Falling in Love - Sermon August 30 2009

Preached at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC

Song of Songs 2:18-13

Dedicated to Professor David M. Carr, who taught me about the Scriptures, and my wife Betsy, who taught me the rest, and always to the glory of God.

The Song of Songs, sometimes called the Song of Solomon, is a series of poems about a man and a woman in love, about their consuming passion and longing for one another. It is a love story, and if you assumed that the Bible had no place for romantic writings, it is only because this book has been largely ignored in recent generations. The passage we heard today isn’t the half of it. Read a bit more this afternoon and you’ll see what I’m talking about. In our Christian Bibles, the Song of Songs is found next to the Psalms, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. These writings are known as books of wisdom. They are not historical in the way that other scripture is, with references to people and places and events. Rather, these are poetic musings on the nature of the world, our lives, and God. However, the Song of Songs contains no mention of God by any name. It seems to be simply a poem about two people in love, which is probably the reason it is so often overlooked in favor of more Godly passages. But it was not always so.

“Rabbi Akiba, one of the founding figures of rabbinic Judaism, is reported to have said that ‘The whole of time is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel. All the writings are holy; the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.’” For years, when scriptures were copied by hand, the Song of Songs was copied more than any other book, and in the medieval Christian church, there are more sermons on the Song of Songs than on any other book except for the Psalms and the Gospel according to John. (David M. Carr, The Erotic Word, 2003, pg. 4) Obviously, there is something of value to be found here.

The Song of Songs is good news first of all because it affirms that God celebrates being in love. God is a romantic. I don’t mean that God is sappy, or sugary sweet. I mean that God is a romantic in the old way, like Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, except much older. The Song of Songs is an answer to the idea that that romantic love is only an illusion, a biological trick, and simply a prelude to heartbreak. Nor is romantic love a trivial thing, the stuff of chick flicks or the daydreams of youth. The Song of Songs stands in the sacred scriptures to proclaim that romantic love is wonderful, a gift of God to be celebrated. There is a Hebrew proverb that says when we die we will be judged for the good things God gave us which we refused to enjoy. In Dante’s version of hell, there is a place for those who were grave when they had cause to rejoice. As a sidebar, when Dante or a proverb speaks of the afterlife, it is only always a way to say something about this life. Dante doesn’t mean that God is waiting to punish us; he means that when we close ourselves off from the gifts of life, we create a hell in this life.

So we hear the Song of Songs in worship and we give thanks to God for love in all its wonder. But there is more. The Song of Songs is about much more than the celebration of love as a gift from God. The Song of Songs says that God is in love with us, and that we are falling in love with God. That message explains what the Song of Songs is doing in the scriptures, without a mention of God. It's there because, for millennia, Jewish and Christian readers have found in this love story an allegory of God’s love story with humanity. God is in there, they have found, and so are we.

Let’s step back and think about what it means to have a love story as a metaphor for our relationship with God. We have other metaphors found in scripture: Parent and child; Lord and humble servants; a Creator who fashions living creations; and Jesus called us friends. Each image describes something important about our relationship with God. Each one is an invitation to a new way of understanding our relationship to God.

So let us not overlook the metaphor of a love story, of the lover and the beloved. The image is hinted at in the prophets, in the letters of the New Testament, and in Revelation, when John has a vision of God creating a new heaven and a new earth, and the city of Jerusalem, which stands for all of God’s people, appears as a bride for her bridegroom.

All this tells us that having faith in God is more than believing and giving yourself in humble service. Having faith is falling in love. What happens when we fall in love? (And as we ponder that question, think about falling in love with God.) When we fall in love, we find that our beloved is constantly in our thoughts. We go to sleep and wake up thinking about our beloved. We spend our days noticing things that she would notice, and finding reminders everywhere of things he has said or done.

When we fall in love, it is not only our beloved whom we find wonderful, but things and people all around us. Being in love gives us eyes to see goodness and beauty everywhere we look. We find greater joy in food, music, family, neighbors, the sun, and even the rain. It’s like that song from the Music Man, “There was love, all around, but I never heard it singing. No, I never heard it at all, til there was you.”

When Betsy and I fell in love, and we said over and over those words “I love you,” I actually found myself expressing love more often to others. It’s something about the practice, and the feeling of overflowing that love gives to us.

It’s a change to think about faith as falling in love. It suggests that you don’t choose faith in order to make you a better person - because it’s good for you, and you don’t choose faith because you’re worried about the possibility of hell, or God’s wrath. You choose faith because God loves you, God finds you, God comes to whatever it is that you are hiding behind, and in the words we heard this morning, “There he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice. My lover spoke and said to me, ‘Arise, …my beautiful one, and come with me. See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come.’”

God proclaims that the winter of our fear, or hurt, or plain old sinfulness and brokenness, is over. And we fall in love. We think about God day and night. Experiences in our lives, big and small, remind us of God. And the goodness we see spills over to joy, and is given in love to others. When love for God becomes a practice, it overflows to others, until we have love, as Jesus told us we would, even for our enemies, and for the least and poorest of our brothers and sisters.

Falling in love is followed by growing in love, in which we learn to know and understand our beloved more deeply. We discover how to maintain the practice of love through good times and bad, through illness and sadness, through changes and challenges: rich or poor, in sickness and in health. When we grow in love with God, it is sustained by our practices of worship, of service, of relationships with our community, and prayer.

When we grow in love with God, we become a fuller person. We become what God created us to be. Iraneous of Lyon, a bishop of the 2nd century, said that “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” God loves you, and God’s love brings us to full life.

Three Wishes

What if you were granted three wishes, just as if you were in a fairy tale? What would you wish for? In John Crowley’s novel The Solitudes, Pierce has been working on this problem since childhood. It takes some work, because there are many traps and pitfalls, as we learn from all those fairy tales. Too much greed has a way of backfiring. Think of King Midas who wished to turn all that he touched to gold, only to lose the ones he love to gold statues. Too much altruism is also a problem. A wish for an end to war might be granted by making you the only living human on earth. If you wish for someone to fall in love with you, it will never feel like the love is real. Likewise for wishing to become a popular published author. Success can only be enjoyed if you feel that you have really earned it. Better, Pierce decides, to keep the wishes smaller, more predictable.

Pierce decides that his first wish will be for a full life of good health until a natural old age. His second wish is for a steady modest income, achieved without harm to himself or anyone else. He will phrase each wish carefully so that there can be no misunderstandings, no loopholes that could allow bad consequences.

For the third wish, Pierce think it would be good to wish for a complete loss of the memory that these three wishes were ever granted and fulfilled. Even the modest wishes of health and reliable income might have negative affects. Knowing that these wishes were granted would remove any experience of risk. No longer would one sense the fragility of life, or the motivation to healthful choices. Better, Pierce thinks, to have the wishes granted but not to know about it.

Then a new thought occurs to him. Maybe they already have been granted! Maybe he really has been granted three wishes and used them just as he is now planning. How would one ever know? It is a thrilling idea.

And it makes me wonder, what wonderful things have been given to us? Are there things about our lives that we would have wished for before we had them, but which are now too often taken for granted? Would you have wished for the place you live, for your family, your health, your friends? Would you have wished to have just a glimpse of the holy center of all things, the creator of the universe, who loves you as a parent loves a child? What if all of us have been granted wishes?

"What are you doing here?"

I heard a story recently of a person who had stopped attending her church. She didn’t stop for any one particular reason. She didn’t quit in protest of a church doctrine or the new color of the carpet. She hadn’t suddenly become an atheist, or disillusioned with what we sometimes call the institutional church (or, “organized religion”). It just kind of happened. She got busy and missed a few Sundays in a row, and then a few more, and by then she kind of had a new routine, a new weekend schedule. Like so many people, she continued to think of herself as a part of her church. It would certainly be the place she went to if she needed pastoral support, or if someone in her family died, or if she wanted to go somewhere on Easter.

This is a common story. It happens to people for months, years, or even decades. And then one day, something draws them back. Maybe they’ve run into someone from the congregation at grocery store. Maybe things aren’t going so well. Maybe they miss the community, the music, the quiet ritual of prayer. Maybe they’re lives just become less busy. Whatever the reason, this woman who had not been to church in a long time decided to return one Sunday. She prepared for church just as she had always done before. I don’t know for sure, but maybe she asked someone if the times for worship had changed (this does happen sometimes). She arrived, parked her car, walked in the door and was greeted by a woman who was serving as an usher that morning. This usher recognized her, and said to her “what are you doing here?”

Once again, this woman stopped attending her church. This time, there was a very particular reason.

We have all come to worship at some time with the sense that we didn’t really deserve to be welcomed there. We have all felt uncertain whether our presence at church would be questioned. If you haven’t felt this, just wait. I bet it’ll happen sooner or later. So thank God for all the people who stand at the doors to give a welcome as warm and accepting as the welcome given by Jesus Christ.