The Time of Singing Has Come
Fruitfulness, Part 3:
May 5, 2024
Pastor Mike
Song of Songs 2:3-13
Behold, the winter is past;
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of singing has come… (2:11-12)
I meditated on these verses for the first time over lunch on Tuesday. I didn’t have to try hard to identify with the joyful feeling expressed here in response to the passing of winter and the coming of spring. Outside of College Market, it was sunny and green, and the daffodils had shot upward to show off their colors. But then on Wednesday afternoon, I sat at my desk, and I took this passage out for a more rigorous round of study, looked up and out my window and – it was snowing. Like, really snowing.
What even is Idaho? The winter is past? On May 1st? Naaah. I felt deflated. When I got home that afternoon, I found that the weight of the snow had snapped the fragile, flower-bearing stems off our bleeding-heart plant, which had just burst into life over the past two weeks. It’s humbling how quickly a day, a week, a season of nature or of the heart can turn. On Friday, it was snowing again in the morning, but by afternoon those of us gathered in the cemetery for Frances Baker’s graveside service were awash in bright, warm, gentle light.
Behold, the winter is past… /
the time of singing has come (2:11-12).
Hmmmm.
Despite our unpredictable weather here in Pocatello, these are the words of the Song of Songs, because this Song is a love song, and winter giving way to spring is how love – fresh, intoxicating, youthful love – feels. You might be surprised to learn that there’s a love poem tucked among the writings that make up the Bible. Or maybe you’ve known it but have tended to modestly skip over all that tasting-the-fruit stuff. Well, there is! And don’t! The Song of Songs is one of the world’s greatest love poems, as its ambitious title asserts. I’ve written some songs in my lifetime – but this one? This is the Song of songs.
The Song is found among the third section of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Ketuvim, or writings. It’s the only book in the Bible where “human, erotic love”[1] is brought to center stage. The Song has nothing to do directly with God or with any of the weighty themes of the Old Testament, such as the covenant, or the law, or the radical preaching of the prophets. It’s not prayer, not wisdom, not history. “With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. …His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me” (2:3b, 6). That’s love poetry, pure and simple. The whole book is structured as two voices, one male and one female, and the two voices alternate speaking, showing us two characters who pine for, seek, relish, and celebrate one another.
Song of Songs is perhaps the earthiest and most body-positive part of the Bible. You can literally quote the Bible if you need to say that you are “sick with love” (2:5). If ever in your life you have been so enamored with someone that you have snuck out to go and be with them, or have lain aching to hear a pebble against the window or to see those three dots appear in the text thread, then you can identify with the thrill of this lover leaping over the mountains to stand at his beloved’s garden wall, peering through the lattice and calling for her to “come away” (2:10).
Notice the language that the author uses to communicate all this ripe passion: fruit! Apples, raisins, figs, vine blossoms. This is the moment in our fruitfulness series when I want to say as directly as I can that fruitfulness for the Christian – whatever that may mean, we’re still working it out – is full of delight. God has created us with his Word and redeemed us through the Word-made-flesh so that we can take our part in a love-song. Fruitfulness has to do with desire, and it adds some joy and zest to the world. Joy, zest, delight, desire – perhaps there’s something out of balance if these are not a few of the words that leap to mind when we consider our relationship with God and God’s call upon our life.
The poem is most obviously about youthful passion, but in both Judaism and Christianity, there are long traditions of interpreting the Song of Songs as an allegory. People have read the Song as one great metaphor, finding hidden, symbolic meaning in the lovers and flora and fauna. In Judaism, the Song has been read as a love-exchange between God and Israel; in Christianity, between Christ and the Church. In both, God has been identified with the male voice and Israel or the Church with the female character. To read these verses in that way would mean that it is God who has come “leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills…like a gazelle or a young stag” (2:8, 9) – or we might say like a pronghorn or an elk –to stand at our wall, and peek through our stained-glass windows, and call to us: “Arise, my love, my beautiful one[s], and come away.” It’s good to know that God is not above being compared to a love-struck teen; that God, in fact, relishes it, blesses it, canonizes it.
When I consider that this poem might have something to say about how God feels toward me, and how I might feel toward God, I have to admit that there is something deep in the center of my heart that whispers, Yes. I want that. And yet that longing is very often accompanied by another, more fearful voice: But can it really be so? Can there be joy like that for me?
On Thursday morning after dropping the kids downstairs at TLC, I popped over to the ISU library to look for a commentary on the Song of Songs and do an hour of research and writing. (I hope you heard that, Heath: that I was working on my sermon on Thursday.) They didn’t have a commentary, but I found something even better: a collection of sermons on the Song Bernard of Clairvaux, a twelfth-century monk, mystic, and writer. It was just what I needed.
As a Medieval Catholic, Bernard unsurprisingly takes the allegorical route of interpretation. Only, he individualizes the metaphor. For him, the conversation between lover and beloved is not unfolding between Christ and the Church in general, but between Christ and the heart of every one of us. The Song’s words are those that God whispers to us as the beloved, and those that our souls can learn to whisper back to God. Bernard writes that the Song puts on full display “the mounting desires of the soul.”[2]
He also says that the Song shows us the point – meaning both the purpose and the summit – of life with God. The Song is the highest form of prayer. It’s not about repentance, turning from sin toward God; it’s not about sanctification, the lifelong process of growing in maturity. No, for Bernard, the Song reveals the possibility of breakthrough moments of utter perfection, moments of inner union with God. Moments when every nook and cranny of our being is flooded with a light and love that comes from God and return to God. Bernard’s writing put me in mind of John Wesley’s own description of the aim of Christian life as holiness and happiness.
Bernard knew how hard it can be for us to believe in such happiness. For some of us, no doubt, the very notion that our hearts might be singing love songs to God only reminds us of how cynical, dull, or knotted up and confused things have gotten in there.
Bernard offers these wise and gentle words: “Only the touch of the Spirit can inspire a song like this, and only personal experience can unfold its meaning. Let those who are versed in the mystery revel in it; let all others burn with desire rather to attain this experience than merely to learn about it.”[3] In other words, this kind of intimacy with God is a gift of the Spirit, and it can only really be described or known as true by those who have held out their hands and received that gift. The Song can help us celebrate that intimacy, or it can help us to want it.
I go into all this detail about allegory and St. Bernard’s preaching because I personally believe that love songs belong in our life with God. God wants each of us to know our essential belovedness, and God wants us to treat each other as beloved children of God. We use a lot of words to describe how God wants us to relate to one another: we should serve each other, love each other, respect and honor and forgive each other. But it is another, deeper thing to desire and delight in one another.
I’m proud that our United Methodist Church put a lot of effort over the past two weeks into reharmonizing its principles and its policies with God’s love song. Hundreds of delegates from all around the world gathered in Charlotte, NC to pray and worship and legislate, and their collective ear finally caught the tune, and they began to hear a song not just for themselves but for all God’s children, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.
No longer in the United Methodist Church are queer folk considered to be incompatible with Christian teaching. That’s been struck from the Discipline. Hallelujah!
No longer are queer folk restricted from pursuing God’s call upon their lives and becoming pastors, deacons, and elders, ordained into ministry with all the authority God wants to give them. Hallelujah!
No longer is it a chargeable offence for a pastor to conduct a same-sex wedding in their local church. No longer are Methodist dollars prohibited from supporting LGBTQ-affirming ministries. No longer is marriage strictly defined as a relationship between one man and one women, but between two persons who fully commit themselves to one another because their hearts can say, “With great delight I sat in his shadow” (2:3). Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!
Thanks be to God, that for these children of God who have suffered and endured and overcome so much, it can be truly said:
Behold, the winter is past;
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of singing has come… (2:11-12)
And what has happened in Charlotte at the most institutional level can remind us of what can be true every time we gather together in the name of Christ. We can know ourselves as God’s beloved. We can amplify God’s song. Maybe we’ll learn just one new note. Maybe we’ll go back over a passage that’s gotten a little stiff. Or perhaps we’ll be fully absorbed and carried away by it.
Lest we balk at the notion of perfection, I want to be clear that a moment of perfect unity with God is just that: a moment. Yet moments like that make up for a lifetime of imperfections, they can sustain a lifetime of yearning for more. Robert Frost has a poem called “Happiness Makes Up in Height for What it Lacks in Length,” which is a great title. It goes like this:
Oh, stormy, stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun’s brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view—
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day’s perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn,
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.
It takes but one day, one moment, one love song to turn the tide. This morning, we are celebrating the sacrament of Communion. In the breaking of the bread, Jesus makes himself known to us. He meets us here at this table. Communion is, well, communion, a gathering of bodies and a unity of souls. It is as the Song says, “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love” (2:4).
What do you feel in your body when you hear those words? Are you comfortable here, in the banqueting house of God? Are you very uncomfortable here? Are you tightening up or loosening up? Do you feel hot, warm, or cold? Do you notice anything in your gut, in your chest, in your throat, behind your eyes? Do you feel a lot? Do you feel – nothing?
God’s name for every one of us is “Beloved,” and what we feel in response to that, and what we choose to do in response to what we feel are the most important things in all the world today. Revel in it or desire it, Bernard says. And my prayer is that this sacrament helps each of us to do one of those two things, to revel in a spontaneous and free and joyful love of God, or to desire it.
The Song says that the time of singing has come.
May it be so, in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit:
Amen.
[1] The Jewish Study Bible, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1555.
[2] Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, trans. Kilian Walsh OCSO, Cistercian Fathers Series: Number 4 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1977), 5.
[3] Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, 6.