"Hot for God"
September 3, 2006: 13th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org

Scripture:
Song of Songs 2:8-17
The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: "Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. Catch us the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin the vineyards—for our vineyards are in blossom." My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies. Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young stag on the cleft mountains.

"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen."

Sermon:
I'm willing to bet you dollars to donuts you've never heard anyone preach on the particular Bible passage we have before us this morning, or maybe even from this book. The Song of Songs is indeed an eight-chapter oddity in the Biblical canon. Within these pages there are no myths, no histories, no battles, no miracles, no sermons, no prophecies, no ethical instructions, no mighty acts of God—in fact, as in the similarly slim Book of Esther, even the name of God is conspicuously absent. But at least Esther is a story, a compelling historical narrative, and gets commemorated in the Jewish holiday of Purim when the whole megillah is read aloud in worship.

The poor Song of Songs, on the other hand, belongs to that most underrated of literary genres, poetry. Worse, unlike the prayerfully poetic Psalms, this is love poetry, and not of the faint Victorian variety but hot and heavy, sexy love poetry. And what's more, this unabashed erotic poetry is written largely from the perspective of a woman, and a dark-skinned woman at that. And describing her beloved as a gazelle or a young stag or a shepherd come to "pasture his flock" among her "lilies," as she does here today is only the tip of the iceberg. Just wait till she starts in on his body, all "radiant and ruddy" (5:10) or his legs like "alabaster columns" (5:15)!

No, the lusty lyrics of the Song of Songs provide a nearly unique oasis in a landscape of Biblical interpretation dominated by negative images of sexuality—particularly women's sexuality and dark-skinned sexuality. In most of the rest of scripture, it's problematic, to the say the least, and often dirty, dangerous, even demonic. Think Delilah, seducing away Samson's strength; or the Queen of Sheba, greasing Solomon's slipper slope down into idolatry; or even just Eve and Adam and the apple: "C'mon, Big Boy, want a bite?"

Given those odds, it's really something of a miracle that the Song survived in the canon of scripture at all. But then the church fathers and the Jewish religious authorities before us have very carefully fenced off the book's sexy content—for our protection, of course.

First, they've simply limited our exposure to the text. In the entire three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary, which proffers four different Bible passages for our consideration in worship each week, this is the Song's one and only appearance. By contrast, we get battles and brutality and bad, bad sex much more often. Apparently, just as on television and in the movies, we're more comfortable with genocide, as in Joshua's conquest of the land of Canaan, than we are with genitals. In the extreme, it seems we wished they'd disappear altogether. Witness the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth.

Second, traditional authorities have attributed the work to King Solomon, whose wisdom was legendary, as was his sexual expertise. I suppose they hoped such a royal and professional pedigree would "take the curse off" the troublesome volume, but unfortunately the literary evidence simply does not bear out the claim. It's just not likely Solomon wrote the book. And, well, I'm no literary archaeologist, but personally I think that, given his reported 700 spouses and 300 concubines, it stretches credulity to imagine Solomon having time to write anything much more than perhaps a plea for some Gatorade and orange slices.

Third and most successfully, scholars over the centuries have drawn the modest curtain of allegorical interpretation across the Song's steamy scenes. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, they have instructed us with all the nervous false-confidence of a middle-school principal on prom night, or to that woman, rather... or that woman and that man. It's not really about sex, not really. It's all just an allegory, an extended metaphor, an intricate system of symbols crafted to tell a completely different story altogether; in this case, not the passionate yearning of two very earthy lovers at all but the sanitized and sanctified story of God's love for God's people, Israel, or the church. From the perspective of Christian allegory, the narrator here stands in for the church, and her beloved for whom she longs is Christ, and her... well, you get the picture. Presto, Change-O! Nothing is what it appears to be, and you can't tell the players apart without a scorecard... or a seminary education.

But I don't believe we should have to work that hard. To quote Dr. Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes the passionate desire of a lover for her beloved's body is just that, and that's enough. We get it, they're in love. Myself, I don't believe the meaning of the Bible is concealed behind some impenetrable code, Da Vinci or otherwise. Just because we may not always understand it and may have to chew on it a while, just because what we read may make us uncomfortable doesn't mean scripture is all cryptic. The living word we believe springs up from this record of the relationship between God and God's people is meant to be more accessible than that. It wasn't written by angels whose shining feet never touched the ground. This is our story, too. The authoring communities of the Bible were every bit as human as we are, and the world in which they pursued their relationship with God was every bit as earthy as our own; in other words, they had sex, too, and sometimes they even liked it.

Lucky for us, God likes it, too, because God likes bodies. God loves bodies. The entire span of history, seen through the lens of our faith, is the story of God's love affair with very, very human beings like us who are not incorporeal spirits floating untainted through the ether, but messy creatures of mud and spit, sweat and tears, sex and blood and rock'n'roll. We may have an uneasy relationship with our bodies—they do breakdown; they do get sick and age and die; and our various parts sometimes seem to have a mind of their own—but God made them for us, all of them, and we quite literally cannot live without them.

And though God is always God, and decidedly not human, apparently God chooses not to live without them, either, without us; in fact God goes so far as to share our human, bodily existence in every visceral detail in Jesus. In Jesus, who walked and talked and ate and drank and likely occasionally lusted because he lived and died in every way as we all do, God affirms and blesses our bodies. That's the shocking good news of a gospel of incarnation. God shares our life in Jesus and through him invites us to share in God's life in a very intimate way. And to those who shrink from considering Jesus in any situation with even a remotely sexual subtext, remember: according to the Gospel of John, Jesus' first miracle was to turn water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana in order to bless a just such a loving couple as we have here in the Song of Songs on their way to their wedding night and their marriage bed, nudge nudge, wink wink.

Just a footnote at this point to say that I don't believe God's love affair with our bodies is limited to heterosexual bodies any more than it is limited to men's bodies or light-skinned bodies or rich bodies or healthy bodies or American bodies. God made all bodies, everywhere, and loves all bodies and redeems all bodies. It's true, all may sin and fall short (Romans 3:23), men and women, gay and straight alike, not least of all in the abuse of God's good gift of sexuality, but just as true, that same gift in all its diversity of healthy expression can be a vehicle of grace, a powerful way of participating in the love of God in our very bodies. As author and pastor Frederick Buechner writes in his handy little book Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC, sex is like nitroglycerin: "It can be used either to blow up bridges or heal hearts (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).

So before we rush off to allegorize and sanitize the Song of Songs, let's stop and appreciate it as it is, in all its ruddy radiance. Listen to the yearning of this dark-skinned woman for her beloved, the way her body literally aches for him in his absence. Hear the rhythms of the springtime world beating in her blood, making her heart race and her skin burn. Notice the way their physical senses—sight and sound and smell and touch and taste—come alive at even just the memory of the sexual intimacy they have shared, and the way their loving, mutual desire crowns them, making them not just one more man or woman, not just another body, but a king, a queen, fairest, graceful, lovely, and beloved. They become for one another not just another homely creature of dirt and spittle, but a garden of pleasure, an Eden. And God saw that it was very, very good. <Sigh!> Was it good for you?

Now, having rooted ourselves in the common sense of the text, having dug our toes down deep into the squishy, muddy marvel of it all, we are free to do more, to use our own poetic imaginations not to retreat into the realm of airless allegory but to further flesh out the many possible meanings of this passage for us who gather here as the church today. We can train our theological vision so that instead of looking past the bodily sense of the text in a vain attempt to bypass what makes us uncomfortable in order to somehow uncover hidden secrets of divinity, we instead look into it and through it, as through a lens, to discern the myriad ways God embeds God's Own Self and the shape of God's eternal love and life right here in the meat of our everyday lives. In other words, we are free to ask ourselves What, if anything, this sexy slim volume of love poetry stuck in here among the hou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots of scripture may have to teach us about our relationship with God in faith?

But of course, you know me. I'm not likely to give you a definitive answer. That would take all the fun out of it—well, the fun and the life. No, I'm much more likely to pose another question and offer a little food for thought. So here goes: What if, like some of those wonderfully subversive Christian women mystics like Mechthild of Magdeburg and Saint Teresa of Avila, what if were to move through the allegorical interpretation not as an end-run around sexuality but as a vehicle to greater truth? What if we heard in these passages not just the inner desires of a woman in love and not just some abstract theological treatise on love, but both, and more?

What if we were to imagine that God is not high up and far away, some cold, mechanical watchmaker sitting on a throne watching all of creation slowly unwinding? What if God is not a remote and withholding father figure who relates to us, his unruly children, primarily by disciplining us according to the book when we stray? What if God is not merely the abstract idea of love, but a lover who loves us truly, madly, deeply? What if God is hot for us?

I know it sounds silly, if not outright sacrilegious, but I don't know what other language to use to capture the intimate, visceral sense that beats in the heart of the scripture here, all that bawdy body-love that sets the page on fire. So many of us were raised with unhelpful or even unhealthy images of God, a cold or angry God who probably didn't like us very much but whom we were told it was our duty to love. In reaction, if we remained involved in the life of faith at all, we likely fled for safety to a more abstracted idea of God or Spirit or a Higher Power that, while perhaps lacking personality, at least posed less of an immediate threat to our spiritual well-being. This is where many of us find ourselves still today, living a cordial handshake sort of relationship at a cool remove from this God or whatever, or this Jesus person.

But what if another relationship is possible? Not a safer relationship—for a true lover is never safe but constantly makes herself vulnerable, constantly risks himself for the sake of the beloved and the love they share—so not something safer but something deeper, better, more alive? What if we could shut out the old, unhealthy tapes and drop our defenses long enough to recognize the passionate love God puts out there for us in Jesus, who is as vulnerable as a lover to all humanity? What then? Can we love God truly, madly, deeply in return?

Try to imagine for a moment what that would look like. Use the love we see in this passage from the Song of Songs to envision those new horizons. In place of a relationship with God driven by fear or a sense of obligation or some abstract ethical imperative, imagine instead feeling a lover's delight in God's presence, a lover's pain at anything that would separate us from the beloved, a lover's fervent desire for union and reunion, and a lover's generosity to share the love that overflows through us. Instead of just loving God because we know we should, imagine being in love with God, as in love as the Song's lyricist is with her shepherd lover. His desire for her, his image of her as beloved and lovely, strengethens her, transforms her. It makes her both weak and strong, bold and humble all at the same time. In return, her desire for him gives her the courage to risk appearing foolish or inappropriate or sinful in the eyes of the other "daughters of Jerusalem" in order to live more fully into the intimacy love has created between them.

The desire of God can do the same for us: both God's desire for us and our desire for the God who loves us so much that God would go to any length, pay any price, make any sacrifice, including even dying on the cross in Christ to be bridge the distance that separates us, to be with us, to know us, to love us. This is the good news of the Gospel: that God is love; that God is in love with us, all of us; and that, in the words of our anonymous poet lover here this morning, God's love is "strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench such love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered for such love all the wealth of one's house, it would be utterly scorned" (8:6-7).

God, our eternal lover, illumines our days and haunts our dreams. God stands behind the wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. God embraces us with a lover's arms and whispers against the nape of our neck, "I come to my garden, my sister," my brother, "my bride," my groom; "I gather my myrrh with my spice, I eat my honeycomb with my honey, I drink my wine with my milk." And that God bids us all, "Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love" (5:1).