The Passion of God

Songs of Solomon 2:8-13
August 30, 2009



The first time I fell in love
was when I was 15
His name was David, and Larry knows all about him
David wasn’t my first boyfriend,
but he was my first love
He was also a pastor’s kid
We met at church camp
He was from Northern New Jersey
and I was from Southern New Jersey
So it was a long-distance relationship
but that didn’t matter
we knew our love would get us through
We wrote letters every day
email would have been so helpful….
We talked on the phone as much as our parents would let us
We got together as often as our parents
were willing to drive up and down the parkway
It was a delicious time
We thought it was forever
We listened to John Denver music
and talked about someday getting married
and living in the Colorado rockies
Of course, I had no idea where Colorado
OR the Rocky Mountains were
but it didn’t matter
My first love also ended up being
my first real heartbreak
David got tired of trying to be faithful
to someone 80 miles away
and so he broke my heart
But what I remember most
is the delicious, almost magical time before that
when the rest of the world didn’t matter

Being in love is intoxicating
I hope you know what I’m talking about
To love someone deeply and passionately
and to be loved back
I’m fortunate
I got to fall in love again
with someone who didn’t break my heart
and this one stuck

People have wondered for hundreds of years
why the Songs of Solomon are in the Bible
It makes some people nervous
the passage I read is one of the safest ones to read in church
there are plenty of other paragraphs
that would make you blush
People have always wondered
how it got in the Bible at all
how it got past the editors of the 4th century
and slipped into the Big Book

Actually, early and medieval Christians loved this book
In the Middle Ages, the Songs of Solomon
was the subject of more commentaries
than any other Old Testament book
They just couldn’t ignore it
In the 12th century, Bernard of Clairveaux
wrote 86 sermons on the Songs of Solomon
and that was without getting past chapter 2
I’m suspecting he just couldn’t handle
the rest of the chapters
or just plain didn’t want to read them in church
The Songs are full of passion
and erotic love
but it’s different than what we term as erotic love
It is eroticism that is born out of a faithful love
between two people
a passion and deep love
that is never quenched
simply because there is always more to discover
in the other person,
more to love
and more to enjoy
I hope you know what I’m talking about
I hope you have experienced
the deliciousness of being in love like that
This is not a song about a one-night stand
or an illicit affair
it’s about the passion of two people
completely devoted to each other
and only each other
The fact that it’s so surprising that this book
made it into the Bible
begs the obvious question,
how did Church and Christianity get so proper,
so passionless?
We come here,
and maybe it’s because we were raised that way
but it seems we leave our deepest feelings
at the door
We sit up straight
we have this sort of bland, bored look on our faces
and we keep everything proper

One of my all-time favorite movies
is “Dead Poets’ Society”
as I might have mentioned before
Robin Williams plays Mr. Keating
who comes to teach at a very old, traditional
boys’ prep school
They are used to wearing ties and jackets to class
learning Latin, and studying to excel
so they can all be doctors and lawyers
whether they want to or not
They file in and out of class
they recite the age-old traditions by memory
they are taught to think
and not to feel
And then comes Mr. Keating
who is an English teacher
with a deep, deep passion for poetry
and he teaches these adolescent boys
to savor the words of poetry
to let the words get under their skin
and release their dreams, their joys,
and their deepest desires
He challenges them to think outside the box
to take off their ties
to stand on their desks
just to get a different perspective
he challenges them to think about and do
what gives them the deepest joy in life
They’ve never been invited to feel before
they’ve never been asked what they thought before
what they felt, what they believed,
nobody ever wanted to know who they really were
Mr. Keating invited them out of themselves
to dream, to dance, to whoop
to experience the deepest joys of life
Of course, it caused a lot of problems
because the majority of people in this world
don’t want to let passion loose
they want to keep everything under control
in its proper place
they want to be dignified and bound
So Mr. Keating became a problem for the adults
but to the kids he would forever be
the one who set them free to live…
That movie moved me and inspired me deeply
when it came out 20 years ago
it challenged me to dream, to feel
to discover who I was instead of
what everyone else expected me to be
It reminded me that life is so much more
than intellect and sophistication
Life is joy,
life is passion
life is beauty
And that’s what the Songs of Solomon are about

I bet Mr. Keating loved the Songs of Solomon
because the words drip like honey on your lips
It is poetry
It’s a love poem
that celebrates the fullness of love
between two people
who know and love each other at every level
who never cease to see the beauty in one another
even amidst the wrinkles and sags
and age spots
the lover sees only their beloved
It is about intimate communion
on a physical, spiritual and emotional level
And I guess that’s something that most humans don’t get
because when we were taught about sex
chances are we were taught about it
as the way that babies are made
Few of us were taught that sex
is a joy, a full expression of two people deeply in love
faithful only to one another
wanting to share and know the passion of
that kind of love
Christians don’t talk much about sex
except to encourage shame, secrecy
or suspicion
At the same time, the rest of the world
won’t shut up about it
and yet what the rest of the world celebrates
is just the physical
the rest of the world treats it like a sport
played with many, many partners
No wonder everyone’s confused about it
The Church won’t talk about it
our friends growing up won’t STOP talking about it
so we don’t know how beautiful, how spiritual
and joyous it can be between two people
that promise to be faithful to their beloved forever
to share all of themselves only with each other
And I think that’s a shame
It’s not embarrassing
and I love the fact that those old, sex-less bishops
of the ancient Church
let this book slip by the cutting table

The Songs of Solomon
never even mention God
which is another reason why one wonders
how it made it in
and yet it celebrates love
that is almost other-worldly
and therefore can only come from God
We don’t often think of God as passionate
certainly the old Sunday School image
of the old man with long white hair and long white beard—
kind of like Dumbledore in Harry Potter
certainly that image doesn’t strike us
as passionate, juicy, delicious
and exhilaratingly joyous
But I believe it took a passionate God
to create this world
down the most microscopic details
It took a passionate God
to create all this beauty and wonder
and possibilities for joy
Some scholars suggest that the Songs of Solomon
are a reversal of the curses of the Garden of Eden
The story of the Garden of Eden
is one of shame, guilt and separation
that it seems we’ve never quite gotten over
But in the Songs of Solomon there is joy and delight
no shame about their bodies
no embarrassment
it is like the recreation
of the Garden before the fall
a picture of what it was once like
and can be again
Before relationships were broken
between man and woman
and between people and God
In the Songs,
to be in love with someone
is to find your whole being tied up with your beloved
tied up not as in imprisonment
but that you can’t imagine your life separate from them
it is to want to be wherever they are,
to want good things for them
to even just want to take their hand
and dance in the kitchen
even if there’s no music playing
Wouldn’t it be lovely
if we could be that joyous here?
Wouldn’t it be lovely if we didn’t leave our deepest,
truest selves at the door
when we walked in?
Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could celebrate the passion
of God, the joy of God, the delight of God
like a lover who can’t stop kissing your face?

The woman is the prominent speaker
and it is the only Old Testament book
where a woman gets to speak this much
She is delighted at the very sight of her loved one
coming up over the hill to her
He invites her, “Arise my love, my fair one,
and come away,
for now the winter is past
and the rain is over and gone…
the flowers appear on the earth
the time of singing has come….”
In other words, the cold, dark barrenness is gone
the lifelessness is over
the very world is springing forth
again, budding into new life
as if to express what is going on in their very souls
It is life after death
healing after sorrow,
breathing again after holding your breath forever
it is light coming into the darkness
and shining on your path
It is cool, crisp water
when you feel like you’re dying of thirst
It is a banquet of food
when you’ve been starving to death
It is the feeling of someone’s loving arms around you
when you’ve been lonely so long
It is God taking your chin in hand
drawing your eyes upward
and telling you that you are beautiful,
you are beloved and cherished
by the same God who took the time
to create living things that we can’t even see with the naked eye
the same God who created the galaxies way beyond our own

I believe that every loving relationship
every deep, soul-connecting love
that is faithful and life-giving
whether it be between spiritual friends
or between two lovers
I believe that those relationships
give us just a taste of the Divine
a taste of what is yet to be
a glimpse of the intimate, loving, passionate love
that God has for us
for every living being that God has created
and I believe it gives God great, rapturous joy
when we get it
when we receive it enough to get that light in our eyes
when we dare to share it with another person
in such a way that they are made stronger,
more beautiful, more whole
and more themselves
Arise, The lover of all lovers says to us,
arise, my beloved, and come away for awhile
the winter is past, the rains are gone
life is springing forth inside and outside
and all over the world
and it is beautiful
delight in it
savor it,
and live in the passionate love of God