This sermon was preached for the first Sunday of the Creation of Season, September 1, 2024 at St. Mark's East Longmeadow, MA. The texts for this sermon were: Song of Solomon 2:8-13, Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10, and Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23.
Back when I was going through confirmation class as an eighth grader, our pastor was trying to convince us that the Bible isn’t so boring after all. He had my classmate open his Bible up to Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, as it’s sometimes known, and begin reading out loud. I’ll never forget how bright red my friend’s face got as he got further and further into the erotic descriptions of the two lovers’ passion. And I’ll tell you what - the lesson stuck! I also never forgot how the Bible is full of fascinating nooks and crannies, war stories and explicit love poetry, nihilistic treatises and rallying cries for justice, letters of advice and visions of dragons. The whole range of the human experience is in there - good and bad.
In the Episcopal tradition, we read from multiple parts of the Bible every Sunday. Here at St. Mark’s, our practice has been to only read three readings each Sunday - a Gospel passage, a psalm, or a reading from either the New or Old Testament depending on the season. The lectionary - the three year cycle of Biblical selections - forces us to engage with Scripture’s many voices and genres. This practice teaches us that our scripture and faith is more than just the words and teachings of Jesus. It challenges us to engage with ancient streams of an ancient faith that stretches all the way back to the very beginnings of monotheism. A great big conversation between many different people, between humans and God, God and all creation.
Through it all, God is continually challenging us to expand our notion of the sacred. To expand our vision of love.
It’s sort of a shame that Song of Songs only appears once in the three year cycle, on this Sunday, although you’ll also come across passages from it at weddings because it really is quite romantic. We’re lucky it’s even here on this Sunday though. Both Christians and Jews debated whether to include the book in their sacred text, mostly because it doesn’t mention God at all but also because it gets pretty graphic, and yes, will totally make you blush to read aloud. What tipped it over to being included was its potential to be interpreted as a metaphor for God’s love for Israel and Christ’s love for the Church. It’s also part of Jewish Sabbath and Passover practices so they couldn’t really do away with it. In the end, this book had too much to say about love to be ignored.
Here’s why I’m glad the Song of Songs was included. The Song of Songs is a glorious celebration of beauty, pleasure, and joy. Because of this book, our Bible contains the meaningful line “I am black and beautiful” and the utterly romantic “for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.” Through its poetry, the Song of Songs declares that passion and romance is a sacred part of the human experience, a blessing from God.
We need this reminder badly. When Jesus came to earth, he arrived at a particular moment in time, with a crucial message for God’s people. His focus was on justice, right relationship with God, and the salvation of all peoples. He gets in arguments with religious leaders about legalism, rules, and hypocrisy quite frequently - as he does in today’s Gospel. Jesus was deeply concerned about how human sexuality could be motivated by evil intentions or used to exploit and abuse. We should be, too.
But if that’s all Christians ever talk about - sin and rules and self-control and how our hearts can defile and be defiled, we miss out on the parts of our faith that are about celebrating the human heart, too.
We know Jesus laughed. We know he danced and sang and feasted. We even know he was causally physically affectionate with the beloved disciple in the Gospel of John, snuggling up on his chest at the Last Supper. I just don’t think most of the time, the disciples felt like those parts of Jesus’ humanity were as important to write down. Besides, they had all these other scriptures like the Song of Songs, like the psalms, that were already part of the tapestry of their faith and practice.
As Christians, Jesus is the center of our faith. But he’s not all of it. There’s so much richness at the periphery - the uncommon passages, the less talked about themes - that are a delight to explore. Love and faith is so much more, includes so much more.
I think we worry as preachers, I was actually explicitly taught this, that this Sunday might be the only chance someone has to hear about the salvation of Jesus and what he did for us on the cross. So the tendency is to always preach that. But as Episcopalians, we get to lean on the liturgy here, again, because the story of salvation gets told every Sunday in the Eucharistic prayer. That leaves us preachers free to explore and play with so many other themes and important messages of scripture, to step into that great conversation. So often the lectionary cycle offers a counterbalance in and between our scriptural selections, not a “but” per se, but a “yes and.” The human heart is the source of defilement…yes, and falling in love is divine, too. Other times, it’s the season of the church year itself that provides the “yes, and.” Humans have and are polluting this world…yes, and creation is woven into our love stories, too.
God and scripture expanding our notion of the sacred. Expanding our vision of love.
As human beings, it’s natural for us to focus on God’s relationship with us. But so much of scripture and our hymnody reminds us that God is in relationship with nature and animals, too. God’s covenant with Noah was also with every living thing. This season, these next five Sundays, will ask us to expand our view to include the other-than-human voices and experiences and expressions of faith. We zoom out from a narrow, anthropocentric focus and remember that God is making all things new. The Good News of resurrection and salvation applies to all creation, living and otherwise.
It’s also common for us to portray nature simply as a location. The stage on which human dramas play out. But trees and rocks and mountains and birds are more than just set pieces and ambiance, more than props. They are equal characters in God’s great story. We must treat them as such, value them as such - not just for the profit potential, for what they can do for the human race, but as inherently good, intrinsically worthy of care, simply because God created them, too.
“My beloved speaks and says to me: "Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance.”
In the Song of Songs, creation participates in the love story. The birds and flowers, trees and vines, help the lover call to his beloved. Nature can teach us to love, sacred places can love us back.
This month, this month! I am leaving more than a community, more than a building. I’m also leaving a home, a town, and a place. Its rivers and hills. The apples from the tree in our yard that my daughter teethed on last autumn, the raspberries that stained my son’s little fingers each summer, the divot in our road that made for excellent puddle jumping and all the bushes my dog loved to sniff. I am leaving a piece of God’s creation that loved me, that helped me raise my children. I am grateful for that love just I am grateful for your love for me.
There are birds and trees and rivers and rain where I’m going, too. Just like there were at the last parish I was a part of. And I will learn again, as so many in our sacred scripture have learned, that God is already there in that new place, too.
Our care for creation does not need to rely only on our anger at climate injustice, our fears of rising temperatures and sea levels, or our lament at the extermination of so many species of animals and insects - although it should. Care for creation should also be - must be - grounded in joy and beauty, passion and gratitude, too. All the genres of scripture. All the ways of loving and being loved.
My prayer is that each of us continually expand our vision of what love asks of us. That we celebrate how all of God’s creation participates in God’s love for us, our love for each other, and our love and gratitude to God.
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| My daughter, teething on an apple from the tree in our yard. |
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