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.