Meg Peery McLaughlin
Tending Relationships
September 1, 2024
Song of Songs 2: 8-13
Children’s Time
I wrote something to the congregation this week—a reflection about my sabbatical.
I want to tell you too. I said that: This summer, I got to be a mom and partner in ways that I cannot when I am full time pastor. And that was really really important to me.
It is not true that pastors can’t be good moms, or good husbands or wives when they are a pastor. But it is true that our relationships take time and work.
This summer I got to spend one on one time with each of my three girls.
2 nights away – just mommy and daughter.
And some I had some one on one time with Jarrett too. In fact, he got 7 nights.
I wonder if you ever get to have that kind of time with people that you love.
It doesn’t have to be away or overnight. That was a super special occasion.
Maybe there is some time when everyone puts down their work or toys,
and all the screens are off, and play you a game. (Rat a Tat Cat)
Maybe it is going to take a little walk together.
Maybe it is at night time, at bedtime, when you say prayers or sing songs.
Maybe you take turns going around the table at dinner answering questions.
(Rose/Thorn/Bud)
Even if that kind of time feels very normal to you, this week, I want you to try to notice those times.
Because here is something I believe: to love another person is to see the face of God.
(It is so true people even have written songs about it. )
Our most special relationships are places where we can feel what it is like to know God. So, this week, when you notice the times when you are feeling connected to someone you love— you can remember that you are also connected to God and that that time is holy time.
Thank you God that we can love others and love you.
Thank you God that we can be loved by others and you.
Thank you God for love. Amen.
Prayer of Illumination
Open our hearts, O God, to your Word,
that we may release every defense against your Spirit’s leading,
and so move in the direction of your love. Amen.
Scripture
The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
Look, there he stands
behind our wall,
gazing in at the windows,
looking through the lattice.
10 My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away,
11 for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
12 The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Sermon
Well, church, in reward for your attendance in worship on Labor Day weekend,
you get a love poem as the scripture for the day.
Song of Songs, often called Song of Solomon,
is the little book slipped between
the ponderous pronouncements of Ecclesiastes
and Isaiah’s ringing calls to repentance.
Only 8 chapter’s long,
it’s the answer to every hormonal teenager’s dreams
especially when they are bored in church.
It very well may be what kept my older brother in the pew through the late 80s.
It only shows up in the church’s syllabus, the lectionary, only once every three years,
and never have I ever preached on it. Neither had any other preacher I asked.
But a love poem it is.
Truth is I’m a romantic.
My hearts swells
when the couple gets together in the end,
when the friends reconcile,
the parent finds the long lost child.
If love doesn’t win
Jarrett has to warn me before I open the novel or watchthe film.
It’s been noted how much I love love.
So much so that someone jokingly gave me this book of love poems,
each one depressingly satirical.
For example.
The kids are finally down. And you are looking at me in that way.
Or are you just spacing out? Wait, yup, you’re spacing out.
You pull on some sweatpants. And a T-shirt and a sweater and a fleece
And I am not able to make out any contour of your body at all.
I think you are sending me a signal in the way that married couples
send each other signals.
And just so we’re clear, you’re signaling:
“I’m going to call my sister and order sushi.
You should do something, too.”
—
Thank goodness the Song of Songs is a better love poem.
Now I need to tell you that
for most of my life , when the church has talked about love, about relationships,
it has been arguing, arguing about human sexuality–
ripping itself apart about who we should be loving.
Today, the Presbyterian Church marries, ordains, fully includes all humans
regardless of who they love, and the church indeed celebrates who God makes us to be, in the full diverse beautiful spectrum of that reality. Thanks be to God.
But because that took a painfully long time,
whenever someone asked a pastor like me to “preach on sexuality”
we weren’t reading Song of Songs
we weren’t reading love poems
we weren’t delighting, but rather debating.
And that was important to do, and so is this, I think, so is this.
—
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
I know a couple that renews their vows every single year, in different locations that are representative to their journey in that particular season. I know a couple where one makes coffee for the other and delivers it bedside every single morning. I know a couple who throughout their marriage would kiss three times every night. Now the man, way out in the fields of dementia, in rehab unit after a fall, can’t summon his wife’s name but when she leaves the room, he still gives her kisses—three of them.
Arise my love, and come away.
—
Some wonder if Song of Songs is the least “biblical” book in the bible, or the most.
Never in the entire book is God even mentioned. No prayer, no nothing.
Some believe that the words originated as a popular drinking song.
There is no narrative, or story to follow.
It is just two lovers going back and forth oozing their passion onto every page.
There is no indication that the lovers are married–
they are simply reveling in the gift that is human love.
And yet the ancestors of our faith kept these poems as scripture. Holy scripture.
The revelation of God. God’s word for the people of God.
In the middle ages, the Song of Songs was the subject of more commentaries than any other Old Testament book.
A famous early Jewish scholar and sage, Rabbi Akiba said:
“The whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies. ”
—
Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come.
I know some kids—2nd grader and preschooler—who every morning
come down the stairs and jump into their mother’s bed.
“Release the Kraken” they yell before a cuddle to start the day.
I know a dad whose nicknames for his kids are: muddy, moosey, rack and doc. And the girl child is the one called moosey. The names are bizarre, but what the kids hear is unconditional affection, even now when “kids” are all grey headed and grown.
Arise my love, and come away.
—
Leave it to poetry to have multiple layers of meaning in the language.
Yes, this text is about human love.
And, yes, it’s about God’s love as well.
Not just in the way that whenever the question in Sunday School gets answered with “Jesus”—not just in the way that of course everything in the Bible is about God.
It takes a little more digging than that.
Dr. Ellen Davis who teaches bible at Duke Div describes how the Song of Songs points to the healing of the deepest wounds in the created order,
and even in the wounds of God’s own heart .
For the Song sings of reversal, a repairing of what happens in the Garden of Eden.
“Eden” means delight,
but as you may remember the story goes that that delight is ruptured,
with a 3-fold consequence.
1. There is an asymmetry of power between man and women.
God says to Eve, “Your desire shall be for your husband
and he shall rule over you.”
2. There is alienation between humanity and nature.
Cursed is the ground, requiring painful toil, the Book of Genesis says,
and there is enmity between the snake and humans.
Third and most terribly,
There is painful distance between humanity and God.
It used to be that in the garden– humans and God would have their one on one time, during a walk, at the time of the evening breeze. They were fully at ease in each other’s presence. But then….expulsion and grief and Eden dissolved.
But when we read this racy little book,
We are returned to the Garden of God. We delve deep in delight, in Eden.
There is no power imbalance in this love song.
The woman is neither shy nor submissive; in fact, she speaks more than the man. Reversing Eve, the woman sings: “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.”
The two embrace in full mutuality.
And the whole natural world joins them. The Song is full of birdsong and bloom.
Garden imagery growing out of our ears.
All is healed. Love, in all its layers, lives again.
—
Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.
The voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
I know a set of college friends who are now on year 22 of an annual Labor day beach trip. I know a pair of work friends: one always jingles his keys in the hallway in the early morning to warn the other that she’s not alone in the building, while she always brings back the extra pita bread to him when she gets take out from cava. I know old friends who remember to text every year on the anniversary of their respective mom’s deaths.
Arise my love, and come away.
—
Divine love and human love are not, of course, mutually exclusive.
As I said to the children,
human love, at its best, can be a glimpse, of God’s love.
I believe one reason the church still clings to the covenant of marriage is because it is in that crucible that we experience how it is for God to love us.
But this glimpse of God is not only for those who are married.
Any of us who are caught up in love for another
friend, lover, child, even creature
can indeed catch a peek at how much love God has for God’s beloved.
God loves us with a passionate love. Christ loves the church with utter delight.
God loves each of us as if we were only one.
Worth every ounce of attention—one on one.
The additional gift of this love poem is the kind of love the poem highlights.
Yes, the poem affirms the joy of a faithful sexual relationship,
but it also shows us love in its purest form –
it’s not love tied to childbearing or marrying up or tax benefits
it’s not love that keeps score, tit for tat, who owes who what,
it’s simply pure mutual delight.
And we can have that same love for God as well.
Of course, we have the grateful kind of love for God.
In response to God’s blessings and God’s grace, we love deeply.
This is the love that prompts us to murmur “Thank God.”
This is the love that spurs our stewardship.
But there is another love that is even more precious.
It does not come from anything God has done for us,
but simply out of delight in who God is.
It arises in us spontaneously because our souls were made for the love of God.
—
Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.
The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom.
I know a church that loves to sing.
I know a church that loves to revel in God’s grace.
That is content in God’s stillness. That is alive with God’s power.
I know a church that loves love.
I love you, UPC.
Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.
Thanks be to God. Amen.