Intimacy, Faithfulness and Other Ways God Loves

Hosea 11:1-9 [NRSV]
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals,
and offering incense to idols.
Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.
I bent down to them and fed them.
They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me. The sword rages in their cities, it consumes their oracle-priests, and devours because of their schemes. My people are bent on turning away from me. To the Most High they call, but he does not raise them up at all. How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.

Some folks thought that the affair was the straw that broke the camel’s back but the truth of the matter was that the marriage was in trouble long before that. If you listened to their conversations carefully you could hear what was happening. Disagreements would arise. He complained, loudly, whenever her parents came over to visit. She felt betrayed every time he wanted to go out for a night with the guys. They soon found they couldn’t broach the subject without a huge flare-up. Every niggling problem became the sign that he didn’t care or she didn’t trust him. And the disagreements never seemed to lead to a resolution. They argued in the same tired circles.

Soon a new tone entered their arguments. It was almost as if they didn’t want to find a solution to the problems. There was a hint of derision when she talked to him. “You’re just not capable of taking out the trash are you? You don’t care about that just like you don’t care about anything else around here, including me.”

He was defensive. “Well, why should I care? You never appreciate it when I do do things around here. You hound me with questions about where I’ve been. You yell at me…in front of the children you yell at me.” Soon he developed a habit of clamming up when she got angry with him. Rather than talk back he would say nothing at all and his stonewalling only led her to believe the worst things about him.

They were living in a constant state of tension, both feeling physically anxious whenever the other was agitated. They began to be sick more often, which only contributed to the miserable way they felt. They didn’t try to solve problems anymore because they felt it never worked. After awhile they never even brought them up. They both felt lonely and unloved.

Once when someone asked at a dinner party how they had met neither one could answer quickly. Even their memory of the way they had come together had started to fade. Finally he laughed off the effort of trying to reclaim the memory. “I was young and naïve,” was all he said. So the affair was not the thing that broke the camel’s back. The break had happened long before.

When divorced people reflect back on their marriages they often see these dynamics in their relationships. In fact, one study showed that only 20 to 27 percent of couples talked about an extramarital affair as a primary or even a partial factor in their break-up. 80 percent said the cause was something more gradual – a gradual growing apart and a lost sense of closeness.[i]

Over the last few weeks we have been looking at love and relationships in this sermon series and I have talked about the work of John Gottman, a researcher who has studied relationships for thirty years. Gottman claims he can listen to a couple talking and in three minutes can determine whether or not their relationship will succeed over the long-term. A lot has to do, he says, with the factors in the scenario I just outlined. When couples talk to each other with contempt and criticism or respond with defensiveness and stonewalling, when they resist efforts to repair situations, when they begin conversations with harsh language, when they develop bad memories about how the relationship began…all of these are signs of a marriage in trouble. And they show up long before the infidelity does.

But Gottman doesn’t believe that we have to accept that this cycle inevitably leads to a break up. In fact, he has written a book called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work to help couples identify what things can strengthen their marriage. Most of it is not about how to argue, because a technique for fighting is not going to be the solution. The solution is in restoring ways of being with each other when we’re not fighting. When we can restore the joy, the love, and the friendship that undergird healthy relationships, we are on the way to building the faithfulness and intimacy we all desire.

Gottman can only go so far, though. As brilliant as he is, (and as he thinks he is!), there is a theological base for this as well and we have been exploring this through these last few weeks, too. I stick with theology because really that’s what I’m trained for. I think it is kind of presumptuous for preachers to pretend that they have all the how-to answers for all of the world’s problems, including marriage. As great as the world would be if everyone would follow my advice on foreign policy, immigration, taxation, marriage, land use, and the color of the new Nassawadox library, I recognize that there are times when I might be in error. Suzanne is probably more firmly convinced of that. Preachers, like all of us, are learning what it means to be human in a fallen world and learning what it means to be loving in relationships.

But what I am trained to talk about is God and that is not unrelated to this topic. God, it turns out, has a lot to say about love and relationships. God, it turns out, is love and the relationships in which God engages are models for our own human relationships. So while I can talk about my own experience of marriage…and we can have wonderful exchanges in our small groups and in our Wednesday night class on this topic...and we have: last week we split up the men and the women to ask the question “What makes a woman feel loved?” – that was fun…while we can do all of these things, today I want to talk about Hosea.

Do you know Hosea? Hosea was a prophet to the people of Israel and his book is one of the smaller ones in the Old Testament. But what it contains are some of the most beautiful reflections on the faithfulness of God in the whole Bible. It’s all told through the lens of Hosea’s relationship with Gomer.

The premise of this book is that God’s people, Israel, have been unfaithful to God. They have forgotten God’s covenant with them. They have gone to worship other gods. They had begun to believe that all the benefits of the land in which they lived had come though their own efforts and not by the grace of the God who had loved them. If God’s relationship to Israel could be compared to a marriage, it was a troubled one.

In fact, that’s exactly what God tells Hosea to do – to live out the relationship of God and Israel in his own marriage. Now it’s not unusual for God to tell the prophets to undertake a great symbolic act. After all, poor Jeremiah the prophet had to walk around naked at one point. He also bought a piece of land just as the entire nation was getting ready to be swept into exile.
What God asks Hosea to do, however, is very dramatic. He was to marry a prostitute and to have children with her. It was not going to be a happy marriage. Gomer was the name of Hosea’s wife and there is never any evidence that she developed any sort of loving relationship with the prophet. They had children, but the children had strange names like Lo-ruhamah, which means “not pitied,” and Lo-ammi, which means “not my people.” They all seemed to be portents of something horrible to come.

Gomer, in her unfaithfulness, came to represent the people who turned their back on God, who ignored the love God held out for them. The children represented the fruit of that disregard. Because of their unfaithfulness, God had every right to reject the people, to withhold pity and mercy. If the relationship between Hosea and Gomer was tenuous at best, the relationship between God and the people was on the rocks, too. There was hope that one day the people would be reclaimed and that God’s name would be on their lips again, but there would be a time of suffering, too.

By the time we get over to chapter 11 in Hosea, though, the metaphor has changed. Now the relationship with God is not pictured as a marriage but as the relationship of a parent with a child. God remembers holding Israel as a mother holds an infant. “When Israel was a child,” God says, “I loved him. You know how a parent holds the fingers of a toddler and helps them take their first shaky steps? I did that for you. I lifted you up to my cheek to embrace you and I bent down to give you food.”

Then God’s tone changes. God realizes that what Israel deserves is to go back to Egypt, back to slavery. Because of their faithlessness, God should put them all to the sword. There is intense anger and disappointment here. But then it all evaporates in a moment.

“But how can I give you up, Ephraim? How could I hand you over, Israel? I can’t do this thing. I cannot destroy my people, because I am not a mortal being. I am God and I must bring my people home.” This is the voice of the lover who agonizes over the pain caused by the beloved and yet who recognizes that the only thing that can bring reconciliation is love. “I am God and not a mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.”

Love heals. Love makes us whole. But love can also cut us to the quick. Do you know where that phrase comes from? The quick is the living, sensitive flesh that we are. We often hear this when we refer to fingernails and toenails. The tips of our nails are not very sensitive. They seem dead. But if we cut them down to the quick we have cut them down to the part where we can really feel it. Love, when it is truly love, cuts us all the way down to there.

“There” is where God seeks to meet us. God does not want the tips of our fingernails where we don’t feel. God doesn’t want our meaningless pieties and easy prayers. God doesn’t want the form of religion without the substance. God doesn’t want the sheen of our polite expressions; God wants the heart and soul of our very selves. God wants all of us.

But God does not just ask this of us, God gives us the same thing. The Wild and Holy One gives us God’s own self. Like the mother with the baby, like the father with the toddler on his knee, like the lover seeking out a faithless spouse, like the covenant partner grieving over the pain caused by the one in whom he had invested so much hope, God comes. And keeps coming. What is the story of Jesus expect the story of the God who would not be content until he offered up his life for us? God doesn’t stop pursuing us. God doesn’t stop inviting us. God does not stop loving us and even death cannot separate us from that love.

So what does that mean for our human relationships? Those messy, broken, wonderful, crazy relationships that cause us so much consternation? It means that they, too, can be redeemed by this love. We cannot settle for less than a redeeming love. We can’t be content with relationships that wander along for years without ever being renewed. If we are seeking to be God’s people in our relationships then we need to find the quick…we need to find the life that grounds those relationships and live there.

I’ll tell you a time when I really felt that. It was while I was in Dallas in seminary and the year that I was doing an internship as a youth coordinator with a United Methodist-related community center in the inner-city. It was overwhelming. The needs were so great and the problems so deep, that many days I felt completely drained. I believe I even went into depression during that year.

But there were so many points of life, too, and one of them came on a night when I had just finished a particularly rough basketball practice. (One of the things I did was to coach a basketball team.) We had the only integrated basketball team in the neighborhood with black and Hispanic team members. All the other teams were one race only. But the challenges in keeping my team together were steep. There were always fights and some deep misunderstandings.

So on this night Suzanne picked me up at the community center and we started back to the SMU campus where we lived in a little efficiency apartment with one of those beds you fold down out of the wall. But she must have seen what a day I had and so instead she suggested we go downtown for dessert and a cup of coffee. Now it wasn’t much as dates go. When I mentioned this to her a while back, Suzanne didn’t even remember it. But for me it was a moment of grace and light and a high point of my life. To sit across a table from someone who knows you and loves you anyway. To watch a candle flicker and sip from a cup. To hear the traffic go by on the street out the window. To know that however God-forsaken the world seems, there are spaces where you know that God dwells.

We can’t attain that faithfulness that God shows us. At best we can offer imperfect imitations. But even in our imperfection we give glory to the one who makes us for each other. Thanks be to God.

[i] John Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, p. 16.

Popping the Question

1 Corinthians 13 (NRSV)
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.

For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

If you’re coming in mid-stream, you will need to know that we are in the middle of the “love sermons series.” I started this series because I know just how confounding love can be. It is the source of our greatest joys and the place of our greatest pains. Many of you can point to relationships with others that have brought you great strength. And most of us can point to relationships that have led to woundedness and brokenness. I know we’ve got a lot of different kinds of relationships represented here today: single, married, divorced, widowed, dating, waiting…we have the terrain represented here. But I want to talk a little bit today about marriage in particular and I hope that you’ll indulge me. It is very possible to live a single life and be a whole person. Despite the claims of The DaVinci Code you can ask Jesus about that. But many of us end up in marriage at some point in our lives and the church has something to say about that style of life, too. Marriage is a “special calling from God,” as Adam Hamilton puts it, and I want to spend a little time today talking about why that is. Even those of us who never marry or who are not currently married would be well-served to consider what it is that we believe about this strange and difficult institution.

Make no mistake about it. Marriage is a strange and difficult institution. As anybody who has been in one can tell you, a good marriage takes hard work. There are some folks who make it look easy, but the ease is bought at the cost of many long nights of conversation, many shared joys and trials, and many unexpected bumps in the road.

And the strange part? Well, that comes from the very idea of marriage itself. I have come to the conclusion that two people, on their own, cannot do this marriage thing. They need help. They need a community of people who care for them and can support them and they need God.

I often tell people who come to weddings that it is good that they show up because the couple that is getting married has no idea what they’re doing. Oh, I mean they’ve usually given it some thought. They’re not just doing a Britney Spears and running into a Las Vegas wedding chapel if I’m doing the wedding. I meet with the couple. We talk about the service. We do some pre-marital counseling. It’s not that they haven’t done anything to get ready. It’s just that they have no idea what they’re saying!

When a couple takes the vows that form the heart of the wedding service they say ridiculous things to each other. For richer for poorer? In sickness and in health? Who has any idea what these promises will mean later in life? Change is an inevitable part of any human life. Accidents happen. Illnesses come. Children come. When two people get married they have no idea what it’s going to ask of them. And there is no way that I or anyone can tell them what they will be asked to do by taking these vows. Except that they give themselves to the unknown and ask God to be present in their relationship. So when we ask for the blessing to be given by the families and the gathered witnesses at a wedding, it is no small thing that we do. We enlist the support of everyone gathered there, not only to help make a great party, but to help make a great marriage and to remind this couple that they are not alone. Because they’re going to need help to live up to these ridiculous vows they’ve made to each other!

We think of weddings as joyful times and they are. There is no doubt that some of the best occasions I have had in my ministry have come at weddings, especially those that take place between people I have known through my ministry, whether it was at my old church, or more recently through the campus ministry I had at UVA. But there is an element of sacrifice and struggle in marriages that we don’t pay enough attention to. Inevitably, when we come to share a life together as married people, we bump up against a little thing called reality, which we can often be out of touch with when we are on the road leading up to marriage.

The day comes when we realize that the whistling in the shower that we found so charming in the early days of marriage is probably not going to go away. I should hasten to say, Suzanne doesn’t whistle in the shower. Neither do I for that matter, but I’m not here to air dirty laundry. I’m just speaking hypothetically. We learn that we react to stress differently, that we expect different things from conversations, that our comfort with physical affection is different, and that we can spend a lifetime exploring the intricate differences that make us unique.

Suzanne and I were talking last night about the sense we had in the early days that we could read each others’ minds. We couldn’t really. We just spent so much time together that we could anticipate what the other was thinking. But then she changed…oh, all right, we both changed as people do and it wasn’t so easy. It no longer seemed like reading each others’ minds. It was obviously going to take some different kinds of communication.

John Gottman, a researcher on marriage and relationships at the University of Washington, has been studying married couples for thirty years and he says that it’s not the big arguments that indicate how successful a couple will be, but the way that they interact when they’re not fighting. He says that some attention to the little things that help maintain relationships builds the intimacy and trust between partners that allows them to weather the storms. If you want to hear the whole list, you’ll have to come join our Wednesday night study on love, marriage and sex from a biblical perspective (6:10 PM in the Seekers’ Classroom), but the basics are simple. Edit yourself. Saying every critical thought may feel like honesty, but couples who use a little judicious self-editing when talking about difficult issues tend to be happier. Accept influence. This is particularly important for men. Gottman says that a marriage succeeds “to the extent that the husband can accept influence from his wife.”[i] Research shows women are pretty well-practiced at accepting influence from men, but partnership happens when a man can do that as well. And have high standards for each other’s behavior in the relationship. Don’t accept hurtful behavior because it quickly becomes the norm.

Well, that’s only a beginning and this is really not a “how-to” sermon. But I like Gottman’s illustration for the importance of this. He says he once had a couple in counseling and the husband was upset because he said his wife never checked the oil in her car. So he thought she was being careless or lazy, but it turned out that she didn’t know there was a problem because she never knew that a car engine needed oil.” That, Gottman says, is a good metaphor for what happens in a lot of relationships.[ii] We don’t attend to the needs of the marriage because we don’t even know that it needs basic maintenance.

Well, that’s a researcher’s perspective, but what we really want to know, when we are in this place, is ‘What is God’s perspective on marriage?’ Some of what Gottman and his researchers found out is very similar to the words we heard in our reading from 1 Corinthians this morning. The 13th chapter of that letter from Paul to a new group of Christians is very familiar to us because we often hear it at weddings and it sounds to us like Paul is talking about how people in love should treat each other. Now Paul wasn’t talking to couples getting married at all. He was talking to a community that was having a very hard time getting along with each other. He has just spent several chapters trying to sort out their differences and to get them to live peaceably, when he gets to this section which outlines what Christian love is supposed to look like.

But even though it wasn’t written for couples, the language of the “love chapter” gives us some models that surely carry over to the way that we relate to one another. “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious, boastful or arrogant. Love does not insist on its own way. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.” That’s good language for any two people trying to ground a relationship in something larger than their own selfish needs. Love looks out for the interests of the other. It is giving of the self, not insisting that ‘I’ get everything that ‘I’ want out of a relationship. It doesn’t score points and it doesn’t hold things over the other’s head. This sort of love is grounded in God who knows us fully and knows how hard it is for us to love this way. But when are able to give ourselves to another in this way it echoes God’s love for us.

This really is the heart of it all. Marriage ultimately matters, not because society needs it for stability or individuals need it for their own betterment. Marriage matters because it offers us a glimmer of the way God loves us. Oh, I know how many problems there are with marriages. I know and you know how much brokenness there is in them, the pain we feel at a break-up and the sad jokes we make about the way men and women don’t understand each other in them. Marriage, as it is, seems a very imperfect lens through which to see God’s love. Now we see in a mirror darkly, to coin a phrase.

But there, at the very beginning of the scriptures, is the hope and promise that marriage could be something more. We talked last week about how Genesis, which starts with the greatest questions of the universe--why we are here and the purpose of our existence—thinks the question of men and women and marriage is so important that it couldn’t be left for later. We talked about the creation of man and woman and about what the man said upon seeing the woman for the first time. Do you remember those words? “At last,” Adam says, “this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. This is Woman because she came from the same stuff as Man.” Then the text continues with a “therefore.” Therefore, a man shall leave his mother and father and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

Reading Karl Barth this week helped draw my attention to the hint of sacrifice in that last sentence. The man shall leave his mother and father. Of course, the woman does this as well. But this is why there are tears at weddings. There is a separation that takes place so that a new union can take place. Now we don’t give up our families when we are married, but there is a ‘leaving’ that takes place. It is not a leaving to freedom from our families but a leaving to the purpose God intends. As my buddy Karl puts it, “if it takes place that a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, to become one flesh with her, this is not something arbitrary or accidental but conformable to what begins in creation.”[iii]

This is the most mind-blowing thing about marriage. What Barth is saying is that when we get married, we are re-enacting what God does in creation. What God does is something strange and difficult, too. There is a separation that takes place. God, who would not seem to need anything to be complete…God, who exists from all eternity and who really has no need of us to be God…this God chooses to create and love something outside of God’s own self. And God does not stop creating and loving, even though we are unfaithful. For God the possibility and promise that we see in the two becoming one flesh in Genesis and the lovers desiring one another in Song of Songs is always possibility and promise, despite the ways we fail. When we understand marriage for what it really is, we see it as the human way of reenacting God’s love for humanity.

That’s why the Old Testament talks about the relationship between God and the people of Israel as that of a bridegroom and a lover. That’s why the New Testament talks about the relationship of Christ and the Church in the same way. As Barth puts it, “The authors of Genesis 2 and the Song of Songs speak of man and woman as they do because they know that the broken covenant is still for God the unbroken covenant, intact and fulfilled on both sides; that as such it was already the inner basis of creation, and that as such it will again be revealed at the end.”[iv]

Isn’t that amazing? We start to talk about marriage and we get tongue-tied because we know that it is fraught with problems and difficulties. The whole concept of two people giving themselves to one another to share a lifetime of fidelity in body and spirit it is so impossible that every marriage, even those that don’t end in divorce, knows this covenant as broken in some significant ways. And yet…and yet…there it is at the beginning of the scriptures, offered up as a model for how we are to understand God’s love for us. We can’t live up to that promise that God has for marriage, but it doesn’t stop us from popping the question and taking the plunge. Because when we experience grace in our most intimate relationships, when we know acceptance and healing and forgiveness and love, we do get glimpses of heaven. And that’s what God intends for us and for our marriages. God intends that a little heaven will come into this broken world by the medium of human love.

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is of God. Love was there at the beginning of all things. And love will be there at the end. Thanks be to God.

[i] “Gottman’s Marriage Tips 101,” The Gottman Institute, www.gottman.com/marriage/self_help/index.php?pageoption=print
[ii] “’The Relationship Cure’ is manual for emotional connection’, University of Washington press release, May 7, 2001
[iii] Church Dogmatics III.1 The Doctrine of Creation, p. 305.
[iv] Ibid., pp. 314-15.

Foolish Promises, Broken Walls

Shorter’s Chapel AME Church
Bridgetown, Virginia

Ruth 1:1-18 (NRSV)
In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there.
But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there about ten years, both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.
Then she started to return with her daughters-in-law from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the LORD had considered his people and given them food. So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah. But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, "Go back each of you to your mother's house. May the LORD deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The LORD grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband." Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud.
They said to her, "No, we will return with you to your people."
But Naomi said, "Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, would you then wait until they were grown? Would you then refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the LORD has turned against me."
Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. So she said, "See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law."
But Ruth said, "Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die -- there will I be buried. May the LORD do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!"
When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.

Now I know we’ve been at worship already today. United Methodists, when they come back to worship on a Sunday usually don’t tell a preacher to preach a sermon. They usually say, “Just do a meditation,” because it sounds like it’ll be shorter. But there’s not going to be any meditating this afternoon. No homilies or messages. We have a word to hear from God this afternoon. Did you come expecting to hear a word from God this afternoon? We do have a word from God to hear. And the word is very simple: Be careful what you give yourself to, because you might break something. That’s it. If you lose track during the sermon or your mind wanders during the next three hours, just remember that because it’s what this sermon is all about: Be careful what you give yourself to, because you just might break something.
What does that mean?
When I was in my last two years of high school growing up in a small town called Orange, I spent my Thursday nights in a most unusual way. I would usually meet up with my best friend, Billy Mack, and we’d head off down the road north of town to a little building in the country. I think my folks were a little bit suspicious of what went on out there in that building and I know they were a little mystified by my eagerness to go there every single Thursday night. But I went because I was compelled to go there. I went because I had made a commitment to be there. I went because I had a red T-shirt with white letters on it that said, “Thursday Night Fever”, and I had that shirt specially made for this event.
Just before dinner time the vans and cars would start pulling in and people would start unloading. There’d be about 20 of us by the time we all got in and a few of us would head off to the store to buy dinner while the rest of us set up for the night. Billy and I would set up the tables.
It was an interesting collection of people and I always felt a little bit different because I didn’t share a lot of the same things with the others who were there. This was an adult socialization program for mentally challenged adults. The people who were in the program were adults who lived very different lives than I did. These were folks who came because they wanted to learn how to live more independently. So they went shopping and learned to cook and learned to read and learned to interact with other adults so that one day they might be able…perhaps…to get a place of their own, and with some assistance, to become a part of a community that often did not accept them or made them feel invisible.
I was there because I sensed that what was happening at that little building on Thursday nights was important. O.K., that’s not all true. I was also there because the director of the program had a really gorgeous daughter, but mostly because I knew that it was important, though I could never quite find the words to say why. But being with Charles and Graham and Christine changed my life and broke down a wall I hadn’t even known was there. These folks, who in so many ways lived on the outside of the society in my small town, turned those Thursday night dinners into an open space where everybody was welcome…including me. It was an early lesson…be careful what you give yourself to, because you just might break something…like a wall.
Ruth was not supposed to say what she did. Ruth, in the story we just read as our Old Testament lesson, was not supposed to make the promise that she did. What in the world did she have to gain by committing herself to her mother-in-law in such passionate terms? “Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God. Where you die, I will die.” What was she thinking?
Did you hear the beginning of this story? This was not a family to be committing your life to. The book of Ruth starts with a man named Elimilech…a good, upright, card-carrying member of God’s people Israel…packing up his good, upright Israelite family and taking them off to Moab to escape a famine. Now that may sound good to you. After all, he was trying to keep his family alive and if there’s no food in Bethlehem, you might as well look for supplies elsewhere. But good, upright Israelites would not have gone to Moab…even to find food!
Do you know what they say about Moabites in the Hebrew scriptures? Moabites are the children of incest. (Go read Genesis 19 and the story of Lot, but be warned. It’s rated R.) It was Moabites who lured the Israelites into temptation and the worship of idols when they traveled in the wilderness…especially the Moabite women. Moabites were banned from the assembly of the people to the tenth generation. Moabites were cursed and reviled by the prophets. To go to Moab when the chips were down in Israel would be like a person from the Eastern Shore going across the bay for seafood. You just don’t do that.
But Elimilech does that. He packs up his wife, Naomi, and their two sons and heads off to Moab. And he dies. Well, what did you expect? His sons, who are named Machlon and Chilion, which in English means something like Weakness and Sickness, (we don’t hold out much hope for these guys, do we?), yeah, old Weakling and Sicky marry Moabite wives themselves and by verse 5 they’re dead, too. This Moabite thing is not turning out too well for our heroes.
So the only ones left are Naomi, the grieving wife of Elimilech and grieving mother of the boys, and two Moabite women who have joined the clan by marriage. One is named Orpah, which means “back of the neck” because that’s what we’re going to see of her in just a minute, and the other is named Ruth. Naomi can’t even see them because her vision is entirely clouded by the losses she has suffered.
Naomi hears that, once again, there is bread in Bethlehem. The famine is over. And with nothing to keep her in the god-forsaken land of Moab, she decides to head home. She decides to leave without her daughters-in-law. Oh, they accompany her a way out of town. It is the polite and expected thing to do. But Naomi dismisses them. “Go back,” she says. “Go back to your family homes may you find security with a new husband.” That’s what this story has become now. It’s all about security and in this society at this time a woman on her own had none. Widows had even less. The only hope that Naomi can imagine is to go back to her people, and certainly these Moabite women should go back to theirs.
They protest. They won’t go back. They insist on going with her back to Judah and Naomi gets a little testier. “Go back. Go back.” She keeps repeating this refrain. “Look, what more can I do for you? Could I get married again and have sons so that you could wait around for them to grow up to be your husbands? No, that’s ridiculous. What could you possibly see in me? Besides, it’s worse for me than for you because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.” Ah…now we know what Naomi is really thinking. It’s not just about security. She feels that she has been cursed and maybe she wonders if Moab has something to do with it.
Well, Orpah can take a hint. She is named back of the neck, you know. So off she goes back to a future we never hear anymore about. But Ruth is still there. She won’t go back, though Naomi has repeated that phrase many times. She tries once more. “Look, your sister-in-law has some sense. She’s gone back to her people and her gods. Go back.”
Now this is what I don’t get. Ruth should never have made this promise which she is about to make here. It’s a foolish promise. She is a Moabite. She should know that she’ll never be accepted in Israelite society. She’ll never fit in at the town socials and street festivals. People will never greet her by name when she goes into the Hardee’s for coffee and she’ll never get a second look when she sits in the stands for the Friday night football games. No man to protect her. No family to claim her. And a Moabite to boot.
“Stop telling me to go back! Don’t tell me not to follow you! Naomi, you may feel cursed and half-dead already, but you are not all-dead and even when you are I’ll be right by your side. Your people…they’re my people. Your God…that’s my God. And may God have mercy on my soul if even death separates me from you.” It’s a foolish thing to say. But Naomi’s slow climb back into life, and Ruth’s, begins with this foolish promise that ignores the barriers that cloud everyone’s judgment and creates a new opening for God’s new day. Be careful what you give yourself to, because you just might break something…like a wall.
I know a God who’s not very careful about this. I know a God who is a little bit reckless in the promises she makes. I know a God who gives God’s own self to a world and to a people that are not in any shape to be the grateful recipients they should be. I know a God who is not content to let sick people go unhealed, to let outsiders go unwelcomed, to let sinful people go unredeemed, to let lost people go unfound, to let dead people go unraised, to let lonely people go unrecognized, to let the poor go uncared-for, to let you and me go unloved.
And it’s a foolish thing to do. Because God knows that we don’t deserve that sort of commitment. God knows we live behind walls, and throw up barriers, and forget who we are, and forget who our brothers and sisters are. God knows us and God comes to be with us. In Jesus Christ, God comes to be with us, to walk among us, to share our flesh, to share our tears, to tame our fears, to look us in the eye and say, “You may not be able to see anything but death, but I see life. You may not be able to claim me yet, but I claim you. You may not be able to see yourself as a child of God, but where you go, I go. Where you stay, I stay. Your people are my people. And when it comes to the end of it all, when you die, I’ll be there with you.”
And because God makes this promise…this extravagant, uncalled-for, unmerited promise…to you and to me, something breaks. Something shudders. Something quakes. Because this God we serve? This God of Jesus Christ? This God is in the earth-shaking, curtain-splitting, wall-crumbling, rock-rolling-away-from-the-tomb business, and when this God starts to make promises nothing can stand in the way…not even the walls you and I have so carefully constructed.
I have some news for you, brothers and sisters: there are even walls in Northampton County that are coming down. They are coming down whether we work to keep them up or not. But if we start telling the truth, we’ll see that the work is not worth it.
I hate to say this because I grew up in a place that is in some ways a lot like the Eastern Shore. Many of the things that I can celebrate about my life and my outlook on the world come from having lived in a place like this. But as much as I celebrate those things I have to say that I also grew up with a lot of lies. We grew up with a lot of lies. I told a lot of lies.
We told ourselves lies and they are not true. They are not true. We need to hear the truth. It is not true that when we talk about Northampton County that we have to say, “Oh, blacks and whites will never get along because the gap between us is just too wide.” It is not true that the come heres just can’t understand, that they just will not be able to fit in because they haven’t known our history. It is not true that the potential of our young people is cut off because they live in a place like the Eastern Shore. It is not true that the future is bleak…that things were better in the past. It is not true that the story ends with us, that young people aren’t what they used to be.
The truth, brothers and sisters, is not any of those things because the truth is that in Jesus Christ all things are being made new. The truth is that in Christ Jesus all things are being reconciled to God. The truth is that in Jesus Christ there is no longer Jew nor Greek, Israelite or Moabite, slave nor free, black nor white, male nor female, outsiders nor insiders, “born heres” nor “come heres,” bayside nor seaside, because in Jesus Christ there is a new creation. There is one faith, one hope, one baptism, one Lord and Savior and every wall that denies this fact at the heart of the universe is destined to come down.
Who can tell this story that is the truth? Only the people of God can tell this story. Only the people of God can live out this truth. And whether they be Missionary Baptist or Southern Baptist, whether they be Episcopalian or Presbyterian, or Catholic or Protestant, or Pentecostal or AME or, God help us, United Methodist…they can tell that truth and no one else can.
I hope you know that this is an important day. Us? Gathered here in this place on the Eastern Shore? This is an echo of the kingdom of heaven! I hope you believe that, because I do. Just like I know that that little program I went to on Thursday nights as a teenager was an echo, too. I gave myself to it and something broke…like a wall. You give yourself to the truth that is the story of Jesus Christ and something breaks like a wall. God gives God’s own self to us with a foolish promise and something massive breaks…like the wall that separates earth and heaven….you and God.
Now I treasure the relationship that I have started to develop with Pastor Earl. The thing that got us working together was a belief that our children and youth and young people were worth coming together for. Last year we met with other pastors throughout Northampton and tried to unite around some things that could help our schools and our youth. We held a series of cottage meetings in the spring that were very well-attended and something started to break…like the wall that keeps good people from doing the right thing to help our youth. We’re not done yet. God’s not done yet. We’re organizing the first clergy schools group meeting of the fall and we have a lot of praying and a lot of work ahead. But God’s not going to let us go and God’s not going to let our children go. So we better not either.
You know, I take it back. I said to be careful at the beginning of this sermon, but the point of this sermon is not to be careful about what you give yourself to. Throw caution to the wind. Give yourself to God and this place…this group of people…is where God’s new thing begins. Right now. Thanks be to God. Let’s eat.

Mars and Venus in Eden and Beyond

Genesis 1:26-27 (NRSV), 2:18-25
Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them…
Yahweh Elohim formed from the earth every living creature of the field and every flying creature of the air and brought them to the earth creature to see what it called them and what the earth creature named the living creature, that’s what its name was. So the earth creature gave names to all the beasts and birds of the air and to all the living things of the field, but for the earth creature an equal and adequate helper was not found. So Yahweh Elohim caused a great sleep to fall on the earth creature and it slept and God took one of its ribs and flesh closed in to fill the gap. Yahweh Elohim built a woman with the rib God took from the earth creature and brought her to the earth creature.
The earth creature said,
“This now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;
So this will be called woman for from man she was taken.”
So it is that a man leaves his father and his mother and will cling to his wife and they become one flesh. And the two were naked, the earth creature and his wife, and they were not ashamed.

I don’t think that the main point I want to make today in this sermon is going to be very controversial. The thing I want to say is this: Men and women are different. There I’ve said it. Men and women are different. Now we’re not all that different. The folks who mapped the human genome code say that there are only 78 genes separating us. But those 78 genes can be pretty significant.

For instance, from my experience it seems that there women have a gene that men don’t have that allows them to tell what clothes look good together. For me brown’s a good color and grey’s a good color, too. Why can’t you wear them together? But a woman’s going to look at that outfit a little differently and that’s why, when I’m in doubt, I run things by Suzanne or Rachel. No amount of HGTV is going to help me do that well.

Men, on the other hand, have a gene that allows us to store a vast amount of information about things we are very interested in. Like the batting averages of minor league baseball players, the specs on boat engines, and the top speed of high performance cars we will never even own. That’s a gene to be proud of!

Men have a gene that makes us blissfully unaware of impending emotional outbursts. We may be very proud of this but I don’t think we can count it as a particular strength. We also have a gene that allows us to take on any project, including driving across the country, without the need for directions. Biblical scholars now think that this may be the reason that Moses and the people of Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness.

Women have a gene that allows them to do more than one thing at the same time, like talk to you about parent-teacher conferences and at the same time doing a detailed analysis of your emotional state. Men have a difficult time watching a TV ad for Tylenol they’ve seen thirty times and paying attention to anything else being said in the room.

But I’m just being funny now (or not!). There’s a lot of research, though, that shows that men and women are really different. A recent book about this that became rather famous was by John Gray called Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Gray argued that we have problems in our relationships because we forget that we’re supposed to be different. He starts the book by imagining that that the citizens of Mars (men) look through a telescope at the citizens of Venus, who are women. They fall in love with them, build a space ship and travel to Venus where they find that they have a wonderful relationship with the Venutians because they are different. But when they go to live on earth they develop a kind of amnesia. They forget that their differences are good and they start to believe that the other sex ought to react to things the way they do and to feel about things the same way, too.

Gray lifted up some observations that many people resonated with. In communications he said conflicts usually arose because men would go into conversations looking for a problem to be solved while women would go in needing to be heard. Men assume that they are being helpful in offering solutions while women interpret this as invalidating their feelings. On the other hand when women offer advice that men are not seeking, men often interpret this is a sign that women don’t trust them to be competent at what they are doing and they react defensively. There is some truth here. There’s also some truth to Gray’s observation that men, in general, cope with stress by going off into a cave to sort things out on their own while women “go to the well” to seek out others for emotional support.

More recently a researcher named Louanne Brizendine has written a book called The Female Brain that talks about the neurological differences in male and female brains and how that affects our growth and development. Among the things she found were that women have a great capacity for processing emotional information and interpreting the emotional responses of others. As she puts it, “Women excel at knowing what people are feeling; men have difficulty spotting an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm.” On the other hand, women also remember fights that men insist never happened. Women, she found use 20,000 words every day; men, on average, use about 7,000.[i]

Now you can make a determination from your own experience about how accurate these observations are. They are generalizations and most of us exist on a continuum between stereotyped male and female characteristics, but we are more and more able to pinpoint things that are unique about the genders. Ignoring the differences would be tragic. Cherishing them might be a blessing.

But what does the Bible say? Well, it seems that the differences between men and women were so important to the compilers of the Bible that they couldn’t put the subject off to later in the book. It’s right there in the very beginning. You can’t go two pages into the book of Genesis without running smack into this basic question.

Those ancient stories at the beginning of the Bible were put there to answer the questions that all of us have about fundamental questions. Why are we here? Why did God make the universe in this way? What is the role of human beings within the creation? How did the snake end up with no legs? Why are women so different? Or, to put it the other way round, why are men like they are? These were questions that could not wait and so they are addressed right up front.

The first chapter of Genesis tells one version of the creation story and it is very efficient. God says, “Let there be light,” and, boom!, there is light. God says, “Let there be dry land,” and, boom!, there’s earth and sea. God says, “Let us make human beings in our image,” and, boom!, there’s a man and a woman. God says, “It is very good,” and takes a day off. There’s a little more to it than that. There’s day and night and creepy crawlies and birds and other things but it’s very efficient. And it leaves a few questions. For instance the whole business about God wanting to make a creature in God’s image and there being two – male and female. Suddenly it seems like there’s diversity within the unity.

So the second creation story that begins in chapter two of Genesis goes into a little more detail. In the first chapter we see everything happening as a result of God’s voice: God says this and it happens. God says, “This is good.” In the second story we see how intimately God gets involved with this new creation. God doesn’t use words but hands. Like a potter fashioning clay, God gets right up to the elbows in the dirt of the earth that is being moistened by streams rising up from below. And God makes an Adam.

Now here’s a funny thing about this word, Adam: We hear this and we immediately think that this is the man and this is the name that is eventually given to the man. But at this point in the story it’s a little unclear. The creature is called Adam because it’s made from the earth, the adamah in Hebrew. So you could just say that what God creates is an earth creature. The word for a male person, ish, isn’t used until after the woman is created, which led some of the old Jewish scholars to say that the original creature was neither male nor female. They don’t become what they are unless the other one exists. A man without a woman makes no sense in the way God goes about creation.

So God makes this Adam and places the human in a garden. It’s a wonderful garden. It has trees and fruits and a river. And the Adam has a purpose in this place. The human is supposed to till the ground and to protect it. To enjoy the garden and to eat of all the trees that are there, except the one tree which is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That one is separated out and it will be the cause of some drama in the next chapter.

But there is a problem from the very beginning. Everything up to this point has been good. Very good even. God has said so. But now God says that there is something that is not good. “It is not good,” God says, “that this human should be alone.” God is all about relationships. God is all about creating communities. God, as we know from our image of the Trinity, contains diversity even within the heart of God. If human beings were created in the image of God then they must have relationship, too.

So God brings all the creatures of the earth before Adam to see if they will be a suitable partner and to see what the human would name them. It must have been quite an audition. “I’m going to name that one a koala, God. It’s cute, but lifelong companion? I’m thinking not. That one? I’ll call that a cat, but it looks like it doesn’t need me. Don’t think that’s going to work. That’s a hippopotamus and it’s definitely out. And what were you thinking when you made that one? Let’s call that a giraffe.” But at the end of the day there was nothing else like the human being. Nothing in whom Adam could see a likeness or a partner.

So God decided to do some radical surgery. If something was to be made of the same kind as the human it should also come from the human. So the potter became a builder and the material the builder used was a rib, taken from the side of the sleeping human Adam. It’s no accident that it happened while Adam was asleep. We’ve been dreaming about this moment of diversity ever since. Our dreams are filled with visions of men and women and the relationships between them and it is because our ancestor was sleeping when the one became two and we have been wrestling with the change ever since.

But what happened was miraculous. When Adam saw what God had wrought while he slept, he sighed a huge and relieved sigh. Finally, at this moment, he attained the image of God because he was able to say, “This is good. This is very good.” Just the same thing that God had said over creation in the first place. Because now what the man beheld was a woman. He didn’t know what it meant to be a man until he saw the woman, but immediately it was clear to him that his existence would never be the same. He recognized that she was different from him. Wonderfully, confoundingly different. And yet, so incredibly close to him that he could say, “This, at last!, is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh! I can name this one. This is woman, made from the same stuff as man.” And just as in English, in Hebrew the two words are very similar. Woman is ishah, and man is ish. So very close. And the intention God had for the two is clear. The man and the woman are meant for each other. When they come together in marriage, the two become one flesh, in their bodies re-membering the original unity they once had.

Now what does this story tell us? Well, the first thing it tells us is that God does not want us to be alone. We are meant to be in relationship with each other. And marriage between men and women is a relationship rooted in God’s original intention for creation. It was, to use Adam Hamilton’s phrase, “God’s big idea.” Not that everyone is going to be married. It’s clear from the Bible and from church history that the people of God have lived full, complete, and faithful lives as single people as well as married people. But there is something unique in marriage, something God arranges and intends to happen. And I don’t think constitutional amendments are going to help us determine what it is. The Bible has things to tell us about what our relationships and marriages ought to be about.

I think the other thing we can say about this story at the beginning of the Bible is that it tells us that sex and sexuality are not things that the Bible tells us to repress. These powerful parts of our lives are blessed when they find their expression in relationships that mirror God’s will for men and women. In marriage there is a place for their full expression and that’s the context in which God blesses the sexual relationship. That’s not to say that sexual behavior within marriage can’t be abused. You know that it can be. But outside of marriage, it is always haunted. What does sex mean apart from marriage? There are a thousand different agendas for it and a thousand different ways that people can be hurt. You only have to look at the television or the internet or literature from any age to know that’s true. That’s why the church has always talked about sex within the married relationship where it is clearly affirmed.

So men and women are different. That’s the first thing to be said. It’s one of the first things the Bible says. But there’s so much more to be said. Men and women are different, yes, and that’s a good thing. God intends for us to be in relationship with each other, even if it’s not a married relationship, we need each other’s differences and we need to learn from each other. And the union of men and women in marriage is a relationship that God has an intense interest in and a special blessing for. We’ll talk about that more next week.

Last week I said that we are a mystery to each other at times. We men and women sometimes look at each other and wonder how in the world the other sex manages to operate as they do. But there is something powerful to be learned from each other and a journey that we are on together. It’s a journey that has something to do with the God who created us and brings us together in love. Thanks be to God.

[i] Joe Garofoli, “Femme Mentale”, San Francisco Chronicle, 8/6/06

The Potential of Passion

Song of Songs 2:8-13
The voice of my beloved!
Look! He comes,
leaping over the mountains,
springing over the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
looking in through the windows,
peering through the net coverings.
My beloved sings and says to me,
“Arise, my darling, my hermosita, and come away with me;
For, look, the winter is past,
the violent rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the land,
the time of singing has come,
the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
The fig tree sends juices to unripe fruit
and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my darling, mi hermosita,
and come away with me.”

Sometimes a sermon demands that we sit up and listen and on those occasions it feels like a wake-up call or a call to arms. Sometimes a sermon demands close attention to what God is doing in the world around us and at those times it feels like prophecy. Sometimes a sermon digs deeply into the word of God that we find in the scriptures and it sounds like a Bible study. And sometimes like today a sermon demands…a love poem. So today I want to start with a sonnet from one of the great romantic poets, William Shakespeare:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses demasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in her breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak; yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
--Sonnet 130, William Shakespeare

Now why would I start with a love poem? Because William Shakespeare, some 400 years ago, was extolling the same power of human affection that we find in that funny little book called Song of Solomon or Song of Songs. Shakespeare tapped into a deep vein in human life – the vein that knows how powerful human relationships are, that knows how powerful love is. You can put them in a line – the writer of Song of Songs calling for his beloved, Shakespeare seeing in his rather plain love the highest form of beauty, the Beatles singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, Troy and Gabriella singing “This Could Be the Start of Something New” in High School Musical. There’s a common theme here and it is love.

So since this is such a constant theme, I want to spend a few weeks exploring it here in our services because I know that our experiences of human love and relationships are among the most exhilarating, confusing, confounding and painful parts of our lives. What we learn in the encounter with another person is deep and yet we know that there is potential and peril in these relationships. We live in a culture that exploits our feelings and cheapens our relationships through negative media images and commercials. We live in a time when the old rules for dating, sexual expression and appropriate boundaries seem threatened. We live in a time when marriages, where we are told God intends our deepest relationships to be lived out, are in trouble because of infidelity, economic stress, and divorce, among other things.

We need to talk about what we are doing in our relationships and what we can do to strengthen them. So whether you are married or single or single again, I hope that this series of sermons will speak to you and that you will join in the conversation. Whatever our status, there are others who need the support and wisdom that other Christians can provide in helping to sort out what’s going on in love.

So let’s start with our lectionary text today which invites us to think about the potential of passion. What is this human love that is so powerful it causes men and women to equate it with an experience of God? What is this love that Shakespeare compares to heaven itself? What is this love that Solomon's Song declares is stronger than death? And why is it there in the reading for today, embarrassing us with its frankness and its suggestive wordplay and its sappy emotions? It’s like some renegade from a melodramatic production of Romeo and Juliet, staring us in the face, refusing to be explained away as merely a metaphor, demanding that we take seriously the love song of two long-forgotten lovers and their aching for one another.

Bernard of Clairvaux, back in the 12th century, preached over 300 sermons on Song of Solomon and never got past the second chapter. For him the book was full of rich imagery and meaning that could not be exhausted. Today we are surprised it's even there, so rarely do we hear these words. Nobody wants to preach Song of Solomon these days. It's just too racy.

And yet, who among us has not experienced or longed for the power of human love? Danielle Steele may have blown it out of proportion, but there is something explosive about that love which sweeps away everything in its path, causing us to lose sight of everything except our beloved. Like the lovers of the Song, when we are in the grips of love we find ourselves incapable of doing anything expect lovingly describing the perfect features of our lover. We linger over eyes and hair and skin. We live for the breath that comes in those many moments of closeness.

Now that passion eventually finds its way back to earth. Who could long survive such scrutiny? We are all finally imperfect, full of our own funny ways and niggling flaws. When the veil is finally pulled away we can no longer hide the bad hair days, the no hair days, the tendency to squeeze the toothpaste in the opposite direction from our beloved, the cold feet at the bottom of the bed. It is then that the true test of love begins.

But, you know, that passion is there. A love as explosive as that initial blast of contact is too powerful to be stowed away forever. There are times, even in later years, when a gentle spring breeze or a half-heard old song on the radio or the scent of a long-forgotten flower can transport us to another time when everything was fresh and energetic and new. In those moments the sentiments that embarrass us, the raw physicality of love which we thought we'd left behind, the sense of wonder we had assigned to the dustbin of our history - all of these suddenly don't seem so distant anymore. In those times we discover that there's a part of us that still really wants to live.

We're not going back to the high school prom again. We're not going to find the figure that slipped into those fashionable bell bottoms and polyester Saturday Night Fever suits so many years ago. But we are going to discover that the part of us that really lived, the part of us we now blame on hormones, never really died. Love has the power to renew us and change us.

A lasting love never loses the sense of mystery. The lovers of Song of Solomon stand behind walls and peer through lattice work. They pose like stags and wild animals. They coo with the voices of turtledoves. They put forth fragrance like the aromatic fig tree in full blossom. With all the senses they seek some kind of language to describe their love for one another. But in the end there is no language and there is no way to capture the essence of one another.

Keeping mystery in a relationship sounds like a tip from a bad Dear Abby column. It's impossible to work at making yourself mysterious. But the best relationships recognize that for all we know of one another, there is still a lot that we don't know. With all our charming defects and as well-known as we feel to those who are closest to us, there is always something new to discover. It is those moments when we look at our beloved and realize that they have surprised us that are the moments when we realize that love is still growing.

Actually I think that’s one of the things that annoys Suzanne the most about me. She never knows what she’s going to discover next. I might come in one day and say, “I think I’d like to get a kayak” or (on a related point), she may get a call from me saying, “Well, I’m stuck in a marsh back of Metompkin Island” and those will be new things for her about me. Or maybe they’re not too surprising given who I am, but there’s always something new. Just as I am always amazed to discover the things that will bring her great joy or bring her to tears.

There is pain. There is hurt. There is struggle in the course of love. There is also forgiveness and reconciliation and tolerance if love is to last. But it is when we put away the mystery that love is most painful. The veil, in true love, when it is removed, ushers in a lifetime of new discoveries. We can’t take it all in at once.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, uses the metaphor of the veil to describe what the married relationship is like. As in the old-fashioned weddings when the veil is dramatically lifted from the bride, two people unveil themselves to one another, “promising to look at each other for the rest of their lives, and to be looked at by each other, lovingly, faithfully, and above all, truly and honestly.” In that opening of their lives to one another, they take a radically new step. They allow themselves to be vulnerable and to risk loving and thus to listen for God’s presence in their lives.

What of God in all of this? Surely Song of Solomon is more than just a celebration of eros, though God is pretty quiet in this book, at least on the surface. Interpreters, like old Bernard, have sought some great metaphorical meaning through the centuries. For the Jews it was a symbol of God's relationship with the people of Israel. For Christians, a symbol of Christ's relationship with the Church.

Can God really love us so passionately? Can we really love God so passionately? Is the love, the agape love we profess for God, somehow hormonal as well - so profoundly moving that it affects us body AND soul? At those times of initial confrontation with Christ it can be like that. People faint and fall out in the floor sometimes. On the pent-up, overstressed, unemotional frontiers of our land in the 19th century, it was not unusual for conversions at camp meetings to be accompanied by seizures and paralysis and even barking like dogs. Can God's love possess us like that?

Nuns for centuries have spoken of themselves as wedded to Christ and many, like Catherine of Siena in the 14th century, have taken these images of Song of Solomon and applied them to the vows which bound them to the Church. There is something intensely physical about real spirituality and it does affect us body and soul, like the profound physical changes that accompany first love.

But above all there is mystery in our relationship with God. As close as we feel to God, we are always just beyond the wall, peering in through lattice work, gazing through the veil. God is never willing to be captive to our designs, no matter how great our desire. So we approach God by metaphor and image. We say what God is like. We linger over God's attributes and beauties.

But God is always more than we can ever apprehend. We continue this courtship with God through regular participation in this wonder of worship. We call upon God and listen for the voice of our beloved. We shout out in praise the glorious nature of our love affair. We whisper our deepest desires to our lover in prayer. We taste the bread and the wine and feel the texture of that love which became physical in Jesus' body. We feel the gentle touch of God the lover in the hands of those around us. And we dance away to the sounds of love songs.

The best loves abound in physical joy and mystery. The Bible is not opposed to human love and sexuality. Song of Solomon proves that. This book even shows that there's a place for sappy love poetry and sticky human emotions. And if God embraces the loves we share as human beings, God also embraces us and calls us to come away - to feel young again, to leap upon the mountains and breathe in the aroma of the fragrant, flagrant fig tree whose very name in Hebrew implies passionate love.

This week, listen for the lover’s voice. Invite God into your most intimate relationships and know that the potential is there, in that relationship for a new listening of how God is calling you. Thanks be to God.