We Are Made for Communion.

 Song of Songs 2:1-7

July 25, 2021

Smithtown, NY

I.

Song of Songs is saturated with nature imagery.  There has always been a tradition in Christianity that creation is God’s “big book,” and Scripture is God’s
“little book,” and both say the same things in different ways.  And what both say most clearly is that “God is love.”

In fact, that is the one verse in the Bible that serves as the best and most concise summary of our faith: “God is love,” 1 John 4:8b.  And that is what this particular book is about, using human sexual intimacy as the guiding metaphor.

God’s creation in the beginning is an act of profound, inclusive, universal, and infinite love; it is the divine, trinitarian self overflowing in self-emptying ecstasy and affection.  The Trinity, for all its being made overly complex and refined to intellectual incomprehensibility, simply means that the one God is a relationship of mutual, reciprocal love of three hypostases or faces, persons, dimensions, facets, perspectives, under-standings.…  

This act of love in creation is finally completed in the outpouring of God’s love in Jesus Christ, who is God’s Word of creation, in whom God becomes flesh and whose shed blood and shared Spirit sanctifies, reconnects, and enlivens everything that God made.  Christ reveals God’s love at the heart, and as the substance, of everything.  

We experience God’s love in nature in the very way that nature operates, the way that life reproduces and multiplies, and even in the way that we all are fed and feed each other in the circle of life.  Fruit does not simply sprout on stem, vine, or branch independently; it requires cooperation in the interaction of male and female.  It requires relationship.  We are surrounded and immersed in an environment that is saturated with sex, from the song of the cicadas in the trees this summer, to the lush tomatoes inflating in our gardens.  

God created us for connection and interaction and cooperation.  God created us for community because as Trinity God is a community of love, and that communitarian frequency or pattern is encoded and embedded in our very nature as created beings.  It is written in our souls and bodies.

Biologists have been reconsidering Darwin’s doctrine of “survival of the fittest.”  Seen through the perverse and twisted mind of modern individualism that phrase has meant that the most powerful, violent, selfish, and cruel individuals survive.  This violent ideology is used to justify rapacious and destructive social, economic, and ecological practices by humans.  

But now we are realizing that “survival of the fittest” really means that organisms and life-forms survive and thrive because they have learned how to “fit” together with others.  In reality it is the cooperative, the reciprocal, and the mutually beneficial who survive.  

Indeed, recent science reveals that not even trees are rugged individuals in mortal competition with others for scarce nutrients, as we have habitually assumed according to our ego-centric delusions.  But trees have lived for millions of years developing ingenious and subtle ways of communication and mutual support.  As people of faith we know that this is because of the inherently cooperative, interactional, communitarian nature of the One who created them, and embedded them, and us, with a mortal need to connect and relate.

God created this whole place permeated with love, right down to the cells and atoms of our bodies, extended out even to the attractional nature of gravity, which we don’t even fully understand.

And the Song of Songs presents all this in the imagery, flavors, actions, and metaphors of human love and erotic desire.  We are made for communion, and that “we” begins here with two people, and then is extended to include everything from rocks to light, with all living beings in between.

II.

So in the Song, the woman is a rose and a lily; the man is a tree hanging with fruit.  She is sustained by his sweet fruit, and she testifies to his embrace.  She is delicate, attractive, beautiful, and fragrant; he is provider, feeder, caresser, who supports with one hand her head — which is to say her intellect and mind — and with the other hand attends to her body, which says that she is both.  God is not just about what we think and say; God also embraces, delights, inspires, and stimulates what we do with our bodies, our actions.  

God’s fruit, when we receive it, moves us to bear fruit ourselves.  Life is a mutual fruit-bearing.  We love others because, and as an expression, of God’s love for us.  God’s love is physical and our response to God is physical; God feeds us and we therefore and thereby feed others.  Anything that we try to keep is dead and inert; we only receive from God what we give away to others in community.

We must not fall into the trap of thinking that this book necessarily presents us with a duality, as if “God is the male, and creation, people, the Church, Israel, the individual soul is female.”  That can lead to bad places when we decide, in the sinful self-interest of dominant men, that this means somehow men are more like God and are therefore to be treated as superior.  But the man in the Song is not “superior” in terms of power and domination, but cares and gives and offers himself for and to the woman.

The different roles presented here are all aspects within God’s love; the One who gives also receives and the One who receives also gives.  The woman could also represent God’s Holy Wisdom, a female figure in the Bible.  The point is to resist the urge to force this into a subject/object, superior/subordinate framework.  

  For what we see in the Song is all God and all of creation as an interactive and mutual dance which cannot be diced into the kind of domination and oppositional language that satisfies the egos of the powerful.  

Every one of us has both masculine and feminine characteristics and traits.  There is not a rigid either/or here, which society often demands; rather we all live somewhere on a continuum of male and female.  And so does God.  Genesis itself says we were created “in the image of God…, male and female.”  God, and God’s Image, includes male and female.  God is both and humans are both.     

So the Song depicts a joyful dance, an intimate, mutual encounter, a wild embrace joining and balancing the necessary elements of love: giver and receiver, nurturer and protector.  This engagement generates the energy of life itself, and it comes from, and is, the identifying signature of, God.  God’s primary act is creation; love is both the cause of creation and the way creation happens, through the interaction of different elements playing, weaving, and kneading together in relationship and community.  In the Song of Songs we are given a kind of glimpse into the very source-code of how creation itself works.

III.

Unfortunately, not only do we habitually and chronically forget this basic and fundamental truth of the universe, many if not most of us have never even heard of it.  And if we have heard of it, we almost certainly didn’t hear it in church.

This is a tragedy, that the very community called by the Creator to bear witness to it most explicitly, has repressed, suppressed, and oppressed, this truth to the point where precisely the opposite usually gets expressed.  The Church ended up too often merely dutifully ratifying the values and morals of Empire, insisting that God and creation, male and female, spirit and matter, humans and animals, different races, classes, and nations are in opposition where one is considered not just better, but where the “good” has to exterminate, or at least subjugate, the “bad.”

This attitude, which is purely a product of human egocentricity applying its own fear-driven values and structures to things, has dominated human civilization and existence, especially for the last 500 years, to the point where we are driving species to extinction at an unprecedented rate, poisoning the natural world, and kicking the atmosphere out of balance.  

From within this lethal mind-set we are helpless to do anything about any of this.  So we watch in helpless horror as wildfires explode, the temperature soars, floods rage, hurricanes strengthen, sea-level rises, habitats disappear, the number of living things on Earth declines and the number of refugees swells, our politics disintegrates into toxic insanity, and pandemics spread and mutate.  (And a handful of people who made themselves obscenely rich off of this planetary catastrophe entertain themselves by going into space.)

We have forgotten the ultimate way, truth, and life of the universe, revealed in Jesus Christ and celebrated in this obscure book in the Bible: that God has created us all by, for, and in love.  We — that is, all creation — are created for communion… with God and with each other.  We have forgotten this, and consequently we exist in a narcissistic, nihilistic lie that is killing us and all creation.

We need to remember this truth and goodness.  But, as we see at the end of this passage, holding this memory alone will not immediately make things right.  The woman in the Song remembers whose she is: “O that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me!” she cries.

Then she advises others, the “daughters of Jerusalem,” invoking the beautiful wildness of gazelles and birds: ”Do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!”  I find that very troubling because it means, “Don’t get your hopes up, don’t get too excited, don’t allow yourself to be aroused too soon, don’t dissolve in an erotic swoon before it is time!”

IV.

In other words, do not wallow in the past or fantasize about the future.  Do not live in either memory or longing.  Neither of those alternatives is real.  They are different kinds of illusion and may be easily manipulated.  They are lies.

Rather, I wonder if this book isn’t advising us simply to be here now.  Be present.  To find within ourselves in this moment God’s living Presence, which is always here.  We have to learn to center ourselves, to set aside memory and longing, to open ourselves to, and fall into, the arms of love, the embrace of Creator and creation, at our deepest place.  That is where we discover and emerge into God.

For this last verse resolves into the rest of chapter 2, which will conclude with a consummation of Presence and union, when she finally exults: “My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies.”  She dissolves in the delight of a true union which is always in her power, if she would only let go and receive it.

What we have to let go of is our delusion of separation.  In Genesis, the fall of humanity did not happen when they ate the forbidden fruit; but when the snake got the woman to talk about God as if God were not there.  God subtly became an object, the world became a thing, the fruit became a commodity to be evaluated and consumed, humans thought they were separate from creation, “and they were ashamed.”

The Church, the gospel community, is called to be a place where we realize and recover our original blessing, our essential connectedness, our communion with and in each other, through Jesus Christ, in whom God becomes flesh to dwell among us, who is true humanity and truly God in one person.  Showing us that so are we.

The early Church affirms that: What Christ is by nature, we are by grace.  We are not separated.  We can now let go of our shame, release our anger, and put down our fear.  We may relax.  We may trust that we are held tight and secure, our mind and body in God’s left and right hands, which are the Spirit and the Word.  And we may glorify and enjoy this God, dancing together in ecstasy and thanksgiving in the glory of this good creation in which we share.

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Beauty Will Save the World.

 

Song of Songs 1:9-17

July 18, 2021 + Smithtown

I.

In Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Idiot, the title character, the naive, epileptic, Christ-like Prince Myshkin, makes this comment that “beauty will save the world.”  I have to say that for Presbyterians that is a barely intelligible remark.  Beauty is not a main part of our religious tradition.

For instance, the word “beauty” only appears twice in our Book of Confessions, both times in the Confession of 1967, which means it took 450 years for us to think of beauty as having any significant theological value.  We’re not known for beauty or much attention to the visual arts at all.  I find classic, spare, Puritan worship spaces to be quite beautiful, in a very Zen-like, understated, spare, and simple way.  But most people might wonder if beauty was what the architect was aiming for.  They were very practical, colorless, image-free, common, and unadorned.  Our tradition tends to be iconoclastic and un-sensory.  It’s all about what we hear; other senses, like the visual, are irrelevant.  (That’s why some of the pews don’t even face the front.  There is nothing to see here.)  This is one of the factors that makes a book like Song of Songs a mystery to us, if not actually offensive.

Song of Songs is about beauty; it is about sensuality, physicality, and even sexuality as values in themselves and as metaphors for the love of God.  This passage pays a lot of attention to fragrance.  In my experience most Presbyterian sanctuaries, if they smell like anything, smell like Lemon Pledge or some other cleaning product. 

But this book wants to connect with all our senses.  These images are supposed to transport us almost to an alternate state of consciousness.  In Song of Songs, God’s love is anything but linear, abstract, and cerebral; it is visceral and consumes the whole person; it stimulates our memory, reminding us that God is somehow present with and within everything that God has made, and that God has always been closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

I mean, look at this opening image.  Song of Songs is mostly an erotic dialogue between the King and the Black Woman, representing different manifestations of God and the human.  Here the King compares her to a “mare among Pharaoh’s chariots.”  Egyptian cavalry only used male horses, which means that the sudden presence of a female among them would have been extremely… distracting.  It could even have thrown into chaos the most potent military power of the time.  Egypt had enslaved the Israelites for centuries prior to the Exodus; it is the great Evil Empire of much of the Hebrew Scriptures.  And this brief image basically tells us that love for God disrupts even armies and empires by appealing to a desire much deeper than the following of orders and the craving for conquest.  The terror of a multitude of armed horsemen can be neutralized by one attractive mare. 

Life wins in the end; life always finds a way.  God has fashioned the world so that life and love always overcome.  Love is profoundly liberating.  “Make love, not war” is therefore a deeply biblical sentiment.  The first commandment God gives to humans, even before the one about not eating from a certain tree, is, “Be fruitful and multiply.”  The woman in the Song exhibits this blessed desire, this fire of life, this beautiful love and attraction at the core of our very being, and within everything that lives, like the song of a trillion Cicadas now echoing through the forests.   

II.

Love, even God’s love, is physical and sensory.  We know how aromas can transport us through memory to our childhood or youth.  How often are these memories really about love?  The smell of cooking pot-roast reminds me of going to my grandparents’ for Sunday dinner; roasting turkey smells like Thanksgiving.  Who doesn’t recall the perfume or cologne of their first love, or their spouse of many years?  For whom does the aroma of fir trees not bring them back to Christmases past?  And of course there was a particular herbal scent that I will always associate with rock concerts.  Bookstores, swimming pools, the ocean… all have smells that might overwhelm us with deep, warm feelings.

Scents fix and ground our emotions, bringing us back to times of delight and joy.  The way to love and beauty is often through our olfactory.  Here the erotic encounter between two lovers is depicted as an airy blending of two pungent aromas, spikenard and myrrh, into one.  

Our relationships with each other, and our relationship with God, are physical, sensory, and enfleshed, which is to say, incarnate.  They are not just something we think and read about.  The spiritual is not abstract or purely rational; it isn’t somehow above all that.  It pervades and permeates the whole person, including our body, the same way a powerful scent infuses the air in a room, and even jars our memory and can cause physical reactions.  All of which demonstrates that faith is not just this opinion we have in our minds or a creed we say with our lips, but it is something that gets to the core of who we are and influences and shapes what we do in our bodies.  It is not like the way we passively watch TV, listen to a podcast, or read a book; it touches us directly, bodily, emotionally, and interiorly.

Love consumes us.  It sends us out of control.  We surrender to it.  Indeed, we lose all balance and rationality.  Love liberates us from the cold, linear framework of our minds and even the calculated defenses of our egos.  It drowns in the delight of the connection.  We are created by God for communion with and in God.  We are created for relationship and compassion with and in each other, and all creation.  We are created for koinonia, which is the New Testament word for intimate, mutual, reciprocal, entwined, physical community.

This is good news, especially for people who have been confined to our homes and staring at Zoom for a year and a half.  I know people who think the future of the church is on-line, and I understand what they are saying.  But without the direct physical and the sensory connections I don’t see the true Church.  God “became flesh to dwell among us;” God did not send a thumb drive or a URL link, or even primarily a written document, to be honest.  God does not communicate merely verbally or digitally. 

Love cannot be reduced to chemistry or physics.  There are some long and detailed commentaries on this book, carefully analyzing the nuances and possibilities of every Hebrew word and tracing the history of interpretation over centuries, languages, and cultures.  People like me love that sort of thing.  But it is all beside the point.  The point is to lose ourselves in the love of God, not to analyze it.

Maybe that’s what the Lord Jesus really means when he talks about how we need to lose our life in order to save it.  Maybe it’s not so much a matter of ascetic discipline as erotic surrender.  Maybe it’s not so much controlling the body as it is letting go of our thinking and giving ourselves up to more primal sensation and feeling.

III.

Which most certainly does not sound very Presbyterian.  We have historically been quite cerebral and suspicious of anything smacking of hedonism, not to mention the body and senses.  Just reading and encountering this text is demanding for us.  It makes us uncomfortable.  It might even make some of you wonder, “Is he allowed to say that?”

There are some very good reasons for this.  Because under the domination of our corrupted egos and our distorted desires, our chronic fear, ignorance, and resentment, these urges that God blesses and declares very good get turned into deadly, hateful, destructive, exploitative forces.  We too easily sink into the horrors of sexual assault, human trafficking, child abuse, domestic violence, prostitution, pornography, rape, and a culture that objectifies people and holds them to standards of “beauty” and “desirability” imposed by the demands of commerce. 

And what spawns this in us, this twisting of the good into evil, is our self-centeredness, our conviction that we are independent and alone in a society of enemies and competitors, our illusion of being isolated individuals in a world of scarcity and zero-sum games in which we have to fight to get what we want and someone else has to lose and that’s just the way it is, and it is better to be a winner at all costs.  We admire the winners and the strong, those who take what they want when they want it, by any means necessary.

What is going on in Song of Songs is awesomely powerful and easily abused to do unconscionable harm to the innocent and the weak, when read from a selfish and fearful perspective.  Jesus preaches against gaining and hoarding and keeping and storing and saving stuff for our own individual benefit.  To own something is to kill it; its beauty dissipates and becomes enslaved.

The Lord condemns nothing so much as our ego-centricity, self-righteousness, self-interest, and self- anything that takes and steals and grabs for ourselves by any kind of force or violence.  This is the false self that Jesus insists we have to lose as a condition of gaining our true and deeper and original Selves.  We have to lose our pride, our self-importance, our property, and even our identity for the sake of love and beauty.

That is what is going on in the gospel reading for today.  Mary of Bethany comes to Jesus bearing spikenard, an expensive aromatic ointment, also mentioned in the Song of Songs as the Black Woman’s gift to the king.  Her gift represents herself, her desire, her devotion, her heart, her courageous love.  She anoints Jesus’ feet with it.  Since this is the only time Jesus is ever actually anointed, it is therefore her act that identifies Jesus and gives him his title “anointed one,” which is what “Messiah” and  “Christ” mean.  Her love literally is where he gets that title from.

Her offering represents her ecstatic self-emptying, reflecting Jesus own self-emptying in becoming flesh to dwell among us, and finally giving his life, which expresses God’s very nature in creating the universe for communion and love.  She anticipates his lifting up on the cross and pouring out his own blood for the life of the world in just a few days.  She is showing us what is going on in the Song of Songs where we see, in the words of an old hymn, “love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all.”  We participate in God’s self-emptying love when we empty ourselves in love for others.  In giving of herself to God, Mary shares in the love of God for all.

IV.         

This is where we come to true beauty, a poignant and profound beauty that consumes and completes us, infuses us and is woven within us, connecting us to each other and to everything.  A beauty that negates the negation of death, and blossoms out into resurrection.  A beauty that is not in getting what I want, but in offering what I have so as to merge with all.  This beauty is the love of the Creator permeating all creation.  This beauty that is a sensory overload transporting us into God’s timeless realm of joy.

I grew up in cedar log house in southern New Jersey; so cedar has always smelled like “home” to me.  The aroma of cedar would also have meant “home” to the Jewish people in Jesus’ day, for the interior of the Temple was completely paneled in cedar from Lebanon.  The air would have been permeated with cedar, mixed with the myrrh oil with which everything had been anointed, and the frankincense smoke that filled the air, catching the light so that the air seemed to glow.  Inside the Temple all your senses would have been stimulated; you would know you were in a special, sacred, transcendent space.  

The Temple is the place of love: sacrifice and beauty, death blossoming into life, individual material abundance lost and communal spiritual abundance found and shared together.  Jesus Christ — fully human, fully God — is the new Temple, and he makes our physical bodies little temples by his indwelling Breath or Spirit, and by feeding us with his Body and Blood.  

We are now the place where love lives in the beautiful aromatic blending of the King’s myrrh and the Black Woman’s nard.  Love is this blessed and fruitful mixing, infusion, permeation, and braiding together of two into one, like the veil of the Holy of Holies woven of blue, white, purple, and red yarns representing the elements of creation, and how individual identities get combined and completed to shine as something new.

The Church, the gospel community, is the Body of Christ, the Temple, the open space of coming together for liberation and for the restoration of our original unity and diversity.  The Church is therefore given to us as the place where all are aflame with beauty and desire for the God of love.  It has to be where we lay down and offer up our whole selves, everything we have and are.  Where we bring what we have and receive what we need, where we connect to each other, to our true selves, and to the living God whose fragrance infuses everything.  Where we realize, share, and spread the overwhelming beauty of God, reflected in us.

That is the beauty that saves the whole world.

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