Lake Edge United Church of Christ

If many church folks had their way, the Song of Songs wouldn’t even be in the Bible at all. It just doesn’t seem to belong there. It barely mentions God at all, and addresses almost none of the great themes that dominate the rest of scripture. Many a bored teenager, thumbing aimlessly through a pew Bible as the preacher drones on and on has been stunned to find it there: this frank celebration of erotic longing of one love for another. Finding it amid the dour prophetic warnings of Jeremiah and the carefully crafted wisdom of the Proverbs is like finding a blooming oasis of life in the midst of a great dry desert. Finding a line like “My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away for the winter is past, the rain is over and gone…” in scripture is like, as William Willimon once described it, finding the love letters your grandparents wrote to each other when they were young. Finding the Song of Songs in the Bible is like that moment when you realize that those people you’d always thought of as withered and old had once had the same desires that often fill your waking moments.

Looking back over the history of the interpretation of the Song of Songs, one comes away with the unmistakable impression that the Church is more than a little embarrassed by its presence in the Bible. For centuries interpreters have gone to great lengths to reassure timorous readers that it’s not really about sex. Volumes of commentaries describe it as the longing of Christ for the Church, a description of the perfect relationship of the bride (the church) to the groom (the Christ). And I can assure you that nothing will turn passionate love poetry into lifeless dust faster than arguing that it’s really about church. The centuries of commentaries that have piled up, most trying to pretend that the book is something other than what it is makes us wonder how it ever got in there at all.

Well, all in all, methinks they doth protest too much. Moreover, I think it’s a good thing that the pages of scripture contain this celebration of what the Greeks call eros, the powerful force within the confines of human love that leads to sexual expression. The creator God, who created women and men in God’s own image, tells them to go and be fruitful and multiply, suggesting that perhaps sexual energy and drive is hard-wired into the creation itself. And so, I suspect, there is Good News for us this day as we ponder eros and its proper place in our lives and in our world.

The theologian Ronald Rolheiser offers us an interesting metaphor as a way to begin. He likens human sexuality to a fire. Now fire is a great and wonderful thing. Fire is one of the elemental forces of energy that permitted human beings to become human. Fire is energy, of course, and like all energy, it can increase in intensity as long as it has fuel. Fire that has fuel, but no limits, can rage out of control, destroying everything in its path, its dangers far outweighing its benefits. But when fire is contained, it can be put to many great and wonderful uses.

A campfire in a ring of stones, for example, provides warmth for all who gather around it. Food can be cooked, and water heated to warm the heart. Moreover, a campfire safely contained invites community and conviviality because people are just naturally drawn to a fire. A fire contained is a powerful and constructive force, the energy of community.

But if the fire leaves the ring of stones, if it leaps onto the forest floor and into the treetops, it becomes a raging inferno, a blaze that devours everything in its path and destroys the very possibilities of community and communion. The energy of fire is wonderful and life-giving within its boundaries, and beyond it becomes dangerous and destructive.

And so it is with human sexual energy as well. In the hands of the great poet who authored the Song of Songs, sexual energy is a life-giving force. The poet strives not to overwhelm or consume or devour the one who is loved, but to be with the beloved, to share, to hold, to dwell with, and to find completion with. And so it is with human sexual energy that is held within the sacred boundaries of love, and commitment, and fidelity, and equality and trust. When the boundaries are of relationship in which both partners are held and not used, when partners both seek what is best for one another, instead of seeking only their own selfish needs, when partners are equals and are committed to one another in the bonds of fidelity, then human sexual energy is to the relationship as the ring of fire is to hearth and home.

Sadly, however, we live in the midst of a sexual forest fire. Long ago the boundaries around sexual energy in our society became strained, and now seem to have burst entirely. Sexual energy is everywhere on display, and not confined to the boundaries of equality, mutuality, fidelity and trust. Sexual energy is used to sell products: cars and cosmetics and clothing, and lots of other things that have no direct or immediate connection with sex at all. If a product can be made to appear sexy, or if enough sexy baggage can be piled around a product, it will be desired, sought and purchased. Quite often it seems advertisers and marketers create sexual connotations for products without a thought to the impact on our world of sexual energy turned loose without limits.

Worse yet is the pornography industry, with its billions and billions of dollars in annual sales, reaping the power of sexual attraction while severing it completely from any demand of relationship or caring. Porn is sex without love, sex without boundaries, and it is built upon the premise that no one is hurt by sex outside of love.

We who are the church, the community of Christ, have necessarily much to say about these matters. The very God we worship became incarnate, became flesh, became body. We are inescapably flesh ourselves, not wholly, of course, for we recognize also mind and spirit and soul, but nevertheless we are embodied selves, and as such, we are sexual beings. The question is not whether we will be sexual or not, but rather only how we will be sexual, and how we will treat our beloved, and how we will guard and limit the incredible power of sexuality, and how we will teach our young about its proper place in our lives. Made to be bodies, and declared to be in the very image of God, the place of sexual energy in our lives is holy and sacred. It can never be tossed away casually. It can never be ignored or denied or pretended away. And most of all the presence of sexual energy in our lives must be inextricably linked to the life of our beloved. We are never free to use another without regard to our impact on them. We are never free to trample upon or neglect the needs of our beloved. We cannot afford to participate when sexual energy leaps the ring and sets the forest aflame.

But there is and always must be more to this conversation than focusing on the boundaries and limitations. We must never become confused and think that human sexuality is primarily something to be denied because it is dangerous. Indeed it is dangerous because it can lead to the most sublime fulfillment of relationship that can be known.

The truth is that our sexual energy and our spiritual energy have a common source; they are drinks drawn from a common well. And the well is this: the desire for transcendence and for union. Sensing ourselves to be incomplete, we seek relationship with God. And sensing ourselves to be incomplete, we seek relationship with a beloved, too. When human sexuality is expressed in harmony with the deepest values that we know, it is a profoundly spiritual matter. Sexuality expressed through trust, fidelity, commitment and love is perfect, it is divine, it is of God.

So declares the very presence in scripture of the Song of Songs. By its very presence we are reminded that sexual energy is of God, a gift to us from our Creator, a gift celebrated in and through relationships of equality, mutuality and trust. This is the lesson of the Song of Songs. It is the lesson we must remember and live out with the beloved in our lives. It is the lesson of God, who became flesh, and dwells among us, full of grace and truth.

Amen.