Vicar’s sermon. 1.9.24: Song of Solomon 2.8-13

Tucked away at the back of the Old Testament you’ll find the Song of Songs. It is an erotic poem, a hymn to love and to ‘being in love’. It’s a celebration of love and an exaltation of the body. It’s shameless. The couple in the Song are utterly besotted, they are breathless for each other, their minds are full of the image of their lover and they want to touch, to hold, to feel, to taste and smell their partner close.
There is desire and longing. Ecstasy and fulfilment. Reaching and wanting – and again, there’s no shame here. There it is, nestled between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah – not hidden away on some ‘bible top shelf’ lest it corrupt the young or pollute our faith. The poet is a genius: it’s wonderful stuff in English (apparently it is overwhelmingly beautiful in Hebrew). He (for it was almost certainly a ‘he’ who wrote the Song) writes with two, sometimes three voices. We read the woman’s words, her description of her lover, we see through her eyes as she gazes upon the man who has captured her heart, we feel her anticipation of his arrival and her desperation at being separated from him. We are also given the man’s words: he is drunk with desire – she makes him weak at the knees! The turn of her neck, her hair on her shoulders, the flash of her smile and the curve of her body. They gaze upon each other in their imaginations…and then they are together. Any love story needs some sexual tension: will they, won’t they? The answer is ‘they do’ but for all that their lovemaking is passionate it is presented modestly: the genius of the poet is that we see and hear through the lovers’ characters (we too are invited to rejoice in love’s affects) ….so we are not voyeurs and this is not literary porn.
Who are the characters? We don’t know. We might assume that they are fresh young things who ‘need to get a room’ but the poem doesn’t tell us that. This need not be a poem just for those embarking on a sexual relationship: it can be an invitation to rekindle the spark of a marriage of many years or an encouragement to be open to love’s gifts even after hurt or disappointment. To the couple their partner is royalty – there’s no-one that can compare. And in this poem there is no sign of jealousy or insecurity, no third person undermining the pair, no sense that he might prove unfaithful or she might turn from him. How different this is from so many modern love songs where the page is strewn with brokenness and upset and angst and hurt. We all love a tragedy, star-crossed lovers, but this is not it.
And here’s a word we don’t hear very often. This relationship is chaste. It is ‘shame-less’ with a second meaning to those words – there is no guilt or shame here. Don’t get me wrong: it is ‘hot and steamy’ too but this relationship is a relationship between equals, it is consensual and it is overflowing with goodness and life, filled with a joy that is almost indescribable. They cannot believe their good fortune in finding one another, their love lifts them out of themselves. How different again this is from so much that we see on the TV or in films, so much we hear about on our radios or on the news. Unfortunately, we so often hear of the awfulness of (usually) women’s lives around the world, abused by both those closest to them (their boyfriends and partners) let alone at risk of harm from sexual predators, or the damage caused by porn and misogyny twisting the minds of young men and boys. The Song presents us with a vision of how our sexual drive can be channelled and fulfilled without harming another person. He may well speak of ‘my love’: but he doesn’t own her. She speaks of ‘my beloved’: yet he is free. They don’t seize or take. Instead they give themselves to each other. In giving themselves to one another they find a freedom and an abandonment that shows their relationship to be one of mutual esteem and trust. Remember the marriage service? With my body I honour you, all that I am I give to you and all that I have I share with you, within the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is no room here for domestic abuse. There is no room here for the objectification of women (or men for that matter), reducing love-making to brutish biology.
No, this is sacred ground. The Song is Holy Writ. The experience of being in love is a pointer to meaning and purpose in our relationships, it is one way in which we realise ‘there is more to life’ than can be offered by an appeal to genetics, the interaction of pheromones and the drive of testosterone. When he rests his hand on yours or you notice her again across the room, it cannot only be biology that describes the spark of recognition, that illuminates what is happening?
There is just one verse in the Song that might disturb us. It appears at wedding services just before couples make their promises till death do us part, and it comes from the Song’s last chapter: Chapter 8 vs 6. It reads: Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion as fierce as the grave. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. There is no rival to come between the lovers, but here we have a mention of death, of separation and ending. Perhaps these words might speak to that feeling of longing for a partner no longer present – the broken heart and the well of love that brings you to tears – do these things not bear witness to men and women made just a little lower than the angels, able to share in the heart of God. Would we rather not feel love in all its fierceness, and might we not rather hope (as the apostle Paul put it) that faith, hope and love abide but that of these three, love never ends?
I wondered how best to finish this introduction to the Song of Songs. How best to affirm erotic love, our bodies and our imaginations, our closest relationships and love that (as another song says) ‘changes everything’. How can we allow something of the joy and pain of this kind of love find its way into our understanding of faith? For those of us who have been blessed with a partner then perhaps we might remember the importance of lifting our relationship above the level of ‘who’s going to put the bins out this evening’. We need touch. We need to be wanted to be desired and to be gazed upon. And let us all remember (those who are single as well as those who have a partner or have had a partner) that we are embodied souls, not souls that happen to have a body. Our experience of God is mediated through our flesh, through our senses: our bodies are important – there is nothing wrong about enjoying our bodies: appreciating the gifts of hearing and sight, of touch, taste and smell.
There is a place for modesty in our conversation about sex and intimacy but no room for prudishness. No room either for so much that passes for a liberated attitude towards our being sexual beings. We are not being ‘uptight’ when we oppose abuse, objectification, humiliation, violence and degradation – most of this comes from an abuse of male power and a corrupt desire to control women and their bodies. Our faith tells us that we are meant for so much more. And finally, let us recognise heartache with all of its pain: the heartache of rejection or betrayal, the heartache of loneliness, the heartache of bereavement and loss and dare to ask that our broken hearts might mend as they are held within the heart of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit – the God who is the beginning and end of all loves and all loving.