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June 17, 2012
“Remember, It’s God’s Gift”
The Rev. Maren Sonstegard-Spray
Song of Songs 4:1-7
How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful!
Your eyes are doves behind your veil.
Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing, all of
which bear twins, and not one among them is bereaved.
Your lips are like a crimson thread, and your mouth is lovely.
Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil.
Your neck is like the tower of David, built in courses; on it hang a thousand bucklers, all
of them shields of warriors.
Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies.
Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, I will hasten to the mountain of myrrh and
the hill of frankincense.
You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.
When you start reading the wisdom literature of the Bible this is what you find: The
Psalms with their poetry and songs so often used in the worship of the faith community;
the Proverbs, little slices of wisdom and advice for living rightly, raising kids, growing
up to be faithful people, living in community; Ecclesiastes which explores what is truly
meaningful in life. All these we would probably read and agree that they impart wisdom.
And then we come to the Song of Solomon or Song of Songs (there are several different
names given to this book based on the opening line). And there are several things that
make this book different. To begin with, when you leave Ecclesiastes and enter Song of
Songs it is like leaving the public world, and entering a private one – it is like walking
from the market square into someone’s house, and not just their house, into their
bedroom.
In Song of Songs we find language of intimacy and longing and desire and affection that
we find nowhere else in the Bible. It is a love poem, the only one that exists from ancient
Israel – and it is only one of two books in the whole of the Bible never to mention the
name of God.
Not only does it not mention God, it doesn’t mention any of the religious traditions of the
community.
It is also unique because it is the only book of the Bible in which the female voice is so
remarkably present – she speaks for 56 verses to the man’s 36. In the poem we have this
verbal volley back and forth between these two voices – and if you read it through you
will find that the woman does not hold back.
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And if you begin with the opening lines of the Song, “"Let him kiss me with the kisses of
his mouth!" and read it all the way through you will probably find yourself wondering,
“What on earth is this doing in the Bible?”
Jennifer Knust, who is a professor of religion at Boston University, has written a book
about the language of intimacy in the Bible and she writes: “Modern readers are
sometimes surprised that this book is canonical at all. Can a book this sexy be biblical?
Surely someone tried to keep it out of the Bible! But, in fact, the Song of Songs has been
among the most widely read and closely studied of all the canonical books.”
Early and medieval Christians shared a high opinion of the Song of Songs. The early
church theologian Origen wrote a ten-volume commentary on it. In the Middle Ages, the
Song was the subject of more commentaries than any other Old Testament book.
Bernard of Clairvaux, in the twelfth century, wrote eighty six sermons on the Song (and
did not even get past chapter 2).
Although it is attributed to Solomon, it was probably written later, a couple hundred years
before the birth of Jesus, and it mirrors some of the other love poetry of the surrounding
cultures of the time.
And as poetry it can be interpreted in several ways – the two most common have been
that is a celebration of the sexual intimacy between two lovers, and that is a metaphor of
the relationship of the soul to God.
So then, the description, for example, of the woman longing after her love becomes a
description of the soul longing after God. The description of the man seeking out his
lover in gardens becomes God seeking out the church in gardens and longing to be with
the church.
This was the interpretation of most ancient Christian writers and Hebrew scholars – but
not all – and certainly they were aware of the power of the poetry and its language of
intimacy. The early Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria was worried that an
immature reader might not be able to handle it and so he wrote: “For this reason I give
warning and advice to everyone who is not yet free of the vexations of the flesh and
blood and who has not withdrawn from desire for corporeal nature that he completely
abstain from reading this book.”
So why do we call this book, with all its impassioned imagery, wisdom? In its pages we
discover a testimony to love, and it is an aspect of love we rarely really talk about – the
sexual intimacy of romantic love.
And to learn and understand how to truly love well, to give and receive physical
intimacy, to learn how to handle someone else’s heart and body, is wisdom.
Stephanie Paulsell, who has written on the Christian practice of honoring the body writes,
“From the pages of scripture sacred to Jews and Christians alike, the Song of Songs
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remains a testimony to mutuality in love, to the beauty of the human body, to the
goodness of sexual desire and the power of love . . . The relationship described in the
Song is one of mutuality; the lovers are evenly matched in the force of their desire. They
are equally vulnerable in their desire to be desired by the other; they are equally
determined to give and receive pleasure.”
And isn’t this what God wants for us and what we ultimately want for ourselves in our
relationships, and what we want for our children and those we love – to learn the wisdom
of mutually satisfying love that is respectful and giving and passionate, and committed.
Paulsell writes that this is what we long for: “Relationships so intimate and satisfying that
they draw us out of ourselves and more deeply into the life of the world. Relationships in
which pleasure is given and received with joy. Relationships in which knowledge of the
body is sought with care and gentleness, in which the body is pronounced beautiful over
and over again.”
She remembers a conversation she had with a friend with two young sons, where her
friend turned to her and said, “I hope they will grow up to be good lovers.”
And she writes, “I was too immature at the time to understand what a profound hope that
was, too young to understand what she was teaching me as a parent. Her sons are grown
now, and I imagine her hope has been realized. For when she and her husband spoke to
their sons about sex, which they did freely and often, they did not give them a list of
unexplained do’s and dont’s. When they set limits, they set them in the hope that their
sons would one day know deep sexual satisfaction with someone whose life and body and
spirit they cherished. And as these parents knew, the path to adult sexual satisfaction is
treacherous. Negotiating adolescence is so difficult, so full of pitfalls. In our first
encounters with desire – our own and others’ – we might entrust ourselves to someone
who is not careful with our bodies or our spirits. We might imperil our freedom through
entering into the entanglement of a sexual relationship too early in life, or through
fathering a child, or through becoming pregnant. We might be preyed upon by someone
bent on exploitation. Bad early sexual experience is so wounding, so difficult to recover
from.”
We don’t talk a whole lot about sex in church, or at least we don’t talk about sex in this
way. One pastor I came across, who was commenting on the Song of Songs wrote, “I've
never written an essay on sex and Christianity before. I have been a pastor for almost 30
years now. That's a long time to go without writing about sex. I haven't preached about it
much. Though I've never thought that sex was just for procreation, rearing three children
made me tired enough to think maybe that was the plan. I think sex is a beautiful gift and,
like all beautiful gifts God has given us human beings, we specialize in cheapening,
perverting, and squandering it. I think we talk too much about sex in the Church, and I
think we don't talk enough about sex in the Church.”
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Sex, on its own, does not guarantee intimacy – it does not mean that two people are
honest with one another, or really even care about the other person. It doesn’t fix what is
broken about ourselves or our lives.
One thing we discover most profoundly in this poem is that the lovers are fully
committed to one another – it is not a poem about pleasure simply for pleasure’s sake.
One commentator remarks: “The Song celebrates faithful human love. For that reason
alone, it could be argued, the Song deserves a place in Scripture. In a culture saturated
with sexual images but sorely lacking in prominent examples of lifelong faithful love,
this text celebrates love between a man and a woman that is marked by mutuality and
fidelity.”
Paulsell writes, “For it is precisely when two people are led by love to make such radical
commitments that boundaries between earth and heaven seem so transgressable. We live
by those commitments in so many ways and in so many circumstances – in sickness and
in health, in good times and in bad, in wealth and in poverty – until we are parted by
death. When we mark those commitments by sexual intimacy and sexual fidelity, when
we devote ourselves to learning to meet the desires of our beloved, and when we teach
our beloved to answer our body’s longing, we taste one of the sweetest gifts God has
bestowed.”
There is great wisdom in learning to love well, and in loving well to experience the good
gift of a loving God. And so we come away from the Song of Songs with this prayer –
that we would learn to be good lovers. Because when it comes down to it, divine love
and human love are not separate things. Human love, at its best, can be a glimpse, a
reflection, of God's love. Amen.