A Sermon on the Song of Songs

Arise, my love, my beautiful one

A Sermon on the Song of Songs

Stuart Higginbotham

Last week, we went to spend time with family back in Arkansas, and I had the chance to drive by the country church where I grew up as a kid, and where many in my family still attend. 

Many memories came back of Sunday School there, in particular of competitions of memorizing Bible verses. There were very familiar or standard verses that we were expected to memorize: John 3:16 of course (but maybe not the following verses which add quite a bit to the meaning). There was also what is called the Roman Road, a series of verses within the Book of Romans placed not within numerical order but with a certain thematic order–to make a theological point. If we followed the instructions laid out in those verses like stepping stones on the road, it would show us what to do to arrive at salvation. Step by step.

Now, my point is not to slight the deeper meaning in what these verses teach; rather, it is to emphasize the necessity of experiencing the deeper meaning rather than seeing the verses as some easy stepping stone to simply arrive at a destination. Looking back, it adds more meaning to follow the Roman Road while also singing the great hymn Come, Thy Fount of Every Blessing:

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it;

  Prone to leave the God I love:

This morning we have the opportunity to explore a text we normally don’t see in the Sunday service. Today, we have a chance to spend time with the Song of Solomon, or the Song of Songs, one of my favorite books, which challenges us to jump in the deep end of the pool, as it were.

It is an exquisite poem that is, in reality, a metaphor for the soul–and God’s desire for us. 

One of the many things I love about this text is that, at times, you cannot really tell who is speaking to whom. Often, when we have such rich metaphors like this, the soul, if you will, that deepest reality of what we understand the self to be, is imagined as female, and God, if you will, as male. But that framework doesn’t always hold as we explore the entire text and that ambiguity itself invites us to reflect more deeply.

The Song of Songs challenges us to reflect on the nature of desire within our practice of faith. Like we’ve said before, so often when we grow up, we focus on “our prayer.” We focus on the dynamic of “saying our prayers” as a key part of our practice of faith. Yet this incredible poetic expression challenges us to ask just who is praying? Who is desiring whom in this text? Who wants to be in a deeper relationship with whom?

Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;

for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.

Our practice of faith not only allows for such imaginative visions; it encourages it, even expects it. While we read this section of the Song of Songs this morning, from chapter 2, listen to how it begins:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!

For your love is better than wine,

Your anointing oils are fragrant,

Your name is perfume poured out;

Therefore the maidens love you.

And father into the text, listen to this image of the relationship between the Beloved and the Lover:

Upon my bed at night

I sought him whom my soul loves;

I sought him, but found him not;

I called him, but he gave no answer.

I rise now and go about the city,

in the streets and in the squares;

I will seek him whom my soul loves.”

We have moved into different territory here! Imagine what the world would be like if we focused on these verses as much as we focused on other ones that we so quickly hold up to promote our causes and such. How would we see the world, each other, and ourselves if we invested more energy swimming into such pools of spiritual intimacy?

If it is the case that desire lies at the heart of our spiritual practice, then how does such a poetic grounding open the eyes of our spiritual hearts when we hear Jesus’ own teachings.

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

We see Jesus’ tenderness here, and the beautiful way he invites us into a more intimate relationship. Jesus doesn’t lay out prescribed rules or an easy step-by-step approach to follow; rather, he invites an intimate relationship. But maybe that is scary to us, and we would prefer rules to follow? That was, in fact, Jesus’ own experience as he wrestled with the expectations of those in the religious establishment who wanted to focus on such strict rules for the sake of social and political power.

Here is the tension, is it not, when it comes to how we approach our practice of faith. On one hand, we have this pattern of seeing and living the practice of faith as a series of steps, a manual, that prescribes how all this is to happen. We see a series of steps, verses, that we can use or apply to situations like a solution to a problem. 

But we learn very quickly that our practice of faith does not follow a clearly laid out, step-by-step outline. There are moments, turns, seasons, and movements of bliss and transcendence, and there are moments of struggle and even a Dark Night of the Sense and the Soul.

There are moments when we experience our relationship with God in terms of leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills and times when it feels like we are caught in God’s gaze, with our Beloved gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. 

How can our practice of faith nurture a depth and resiliency of the soul that is grounded in moments like this from the Song of Songs, where it says
Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away with me.

And where it also speaks to the struggle we feel in feeling separate from the one who loves us most:

I will seek him whom my soul loves.

I sought him, but found him not.

If we approach the text and our practice of faith as an instruction manual, we struggle to make such sense of our lives so often, and we can easily see how we may throw our hands up and be done with all of it in trying times, in moments when we struggle or feel isolated. A step-by-step approach to the practice of faith doesn’t allow for nuance and struggle.

If we can approach the text and our practice of faith in a more poetic, imaginative, and spacious way, perhaps we can begin to experience a remarkable “stretchiness” of soul that takes seriously both our human experience and God’s own desire for intimacy.

The great poet Billy Collins describes the tension this way, in his wonderful poem called “Introduction to Poetry:”

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

I often use this poem in classes because it so wonderfully describes the tension in how we approach our practice of faith. And it is so important for us to reflect on how we approach our practice of faith these days filled with anxiety, tension, and fear. We need to make meaning with all that is changing and happening around us.

So, perhaps we are left with a question this week as we reflect on the text and our lives: Do we want this intimate relationship, this experience of connection, with God? Or do we prefer a perspective that approaches our practice of faith more as a prescribed set of steps to follow, more of an instruction manual. 

And if something in you leans toward the instruction manual, can you be brave and wonder why that might be the case? And if something in you celebrates the possibility of such intimacy, can you be brave and wonder how you can nurture that in your life?

I would claim that only through such a vulnerable openness that is embodied in these text, and embodied in such a practice of faith, can we connect with one another in a way that promotes healing and wholeness. Otherwise, we just set our answers over and against one another and seek to argue one another down–and that just feels awful to me. 

The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.