October 6, 2019 “Beloved” – Song of Songs 5:9 – 6:10

Song of Songs 5:8 – 6:10
“Beloved”
October 6, 2019 – Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

If we didn’t have a shelf for religious books like the Bible at the bookstore, where would it belong? Under which genre of literature would you shelve our Scriptures? History? Maybe, it covers thousands of years. Biography? Possibly, the lives of several famous people are told in it. Science fiction? Could be, it tells of events that extend well beyond our planet. What do you think?

Notice, however, that the Bible pretty much ends with a wedding. What sort of book often ends with a wedding? That’s right, a romance novel. You might want to shelve it there in one of the largest sections in most any bookstore. As Robert Farrar Capon, explains, if you look at it right, the Bible is “the oldest story on earth; Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl! He marries her and takes her home…”

I’ll say more about this way of looking at the story of Scripture in a bit, but what I’d like you to realize right now is that I’m not looking at the one book of the Bible which clearly is a love story quite like the introduction which you may have read in Poets does. That introduction is not wrong. It tells you the Song of Songs celebrates God’s good creation, which includes our maleness and femaleness. It says “God himself delights in the goodness of physical, sensual love.”

That is all true. The Song of Songs disproves one of the most persistent modern myths about Christianity. According to thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, religious faith harms human beings by repressing perfectly natural and acceptable sexual desire. In other words, Christians and other religious believers think sex is bad. They imagine such Christian thinking has caused all sorts of pain and heartache in human life.

I vividly remember Beth’s and my public discussion about morality and God with a couple of atheist University of Oregon professors a few years ago. One of them, who later became somewhat of a friend, trotted out a long list of complaints about Christianity including this one, that Christians hate sex and teach people that it is evil. I didn’t, but I was tempted to just interject that “I’m a Christian, and I like sex.” But that might have gotten the discussion off track.

That concept that sex is evil did find its way into the Christian church. It can be hard for us to even read the Song of Songs aloud in worship. It’s not just our time and culture. According to Matthew Henry, the church fathers Origen and Jerome claimed it was a Jewish tradition that no man should read this book of the Bible until he was at least thirty years old. It might get a young person too worked up.

None of that is a truly Christian view of sex nor of the Song of Songs. God is the creator of our bodies and of our sexuality. As the first chapter of Genesis says, He made us good, very good. What culture around us and we ourselves perceive as the Lord’s condemnation of sex is actually transference to God of our own sexual brokenness and misuse of His good gift. Sexuality is only bad when it plays out beyond the boundaries God set in marriage or when we use it to hurt it each other even within our marriages.

The Song of Songs does invite us to celebrate God’s good creation. It includes the natural world of doves and lilies and meadows fresh with dew, but the poet also celebrates our bodies as good and beautiful. That introduction in Poets suggests that in ancient times and even some modern cultures, brides and grooms are portrayed as kings and queens, even dressed that way. You can see that in the passages I read where the bride and groom describe and praise each other. She says, “my lover is better than ten thousand others.” He says, “Even among sixty queens and eighty concubines and countless young women, I would still choose my dove, my perfect one.”

We can let that royal imagery and praise for one another remind us that each man and woman on this earth is created to be royalty, a child of the King of heaven and earth. That is the divine lens through which we ought to look at one another, and not just as brides and grooms. As C. S. Lewis says, we are all meant for glory. “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Let the Song of Songs help us remember that the next time we are tempted to despise someone for how they look or for how they talk. In this day and age, let us especially remember that both the man and the woman in this song are pictured with dark skin.

I could easily go on about how this Song can refresh and even heal our understanding of human love between men and women. It is a portrayal of sexuality that is miles away from the exploitation and violence of pornography. It displays an expression of mutual care and appreciation that is totally unlike the raw sex for personal fulfillment so often portrayed and desired in our time. It gives us human sexual love as it was designed to be by a loving Creator who cherishes each person He has made.

And that last is exactly why I want to go on to talk about an interpretation of the Song of Songs that is not really highlighted in the Poets introduction. For thousands of years both Jews and Christians have found another dimension of meaning in this book. Yes, it is a beautiful, earthy celebration of human love. But like the prophets, like Jesus Himself, like the apostle Paul and the book of Revelation, the Song of Songs offers us a picture of God’s love for His people. God is a faithful husband seeking out and bringing home His wayward wife. It’s a picture of God’s sacrificial loving-kindness toward us.

Specifically, Christians have pretty much always understood that they can see Christ’s love for the Church here in the Song of Songs. When an old praise song sings, “I am my beloved’s and he is mine, his banner over me is love,” it puts together chapter 6 verse 3 of and chapter 2 verse 4 of the Song. It’s no longer a song about marriage or a man and woman. The “beloved” is Christ and we belong to Him under His banner of love.

So the Song of Songs is about two things. First, it’s a love poem. Traditionally it is about the love of King Solomon for a foreign woman, a Shulamite he took to be his wife. It’s certainly a kind of drama or dialogue about love being sought and found and celebrated. The man and the woman and their friends and family speak and have parts in the play. It’s about human love in a human community.

The second and greater message of the Song of Songs is God’s love for us and our love for God. Jews and Christians have always known this. In the middle ages Bernard of Clairvaux preached 86 sermons on the Song, all aimed at showing how it speaks to us of our relationship with God. Scripture says that the Church is the Bride of Christ. So it only makes sense to read the Bible’s greatest celebration of married love as a celebration of that greatest Marriage.

We can learn a lot about human sexuality and marriage here, but the deepest and most profound lessons in this Song are about God’s love for us and our love for Him. Take that passage on page 190 in Poets, part of chapter 5 in a standard Bible. It’s the bride offering a head-to-toe catalog of the charms of her lover, from his raven black hair to his golden feet. Take that and go and read the description of the divine Man in Daniel chapter 10 or of Jesus Christ Himself in Revelation chapter 1. The Song of Songs helps us remember that our Lord is beautiful and that we are here every Sunday to celebrate His beauty, just like human beings celebrate the beauty we find in each other.

However, the main lesson from the Song I’d like us to recall today is what is pictured over and over here: the power of love. The passage I read began on page 189, chapter 5 verse 8, with the woman wanting her lover to know that she was “weak with love,” overcome by its power. And as her lover, in return for her praise, catalogs her beauty on page 191, chapter 6 verse 4, he declares that she is “as beautiful as Jerusalem, as majestic as an army with billowing banners.”

The lovers in this song constantly remember and celebrate the strength of love, even using martial images for each other like banners and armies and architectural images like pillars and towers. It may sound silly to us. Bryan reminded us Friday morning of an old cartoon from the Wittenburg Door which portrayed a Song of Songs woman literally, with a nose like a tower and temples like pomegranates and hair like a flock of goats. But that poetic imagery is meant to convey a powerful and rich adoration and love.

Look at the bit from the Song on the front of your bulletin, page 193 in Poets, chapter 8 verse 7. I’ve frequently worked with brides and grooms who chose that verse and the one before it to be read at their wedding:

Place me like a seal over your heart,
like a seal on your arm.
For love is as strong as death
its jealousy as enduring as the grave.
Love flashes like fire,
the brightest kind of flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
nor can rivers drown it.
If a man tried to buy love with all his wealth,
his offer would be utterly scorned.

What I have try to point out in a brief wedding meditation on those verses is that love truly is as strong as death, that it takes something very much like dying in order to hold onto and perfect love. Good human love—a good marriage, a good friendship, a good relationship between parent and child—is all full of giving and self-sacrifice. And that’s exactly what human love teaches us about God’s love.

You don’t have to feel sorry at all for me because I am better for it, but one of the sacrifices I’ve made in marriage is to experience and learn a little about opera. So let me share the story of the one opera Beethoven ever wrote, Fidelio. It’s about a man named Florestan unjustly imprisoned for political reasons. His loving wife Leonore wants to rescue him. So she dresses as a young boy, calls herself Fidelio, and enters the prison posing as a guard. There she even pretends to be in love with the warden’s daughter so that she can find a way to save her husband Florestan.

The military governor Pizarro decides he needs to kill Florestan, before another official who is Florestan’s friend finds him there. Leonore manages to delay the execution. But in the end, as Pizarro comes to kill her husband, she has to put herself in between to protect him. They are only saved by the timely arrival of Florestan’s friend and all the prisoners are freed. In closing the crowd sings the praises of Leonore in words which remind us of the last chapter of Proverbs, “Who has got a good wife.”

I hope Leonore’s story might remind you of another story, the story of One who loved you so much that He came into the prison of this world in disguise and placed Himself between you and death. Jesus our Lord came as one of us so that He could die on the Cross and rise from the dead and raise you and me out of our own prisons, from our own deaths in sin. His sacrificial love is the power and strength behind and beneath and above all love.

There may be something in the Song of Songs for you that blesses human love in your life. Perhaps it reminds you to appreciate and honor your spouse. If so, I am pleased you can find and remember that lesson today. But more than that I know that there is something in the Song for everyone here today as it shows us how strongly God loves His people, how deeply Christ loves His Church, how very much Jesus loves you. It doesn’t matter if you are man or woman, married or not, you are loved, loved with a love as strong and majestic as an army with banners, loved with a love as strong and stronger than death. Trust in that love, Jesus’ love for you, right now.

Amen.