Sunday, December 31,
2017
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and
come away; for now winter is past, the rain is over and gone” (Song
2:10b). Why this scripture, on this day of all days? The colorful Christmas lights are dimming,
giving way to short, cold, gray days, as the holidays recede and we timidly
move into the dead of winter.
“Arise, my love, my fair one.” No predawn frost, no harsh storm of sleet and
snow can diminish the love God feels for us, for you, for each one of you. Who, when asked to describe God, would begin
by saying, “God is personal? God is
relational?” That’s our starting point
this morning, at the end – the end of the year.
God desires a relationship with us.
The prophet Hosea, whom we will study in depth next summer, reveals
God’s inner heart, quoting God who says, “How can I hand you over, O
Israel? My heart recoils within me; my
compassion grows warm and tender. I will
not execute my fierce anger” (Hosea 11:8, 9a).
That’s God.
God longs for us. Of course as we experience God, it is a
spiritual relationship, and there is an unwelcome trickiness to the word,
‘spiritual.’ What does it mean? We think we know. We don’t really know. ‘Spiritual’ is something other than
‘physical,’ or ‘tangible.’ It is
something outside the experience of our five senses. And when this is how we think of spiritual,
then it becomes theoretical, not really real.
The relationship we have with God,
in Christ, is spiritual, and it is real. This relationship comes to life in
many places and times. When we are with
others in worship, a community attuned to God; when a believer is alone, in a
quiet place, meditating on the word, opening herself to God’s presence; in the
process of doing God’s work, helping others; in all these ways, the
relationship with God comes to life. One
of the ways the spiritual is expressed and experienced is in the physical way
humans relate to each other.
If you can, reach out, and touch
someone. One of the ways our spiritual
relationship with the God who says to us, “arise, my love,” is experienced is
in that touch.
The first Sunday of 2017, which was
January 1, I was tired of hearing how bad things were in America. People had broken off friendships, left
churches, and expressed loss of faith in our democracy over their frustration
with the presidential election. As this
year began, the loudest voices were the angry voices.
I attempted to have us begin
differently, not complaining or arguing, not blaming or lampooning, but rather
looking in a different direction. We
needed to focus on something other than anger.
We needed to think about something others than the people who rile us
up. So, I talked in the first sermon of
the year about God and icebergs.
I think God is like an iceberg. In photos of icebergs – photos that show both
above and below the water’s surface, it is clear how much more is under the
water; this is what we don’t see – except in those special photos. There literally is a lot more than meets the
eye. We see less of the iceberg than the
submerged portion we can’t see. And
there is more of God we do not know and cannot know than what we do know –
immeasurably more.
That word, ‘immeasurable,’ is often used
as hyperbole, to express how big something is.
In this case, I am using the word literally. God’s expanse goes beyond our physical
universe and when God so pleases, he occupies space in our universe. God operates within the bounds of the laws of
nature, but God can, at times, defy the laws of nature. Furthermore, God cannot be measured.
We want to try to see more of God
knowing that we can never see all of God and in all likelihood there will
always be more of God that we cannot see than what we can see. There will always be more of God that we cannot know.
We tried to give our attention to
the story of God because that’s a better story, a truer story, a story more
real and lasting, and a story more revealing of who we can become than the
stories of racism, politics, terrorism, and wealth disparity being told by
various media outlets. In our attempt to
give our attention to God, we did not ignore the realities around us. We simply did not let the world in its
current condition tell us who we are. We
looked to God to tell us who we are.
Now, we’re at the end of 2017. It’s unique in that the very first day and
the very last day both fall on a Sunday.
As we look back, we see how the acrimony that ended 2016 played out in
2017. There was the racial violence in
Charlottesville, the hideous display of bigotry that ended in death. There was the cultural battle over Confederate
monuments. There were mass shootings in
the United States. Terrorist attacks in
the United States. Endless war in Syria
drags on; endless tension between the United States and North Korea drags
on. All the doomsday stories of 2016
have rung true or at least linger through 2017.
But those aren’t the only
stories. What different story do we have
to tell? When it is told, are we listening? Are we ourselves listening to our own,
different, better story – God’s story?
Are we living by God’s story?
I began imagining the vastness of
God, calling God indescribable, because I needed God to be bigger than
presidential politics. I needed God to
be bigger than our national debt. I
needed God’s light to outshine the creeping darkness I feared would envelop
me.
Now, at the end of a year in which
we examined God’s immensity and imagined our church as the household of this
gigantic God and ourselves as brothers and sisters, adopted by this
overwhelming God, I think I know what could be helpful. When God is indescribable, if that’s all God
is, in our puny state we can be obliterated.
Our story once again must adjust focus: first from the crud that is
called news in our society to the greatness of God, now from the unending
vastness of God to the personal nature of God.
The unfathomable “iceberg God” loves us personally and intimately.
Keep in mind the passage I read from
the prophet Hosea. God says to his
people, “My compassion grows warm and tender.”
In Christ, we are his people.
Also recall Hagar, the slave woman whom Sarai expelled because she did
not want Hagar’s son Ishmael toying with her son Isaac. In Genesis 16, left for a horrific death in
the desert, Hagar finds herself rescued by God.
She names God “God-who-sees” (Genesis 16:13). The ruler of the universe took personal
interest in the rescue of a cast-off slave.
Furthermore, remember Luke chapter
15. There, the object of God’s attention
is the one who is lost. Jesus tells the
same story three times, describing a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a runaway
son. Jesus’ punchline is Luke 15:7. “There is more joy in Heaven over one lost
sinner who repents and returns to God than over 99 others who are righteous and
haven’t strayed away.” The gigantic
iceberg God is mad with love for us.
There aren’t enough words to speak
all the ways God shows this love. But
poets try and the most passionate poetry in the Bible is Hebrew love poetry,
found in the Old Testament book Song of Songs.
Read it, just 8 short chapters, in verse. But be prepared. It is sensual. It means what it seems to mean – a man and a
woman deeply desiring one another with a community around them celebrating
their mutual longings for love.
The early church grew in the
Greek-speaking world at the same time, the first and second centuries, that
ascetic philosophy influenced society.
One variation of that ascetic approach was Gnosticism, the philosophy
that denied there was anything good in the physical world. ‘Gnostic,’ literally means knowledge, and the
Gnostics claimed Jesus was never actually human or tangible but just appeared
that way. Gnostic thought had no room
for the whole ‘and the Lord saw that it was good’ (Gen 1:25) idea about the
physical, created world. The world was
evil and God was a spirit who pulled the righteous possessors of secret
knowledge out of the evil tangible world.
The earliest Christians resisted
this philosophy. They preached the
incarnation, the full humanity of Jesus. They insisted upon the physical,
bodily resurrection of Christ. Gnosticism
did, however, sow seeds of loathing for physical things even in the minds of
Christians. This false teaching flowered
into a needless sense of shame around human sexuality. This made the sensual poems in Song of Songs
intolerable. The early church couldn’t
handle such expressions of physical love. The only way Christians could live
with this in the Bible was to read it as allegory.
An allegory is a story interpreted
to reveal a hidden meaning. For
Christian commentators in the early centuries of the church, Song of Songs was
not about and a man and a woman. The
lovers were God and the church. Early
theologians wrote more pages of commentary on Song of Songs than any other
Biblical book. This approach to the
Songs as allegory held up through the Middle Ages.
The only problem is allegory misses
the point of the poetry. The Song of
Songs is an affirmation that ancient people fell madly, passionately in love
and expressed it. If we believe God’s
Holy Spirit guided the development of scripture and which books are included in
the Bible, and I do believe this, then the inclusion of Song of Songs is under
God’s authority.
God
is never mentioned in two books of the Bible, Esther and Song of Songs. Unlike Esther, which is a book that upholds
Hebrew culture and thus implies God, Song of Songs does no such thing. The Song is not an allegory, it is a love
poem, often used as an epithalamium, a bridal song. The initiative in this relationship is taken
by the female, driven by her passion.
That
this poetry collection is in the Bible is itself a testament. God smiles on physical love. God rejoices in sexual love. From the rest of scripture, especially,
Genesis 1, Matthew 19, Ephesians 5, and 1 Timothy 5, we believe that sexual
love is best experience by a man and woman in lifelong marriage covenant. The greater point is God celebrate love and
one of the ways we live in that love is in sexuality.
Sexuality
is not the only we experience physical love.
Think of love enjoyed with all the senses, shared in a community of
people who follow Christ. When we
gather, we embrace one another. We give
warm, heartfelt handshakes. We hear each
other’s loud laughter as we share each other’s stories. Different smells come to mind from visiting
one another’s homes. We remember meals
out together. Love is tactile in God’s
way of things.
Once
we appreciate that Song of Songs is a poets’ amplification of love, evoking
thoughts of spring, even in winter, and once we accept that the presence of the
Song in our scriptures is God’s affirmation of physical love, then we can
superimpose God’s love for us on the poem.
Reading the Song for the love poem that it is and realizing just how
much God love us, we can hear God speak to us through it. And when we meet God in these words of love
it is spring time, “the fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in
blossom” (Song 2:13). God longs for us
and we for God. In the relationship, we
have joy. Every day is new.
We
began 2017 staggered by how much bigger God is than the noise around us. The events of the year vied for our
attention. The evil in the racism on
display in Charlottesville; the political acrimony stooping to unprecedented
lows; the growing gap between a wealthy minority and everyone else. All the noise continues to rise, but God is
bigger. God is above it all and the huge
iceberg God is with us and for us.
Heading
in 2018, we know we are part of a better story. The God of universe is all
about love and is thrilled when we show love to one another. No single person experiences every aspect of
God or every aspect of love. But each
and every one of us is invited into God’s love story because God loves each of
us relationally, personally, and intimately.
We move into a New Year intent on growing in our relationship with this
God of love.
AMEN
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