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.