Song of Songs 1:5-8
June 6, 2021 + Baldwin NY
I.
The Bible is about liberation. From at least Exodus on, it is about movement and transformation from a situation of oppression and exploitation, to an expression of freedom and integrity; from bondage to the old self, the old rules, the old values, and the old conventionalities, to a new life in union with God which is the true identity and destiny of human beings, made, as we are, in God’s Image.
And this amazing erotic poem, The Song of Songs, nestled in the middle of the Hebrew Scriptures, is no exception. Here we see this same movement from bondage and domestication to wildness and freedom, from fruitless labor to feral delight, from the mindless and constrictive rat-race to the wide open, blue sky of true freedom.
The opening verses of chapter one described the falling in love of a woman with someone who is only named as “the King,” and an awakening of her deep desire for him. She gets an inkling of an infinitely better world, an unimaginably better life, an impossibly better Lover, the man of her dreams, available and calling to her. It is reminiscent of two of Jesus’ parables: she has become aware of “the treasure hidden in the field,” and “the pearl of great price” which is worth all we have to possess. Now here in this next section she talks about her present stifled situation and how she gets out of it.
The woman is wild and full of life. She embodies the curiosity and wonder, the spirited enthusiasm, the joy of living, the playfulness that is essential to our very humanity. We are created for freedom and wonder, for joy and delight, for communion and playful intimacy.
But this wild energy does not fit inside the fearful conventions of polite and civilized society. She has not adhered to the oppressive rules of order and morality imposed by her “brothers” who control things. This is what she means when she says she has not “kept her own vineyard.” She has been judged as out-of-control, irresponsible, and profligate, perhaps even acquiring the reputation and sour epithets that society slaps on such offenders, like “loose,” or worse. She did not voluntarily yield to the patriarchal order, but stayed wild, like the Spirit, dancing in creation like God’s Wisdom in Proverbs 8.
Therefore, they had to forcibly domesticate her. She was made to function within the parameters set by her stuffy, Puritanical brothers, enslaved even, put to work in their vineyard where they can keep an eye on her and make sure she stays in line. They make sure she is productive for them. This is the circumstance that makes her “dark;” she had to work out in the hot sun all day.
Dark can mean several things. It could be her mood of barely contained rage at being so summarily stifled. Sometimes our dark anger is beautiful if it is rooted in righteousness and and appeal for justice, like that of Jesus when he drives the merchants from the Temple. Her darkness is beautiful because it results from her direct relationship with the Light, the sun, which shines on her even in her domestication. Even under lockdown, she looks upward and dances in the Light. Indeed, she absorbs the Light, the Light becomes her; she reflects and shines with, in, and as the Light. The more Light we absorb, the “darker” we become. Until we, full of and overflowing with God’s Light, arrive at the place of this woman who proudly proclaims herself “black and beautiful.” She has paid her dues, as they say. She has earned her status. When gazing upon her we see not just her but the One one who fills and colors her.
II.
The black woman of the Song also represents the Israelites, the people whom God remembers when they are slaves in Egypt. She in a sense then stands for all of us, when we recognize that even, and perhaps especially, in our times of restriction and domestication, when our wildness and our spirit is being forcibly contained, controlled, constricted, contorted, confined, and crushed out of us, when we work at the demand, and for the benefit of, another, that is when we see God coming to us with deliverance.
Even in the midst of evil, the Light of God nevertheless shines on us and becomes real to us and colors us. God’s true nature is revealed as liberation and love. If we didn’t realize that we are in bondage we would not see and experience this truth. She would not have become so woke and so beautiful. The spiritual fact is that we cannot experience or receive God’s freedom until we understand that we are ourselves imprisoned in a host of circumstances, both by our society and traditions, and by our own minds.
It is no accident that the Lord Jesus, during his earthly ministry, infamously associates with those whom society had dismissed and condemned as hopeless “sinners.” One of the epithets people would use to denigrate those with whom Jesus hung around was: “tax collectors and prostitutes.” Jesus knows that these are exactly the kind of people who are most likely to recognize the Presence of the Light in their midst.
What do we call it when we, like prostitutes, sell our bodies to someone, like to an owner, for 8 hours a day? We call it a “job.” We call it “working for a living.” We call it “being employed.” What do we call it when we, like tax collectors in Jesus’ day, dedicate ourselves to making as much profit as we can, even by stealing and extortion? We call it shrewd investing. We call it business acumen. We call it success.
When people, like the Prodigal Son in Jesus’ great parable, wake up and come to themselves, their eyes are opened and they see the harsh reality of their own situation. They see that they are merely subsisting feeding someone else’s pigs, that they are, in Walter Brueggemann’s memorable phrase, just spending their lives “making bricks for Pharaoh,” in effect, constructing their own prison.
What happens when we find ourselves in this situation of domesticated servitude, our freedom stifled by conventionality, laboring according to our brothers’ rules and assigned role. What happens when it occurs to us that everything we have been taught to desire — money, family, popularity, success, sex, a nice lawn, a good job, an expensive car, a big house — is empty, pointless, and nowhere, just a giant scheme to keep us working in somebody else’s vineyard according to someone else’s rules to make someone else rich? What happens when the very Church, the community that is supposed to be the steward of the liberating gospel, also congeals into a domesticated institution? What happens when it occurs to us that, as in the first of the 12-steps of AA, our life has become unmanageable, and we are headed for extinction?
The woman in the Song awakens to the truth that it doesn’t have to be this way! She gets the idea that, like in the film, The Matrix, “there is something wrong with the world.” Only unlike in that movie, the real world is immeasurably, unimaginably better than the-world-as-we-know-it. What if we discover the existence of love, liberation, ecstasy, and delight; that we have a true Monarch, a Lover, Someone who wants us, cherishes us, feeds us, and satisfies our deepest desire?
III.
What happens is that we seek some way to release our familiar, normal, conventional, domesticated existence, our old life, our old self… and open our hearts to receive this magnificent treasure that has always been right there! All we have to do is let go of our imprisonment, and let freedom wash over us. All we have to do is want it.
This is what the black woman in the Song does. Finding herself apparently miraculously discovered and desired by the King — who is God, Christ, the One her soul loves — she asks where she can go to meet him. Like the woman Jesus encounters at the well who asks him where she can get the “living water” he talks about, she is not satisfied with promises or possibilities. She is not content with talk, she wants to have and experience this Reality. She immediately does what she has to do to extricate herself from her status quo of domestication, and find a way to surreptitiously, illicitly meet the King.
The woman in the Song represents each of our souls; and she reveals the soul of the gospel community, and indeed, all creation, in desperate travail, appealing to the divine Lover: Tell me where to go! Tell me how to meet you! Tell me where you are! What must I do to have eternal life? Where are you staying?
God does not want people who study or analyze, who theorize and hypothesize, who take God for granted, or who think of God as their private or cultural possession to be preserved, protected, or restored. God wants lovers! God wants people who have a crush, who want God so badly they will be vulnerable, take risks, embarrass themselves, break rules, sell everything, buy anything, to be with God! Who do not give up at the first disappointment or setback. Who, like the widow in another of Jesus’ parables, stubbornly, energetically persist!
This is when the King, the One her soul loves, finally speaks. And the answer from the King is that she should follow the pathways marked out on the Earth by the hoof prints of the King’s flock of sheep, which is to say the sacred story. But this sacred narrative is not what we have been fed by the establishment, the “brothers” who clamp down and assign us to labor for them in their vineyard. This is not the Sunday School version of the tradition that somehow domesticates God and seeks to punch out useful, productive, patriotic cogs in the Empire’s economic machine.
Rather, we see that she is the sacred story. For the sacred tradition is the movement of love and liberation itself which she embodies, from bondage to freedom, from servitude to generosity, from being exploited to exploding in expression, from Egypt to the Promised Land, from the cross to the empty tomb. It is a movement, a path, a Way. It leads somewhere.
The stewards of sacred story are not necessarily the accredited scholars and the ordained priests, the pastors and the bishops and the elders of the official religious institutions. For, like the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ time, they all too easily depart from the sacred story and sell-out to the Empire, and end up peddling the same cheap trinkets and restrictive values as the larger society. They ally themselves with the brothers who lock us up to work for their benefit in their vineyard.
The true stewards are those who have actually made this journey. They confess: “I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.” These are the ones who quit their jobs as “tax collectors and prostitutes,” and emerge as shepherds in service of the King, guiding others along the same Way of liberation, leading them home.
IV.
She moves from slaving away in somebody else’s vineyard, to guiding her own small flock of young sheep. She becomes a Good Shepherd. For to follow God is to, in some sense, become God, as the early Church knew. To paraphrase the powerful statement by the pacifist, A.J. Muste, who said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way,” we need to remember that there is no way to love; love is the Way. There is no way to justice; justice is the Way. There is no way to liberation and true freedom; liberation is the Way. There is no way to forgiveness; forgiveness is the Way. There is no way to Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ is the Way. To follow the Good Shepherd is to become a good shepherd. To follow the King is to become one with the King, an event for which this book will use direct, sexual imagery to depict.
This is what the church needs to be: the place where forgiveness and peace, justice and liberation are happening now. The place and gathering where Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is happening now. The place where people don’t just love God, but are together in love with God, and desire more than anything to be filled with God, to be black from absorbing God’s Light, and to shine that Light into the world with wildness, beauty, affection, and delight.
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