Potentially Problematic: Passion (Song of Songs 2:8-13)

Ordinary Time

The Bride Adores Her Beloved

⁸The voice of my beloved!
    Behold, he comes,
leaping over the mountains,
    bounding over the hills.
⁹My beloved is like a gazelle
    or a young stag.
Behold, there he stands
    behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
    looking through the lattice.
¹⁰My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my beautiful one,
    and come away,
¹¹for behold, the winter is past;
    the rain is over and gone.
¹²The flowers appear on the earth,
    the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
    is heard in our land.
¹³The fig tree ripens its figs,
    and the vines are in blossom;
    they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my beautiful one,
    and come away.” (ESV)

Show of hands (emojis, if you’re with us online): who here has read the book Song of Songs? Who here has heard of it?

It is not a particularly oft-used text; in fact, this is the only time in the Revised Common Lectionary, the three-year cycle of Scriptures used by many mainline denominations both Protestant and Catholic, that anything from this book appears. There are eight chapters in Song of Songs; the lectionary, this once, uses six verses.

It is mildly unsurprising; the Song of Songs is a postexilic collection of love poetry.

Rev. Dr. Alyce McKenzie writes that, “While it has Egyptian counterparts, and other love poems must have been composed in biblical times, [Song of Songs] is the only example of secular love poetry from ancient Israel that has survived.”[1]

Through the history of the Church, the prevailing attitude around this book has been to make it into an allegory—my beloved may indeed gaze through my windows and call me to go with him to the garden, but only in a metaphorical sense because surely this is a love dialogue between God and the Church. We would not be so crass as to imagine it between human lovers, not when this is Scripture. And there is textual support for that; the translators and commentators through the years were not wrong to see that covenant, that relationship, in these verses.

But Scripture so often invites us to more than one single reading. This, alongside the book of Esther, is one of only two books in our canonical Bible that never mentions God by name. Pastor Alphonetta Wines points out, “The poems are spoken by a man, a woman, and a chorus that periodically comments on what is happening between the two lovers. Unlike most books in the scriptures, the woman’s voice is clearly heard. In the intimacy and anticipation of love, her voice rings out in ‘close to 75 percent of the poems.’”[2] This is not only a celebration of love but of equal love, of consenting love that binds the two together in shared affection.

“My beloved speaks and says to me, ‘Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come away.’”

The Church has an awful lot to say about physical intimacy. We talk about who should have it, with whom people should have it, when they should have it, how they should have it, why they should have it. We so very rarely take the time to bless the reality that we do have it, to speak of the beauty of coming together as passionate human beings giving and being given ourselves.

Before I knock you too far off your Sunday expectations, let me clarify. We humans are designed with a biological draw to sex. We’re built for it. And then some folks are wired not to want it, which is okay; asexual people are as much God’s creations as allosexual, or sexually attracted, people. But the point is that the Church has so much to say about the doing of sex that we forget to celebrate that it exists at all, that is it one way in which we can get as close to another person as possible and delight in them, in their created self.

Enter Song of Songs. “The flowers appear on the earth and the time of singing has come”. Have you ever missed someone so much, whether they were your spouse or just a good friend who meant a lot to you, that it made the whole day brighter to see them at last? We are a connectional people, and I don’t just mean us Methodists; we humans are made for each other, given to each other by a God Whom we believe to be grounded in relationship—one in three, three in one, the Trinity forever connecting. The second creation story in Genesis 2 tells us that God made a human and then saw that he was lonely; “it is not good that a human should be alone,” God said,[3] and made another person. We connect to each other in all sorts of ways—through Zoom chats, phone conversations, letters, coffee dates, hugs, kisses, sex.

Contrary to some of the mixed messaging of the Church’s history, there is no moment where God says sex is inherently bad. The fact that the Church put an entire book of love poems into our sacred text is a clue to that. It can be a wondrous thing, a single part of the entire relationship in which we love another person in such a way that we look for each other leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills, straining our ears to hear our beloved’s voice call, “Arise, and come to me.”

What this snippet of love poetry teaches us, however, is that sex and passion and love and relationship and affection and connection have to be wrapped up in a very clear understanding of what love is; of what love asks of us in respect for each other.

“The Song celebrates faithful human love,” writes Professor Kathryn Schifferdecker. “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…that is marked by mutuality and fidelity.”[4]

Some of you may have heard some uproar in the past two weeks about a website called OnlyFans. (This may seem like an abrupt shift, but stay with me.) OnlyFans started in 2016 as a social media subscription platform intending to connect creators with their fan base in a way that supported conversation but still allowed creators to monetize their work.[5] Perhaps unsurprisingly, the site quickly developed a following for sexually explicit content. With the lockdown last year, the numbers of creators and subscribers alike jumped as people turned to the internet for both a way to connect and a way to earn money.

A week and a half ago, OnlyFans announced that it would be shutting down all sexually explicit content beginning in October in the hopes of drawing investors who didn’t want to be connected to the sale of pornography. The backlash was immediate and fierce; the American news commentator Philip DeFranco interviewed one of the OnlyFans content creators who would be impacted by the decision and she said she felt betrayed by the decision; “This just kind of felt like the one really safe place” online where she could do her work. She said she wasn’t particularly surprised, however, “because honestly, no platforms care about sex workers.”[6]

OnlyFans reversed their decision this past week, by the way. All explicit content can stay.[7]

“The voice of the turtledove is heard in our land”. I am absolutely dropping this story of the marginalization of sex workers into a sermon about passion because we who are called to the fidelity of respectful love are also called to acknowledge how we have helped create a culture that does not work to realize that love. The Song of Songs is a rich and wonderful back-and-forth between two lovers, a wandering tapestry of “the joys, the ups and the downs, even painful longing when apart and violence against the woman by her community when she searches for her lover, of a relationship between two human beings who love one another”.[8] It is an invitation built into our holy text that we are bound to each other, sexually or no, in relationship that is meaningful enough to make a loved one’s return feel like spring, that calls us into loving and being loved in the holiest of ways.

But we have spent so much time talking about how passion leads us astray, how sex is dangerous, how the wiles of lust twist us into something evil, that we—we of the Church, we of Midwestern prudishness, we of generational reserve, we have taken passion away from the narrative of love and boxed it off as its own problem. We do not have sex workers and porn sites because humanity is weirdly perverted—well, not only; we have sex workers and porn sites because we have told the parts of ourselves that yearn for that kind of closeness and that want to celebrate in our gazelle or our young stag that it is wrong, that it is shameful, that we cannot call to our lovers and speak of ripening figs.

And then we ostracize the ones who step into that space as a profession? We turn away from their economic exploitation, their lack of safe space, and say that they should have had a better career? How, then, shall we call ourselves Christian?

When Jesus allowed a sinful woman—commonly thought to have been a prostitute—to wash his feet at Simon’s house with the oil from her alabaster jar, He did not say that all sex is terrible and your connection with it has made you less than human. He said, “Your sins are forgiven…Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”[9] When Jesus is asked about divorce by the Pharisees, He doesn’t say everyone should go into seclusion and never have sex again because it’s gross. He talks about how infidelity is the real sin.[10] Over and over again, Jesus draws us back to our connection to each other, our passionate selves that reach out with oh-so-physical fingertips and say “the winter is past; / the rain is over and gone” because we have each other, because we respect each other, because we are passionate about the command to love one another as we love ourselves, naming the fingerprints of God on our created selves. Everyone is part of that creation—including our beloveds.

“Arise, my love, my beautiful one”. “Today’s lesson, like the larger work[,] celebrates human sexuality as part of God’s good creation,” writes Professor Wil Gafney. “[T]he garden setting may well be intended to evoke the Garden of Eden…In the Song, the woman and man are in harmony with one another and with the natural world; the brokenness of relationships between humans and between humans and the earth is healed.”[11]

What a wondrous way to celebrate this poem of yearning and love and passion: to heal the fear we have of our own passionate selves. What a beautiful step toward the justice Jesus modeled for us: to call for protection of those who are broken on the commercialistic wheel of shame our faith tradition helped create. Gafney continues, “The Greek philosophical tradition that will become so important to the Church Fathers as many of them reject and restrict sensuality, sexual love and bodiliness is unknown here. This text does not share the later dualism separating flesh and spirit inspired by Greek philosophy in which the body and its desires are regarded as being lower or lesser than spiritual things. Body and soul are one here, united in love.

“As a part of the larger Christian canon, this passage is also available for an incarnational reading, focusing on the humanity in which Jesus of Nazareth was clothed. That humanity was not just miserable unredeemed flesh, but also joyful, loving, touching, sexually mature flesh.”[12]

“My beloved speaks and says to me: / ‘Arise, my love, my beautiful one, / and come away, / for behold, the winter is past; / the rain is over and gone.”

We have been imprisoned in the winter of our own uncertainty for so long, Church; we have watched the unending rain of disconnect from our passionate selves, made good at the very beginning by a God Who loved what was crafted from the muddy earth. Shall we breathe deeply of the fragrance of flowering figs that draws us to live in the world as though we are meant to be here in the fulness of who we are, claiming the fidelity shown us in equal relationships that value all participants? Shall we reclaim the passion we have been given by a passionate God Who taught us to love in all the wondrous varieties as partners who willingly, consensually, beautifully dance over the hills while the turtledove sings? Shall we take up our position in the public square as followers of a Christ Who saw all people as worthy of loving and being loved? I hope so. I pray so.
May we have the wonder to embrace the fullness of our created selves in love, the courage to embrace the fulness of our created selves in love, and the passion to embrace the fulness of our created selves in love. Amen.