August 30, 2009
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10; James1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 

      Let us pray.  Most gracious God, whose appearing is as sure as the dawn:  Come to us like the rains that water the earth, showering your blessings upon us and all whom you have made, that we may be strengthened by your love and may share that love with others; in the name of the Source, the Word, and the Spirit.  Amen.  

      In the Hebrew Bible’s beautiful tribute to human love – in Hebrew, the title of the book is shir hashirim, literally, “Song of Songs” – today’s lesson is a part of the verbal exchange between two young lovers.  The speaker is the young woman, who is obviously not a shy, retiring wallflower, since her speeches far outnumber her young lover’s in this short but powerful work.  There has been much scholarly speculation about what is going on here, but what is agreed and acknowledged by most is that the Song consists of a series of dialogues between a young man and woman who are not married.  The setting of this morning’s dialogue is a pre-dawn visit of the young man to the house of the young woman’s family, wherein he entreats her to come away with him to the spring countryside. 

      Most preachers I know would be somewhat reluctant to talk about this passage, or if they do only allude to it in passing as some allegorical imagery of Christ and his bride, the church.  But the unspoken topic that this lesson is alluding to this morning is sex. 

      While it seems that everyone in today’s society is obsessed with sex the last place that people expect to hear any discussion about it is here in church.  If I were to put that topic on a sign in front of the church I am willing to bet that a lot of folks would show up out of sheer curiosity, wanting to know what great and remarkable thing that we would have to say about it that hasn’t already been discussed on some talk show or in some ‘how to’ manual. 

      That would probably be because we have done a poor job as a church, addressing the entire issue of sexuality from our pulpits.  After all, sex and money are the two topics that lead both clergy and congregations into fits of apoplexy.  There is also the fact that most of us grew up in the church with very mixed messages and a whole lot of guilt around sexual issues, with one of the most ironic, loud and clear messages being, in effect, that “Sex is dirty…so you should save it for marriage.”  Say what? 

      That is not really a comforting or encouraging message for a teenager with raging hormones or a lonely person longing for a relationship.  But given the fact that research claims that every man thinks about sex every seven seconds on average and that women only slightly less so, but none-the-less they still think about it, how are we to address the issue of sex in a way that is both biblically sound and practically useful? 

      To begin, we should look at Scripture.  The truth is that the Scriptures are generally not explicit on what to do with our sexual desires, but are very clear about what we are not to do with them.  The Old Testament view of sex is pretty ambivalent, emphasizing more the results rather than the emotions and spiritual connotations.  Sex in the Old Testament is part of God’s good creation, but like everything else, it is subject to God’s protective law. 

      What the Torah and the prophets are very clear about is that without some legal controls and regulation, sexual desire can be dangerous and is easily used by humans for self-serving and destructive purposes.  The Torah describes various prohibitions, while the prophets resort to the use of the metaphors of lust and prostitution to describe Israel’s craving for idol worship.  Outside most contexts, the Bible generally views sex as the equivalent of a lit fuse.  Think of Bodacious, the most famous rodeo bull of all time:  1800 pounds of angry, bucking fury.  You have a better chance of strapping nitro glycerin on his back and sending him safely into the rodeo arena without blowing the stands to bits rather than controlling the sexual urges of teenagers living in a sex-soaked, sex-crazed culture like ours. 

      Granted, that’s probably a bit over stated.  But not much.  Author Pamela Paul (Pornified:  How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families) writes that we live in a pornified culture.  She writes that a pornified view of sexuality sees people as mere bodies and love as a naked contact sport where the winner receives a pleasurable prize.  But if the culture has pornified sex, the church has prude-ified it, a perspective that seeks to pretend that we don’t relate and react to one another physically.  Both views focus on only one dimension of human relationships.  The writer of the Song of Solomon is not as concerned with the consummation of a physical relationship as they are with the desire and commitment that create a dynamic sense of anticipation for the couple. 

      In verses 8 and 9, the woman anticipates her lover journeying to be near her, and for him to come to her quickly like a “gazelle” or “young stag.”  Later in verse 16, we discover that they are committed to one another:  “My lover is mine and I am his,” but the woman sends her lover away in verse 17.  The consummation of their love is delayed in favor of a playful and passionate sense of anticipation.  Throughout the entire book, the lovers move toward and away from one another almost as like a dance, in a sense revealing that desire and anticipation are much more intoxicating than instant gratification. 

      This waiting and longing are not a type of punishment for these two lovers.  Instead, the lovers are willing to wait for one another because they know that each is fully committed to the relationship.  They are free to dream about one another because each knows what the other is wanting.  This is not going to be a one night stand – it is all about unbridled passion found within the bonds of committed love. 

      The truth is that real intimacy is the result of a lot of time and energy invested in commitment, loving our partners with our hearts long before we love them with our bodies.  The Song of Solomon ends without a resolution, the lover’s still anticipating being with each other.  That lack of resolution leads us to remember an important truth:  the more we learn about one another, the more we spend time moving toward one another, and even spending time apart, the more we intertwine our brains and spirits before intertwining our bodies, the deeper and more long-lasting our love becomes. 

      The church has “prude-ified” sex over the centuries by wrapping it up in a corset, shutting it into the back of the closet and throwing away the keys.  Is it any wonder that most people make the assumption that God for the most part frowns on the whole idea of sex as a kind of necessary evil?  Both clergy and churches tend to either emphasize a puritanical and “prude-ified” view of sex on the one hand or, more often than not, we tend not to say much about it at all. 

      That is probably why when the Song of Solomon shows up every three years in the lectionary it can have the same effect as discovering a centerfold tucked inside the pages of a theology textbook.  We are not exactly sure what to do with this erotic piece of literature that finds itself located almost in the exact center of our Bible.  But it can probably be argued that it is the one single book of the Bible that most people will turn to in a pew Bible when the sermon of the day doesn’t hold our attention or our seven seconds are up. 

      If the culture has pornified sex, and the church has prude-ified sex, then God has sanctified, or purified sex.  The Song of Solomon is anything but ambivalent about sex and for that matter seems to promote an almost wild and free view of love and sexual desire.  God is mentioned only peripherally in the book; there is no mention about procreation, without any legal prescriptions or boundaries discussed.  It is a long, lusty poem about two lovers pining for each other and imagining the joy of their ultimate union. 

      While Song of Solomon may seem to some people to be a pornified, panting essay in ancient literature, it is anything but.  If most of our culture’s focus on sex is of the detached and two-dimensional kind found in magazines and on the internet, Song of Solomon promotes a view of sex that is wholly three dimensional and placed in the context of a committed-but-uninhibited relationship between people deeply in love with one another. 

      The Song of Solomon is in point of fact a “purified” view of love and sex.  When partners are committed to one another and have taken the time to develop a passionate desire for one another, then sex becomes a wonderful expression of a deeper intimacy.  In a “purified” world, sex itself is neither prize nor product, but one dimension of a three-dimensional relationship. It is not about self, shame or a magazine subscription.  It is about pure, unbridled guilt-free passion with the one person that you know through and through. 

      Scholars have long debated about whether or not the Song of Solomon should be in the biblical canon at all, while some have suggested that it is simply an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel or Christ and the Church.  While we will probably never know if the author had that in mind specifically, we do know that in these verses we see the kind of intimacy that God intended for us to have with God and with one another from the beginning – a relationship where desire and commitment will in the end win out over objectification and selfishness.  Amen.