, and remember how we fell in love in the first place. Jim Somerville 2018 i Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses ii Eugene Peterson, The Message iii Michael V. Fox, from the Introduction to the Song of Solomon in the HarperCollins Study Bible. iv Ibid. v Ibid. vi Pun intended. 8