Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "The Sublime Song of Love "
Date: September 3, 2006
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Song of Solomon 2:8-13

A little girl was asked to write an essay on “birth”.  She went home and asked her mother how she had been born.  Her mother, who was busy at the time, said, “The stork brought you darling, and left you on the doorstep.”

Continuing her research she asked her dad how he’d been born.  Being in the middle of something, her father similarly deflected the question by saying, “I was found at the bottom of the garden.  The fairies brought me.”

Then the girl went and asked her grandmother how she had arrived.  “I was picked from a gooseberry bush,” said Grandma.

Armed with this information the girl wrote her essay.  When the teacher asked her later to read it in front of the class, she stood up and began, “There has not been a natural birth in our family for three generations.”

That seems a natural introduction to today’s lesson from the Song of Solomon, also known as the Song of Songs.  It is unknown why the Song is ascribed to Solomon, for the text’s language comes from centuries after that tenth-century monarch.  The Song is all about the longings of a young man and a young woman to be together.  Some of the passages are exotic, if not erotic.  It is said that more people look through this portion of scripture during a boring sermon than any other passages in the Bible.  Don has already told you it can be found between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah any time you need to read it!

Some people say it shouldn’t even be in the Bible, for God is never mentioned in its eight chapters.  Well, God is never mentioned in the ten chapters of Esther either, and that is an important story about a non-Jewish queen saving the Jews.

If we were to say no book of the Bible should cover longing, passion, yearning for a sexual relationship, we would probably have to throw out the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis.  If portions of this Song are occasionally read at weddings, we must recognize that it is weddings in the church that make sexual relationships between a man and a woman legal in the eyes of the State and society, and sanctified in the eyes of God.

It is interesting to note, however, that this single passage is the only selection from the Song of Solomon in the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary.  An essay for preachers lately asked, “When was the last time you preached from the Song of Solomon?”  I didn’t take the time to cross-reference the scripture texts of all 1,312 of my sermons, but I daresay this is only the second or third time in 33 years of preaching!

While much uncertainty surrounds the form, structure and purpose of the Song, the best that scholars have concluded is that it consists of a series of dialogues between a young man and a young woman who are not married.  (And at times, they appear to be less dialogues than soliloquies.)  How many other speakers, and whether the events are to be understood historically or figuratively, are all open questions.

The scene of today’s lesson consists of a pre-dawn visit of the young man to the house of the young woman’s family, and his request for her to escape with him to the spring countryside.  In today’s parlance, he would be asking if she wanted to take off for the weekend to the beach, Palm Springs, or Las Vegas.

Various attempts over the centuries to sanitize the relationship by making the young couple married run aground on such passages as today’s lesson, where the young man calls out to the young woman from a secluded spot “behind our wall.”  Other passages reinforce that the young couple is not married.  This may, in fact, be the circumstances that has given rise to the Song in the first place, with its repeated references to yearning and frustrated desire.  Any of you who have been in a long-distant relationship, separated due to jobs, college, or war-time service, can relate.  Were there impediments to marriage for this young couple?  Do they come from different sides of the tracks?  Is she too young to marry?  We are never going to know the facts behind this 3,000 year old story.  Might it have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or Bernstein’s West Side Story?

Much as those latter stories are of love and longing, both with tragic endings, the writer of the Song of Solomon is not as concerned with the consummation of a physical relationship as he is with the desire and commitment that creates a dynamic sense of anticipation for the couple.

As today’s lesson begins, for example, the female anticipates the coming of her lover to be near her.  She desires him to come to her quickly, like a “gazelle” or “young stag.”  Verse 16 lets us know that they are committed to one another:  “My lover is mine and I am his,” but the female sends her lover away in verse 17.  Consummation of their love and sexual gratification are delayed in favor of a playful and passionate sense of anticipation.  Throughout the Song the lovers move toward and away from one another, in a sense revealing that desire and anticipation are often more intoxicating than instant gratification—a truth that many of us parents have tried to impart to our teen- and college-aged children.

Waiting and longing are not forms of punishment to these lovers.  There is no sense of “wanting it all and wanting it now” with them.  Instead, the couple is willing to wait for one another because they know that each is fully committed to the relationship.  They can dream of one another, wax poetic about each other, search for one another, even risk harm for one another (5:7), all because each knows that the other is waiting.  This is no one-night stand, no back seat-of-the car tumble — it is about unbridled passion found within the bonds of committed love.

The truth is that real intimacy is the result of a lot of time and energy invested in commitment, loving our partners with our hearts long before loving them with our bodies.  Song of Solomon itself ends without a resolution, the lovers still anticipating being fully with each other.  That lack of resolution leads us to remember an important truth:  the more we learn about one another, the more we spend time moving toward one another and even spending time apart, the more we intertwine our brains and spirits before intertwining our bodies, the deeper and more long-lasting our love becomes and the greater the physical relationship that follows!

One of the most frequently chosen opening statements wedding couples choose from my service choices is this: 

“The church believes that marriage is a gift of God and a means of grace in which man and woman become one in heart, mind, and body.  Marriage is a sacred and life-long union of a man and a woman who give themselves to each other in love and trust, that they may enrich and encourage each other in every part of their life together.  A couple approaches marriage with delight and tenderness that they may know each other in love, and through their physical union strengthen the union of their lives.”

I hope couples that read and choose that, and the guests who hear it, understand that really knowing who a person is and falling in love with that person should come before the physical relationship. 

The Song of Solomon is a “purified” view of love and sex.  When partners are committed to one another and have taken the time to develop a passionate desire for one another, then their physical union becomes a wonderful expression of a deeper intimacy.  In a “purified” world, sex itself is neither prize nor product, but one dimension of a three-dimensional relationship.  Within a “purified” relationship, sex is not about self, shame or pictures in a magazine — it’s about pure, unbridled, guilt-free passion with the one person you know through and through.

Scholars have long debated as to whether Song of Solomon should be in the biblical canon at all, while some have suggested that it is simply an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel or Christ and the Church.  While we don’t know if the author had that in mind specifically, we do know that in these verses we see the kind of intimacy that God intended for us to have with God and with one another from the beginning — a relationship where desire and commitment win out over selfishness and treating another person as a mere object of satisfaction.