Deep, Honoring, Passionate Love

Brad Sullivan

Proper 17, Year B

August 30, 2015

Saint Mark's Episcopal Church, Bay City, TX

Song of Solomon 2:8-13

James 1:17-27

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”  We got to hear from the Song of Solomon today, a series of poems and writings of passionate, unabashed love, the kind of love experienced between a newly married couple on their honeymoon and a long-married couple for whom that passion and unabashed love remains.  Interestingly, God is nowhere mentioned in the entire book of Song of Solomon.  Many in the church have tried to allegorize Song of Solomon to make it about Jesus’ love for the church, and that’s a valid interpretation, God’s passionate love for humanity. 

If we stop there, however, and don’t allow this book also to be about what it truly is, a writing about passionate love between people, we’d be missing out on some of the beauty of this writing and the beauty of the love we have as passionate, sexual people.  Passionate love and even sexual desire that men and women feel for each other is part of the image of God in which we were made, and ask any newlywed, it’s a good thing. 

The lovers in Song of Solomon in the passage we heard today are so in love, that once they are together, everything in the world seems beautiful.  It’s spring time.  There are flowers and turtledoves, figs ripe on the vine.  There are beautiful scents in the air, sounds of birds chirping, not a mosquito around, and it seems as if all creation was put there by God just for the love and enjoyment of the two of them. 

I’d venture to say that a lot of us have had those feelings of being so in love that it feels like every sunrise and sunset were given by God just for you and your beloved.  Beautiful, blissful creation that is made by God and given for the enjoyment of just two people who are passionately and unabashedly in love sounds an awful lot like the Garden of Eden. 

Far from sinful, the passionate love the man and woman in this passage helped them love creation more.  They seem at peace with the world, as though the love they have for each other is going to pour out onto the world around them.  Passionate and unabashed love is far from sinful, far from anything to be ashamed about.  Passionate and unabashed love is our Edenic state, how God made us to be, part of the image of God in which we were made. 

How do we then get from the good joy and beauty of the passionate love seen in the Song of Solomon to the church sometimes in our history teaching that sex is basically wrong and bad; in a marriage it’s ok, but even then, kinda questionable?  Well, as we are no doubt aware, our desires can sometimes run amuck. 

Desire run amuck is largely what Jesus is talking about when he lists some of the evil intentions that can come from the human heart:  fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.  These are basically desire run amuck, desire for things and people, desire for people as things, without regard those people.  Jesus’ list of vices are all ways that people gratify their own desire, regardless of the cost to others. 

Fornication is sex for personal gratification, without truly honoring and deeply loving yourself or the other.  It is desire run amuck.  It doesn’t really bring about that deep, passionate love for each other and for all creation, such that every sunrise and sunset is made just for those two people.  I very much doubt that when someone steals something that they really want, that they suddenly notice the beauty of the flowers and the chirping birds, the love and beauty of creation surrounding and blessing them.

From the beginning, when Adam and Eve decided they desired a piece of fruit more than they desired God and each other, our sin, our missing the mark, has been our desire run amuck, when we have desired things and even people as things more than we have desired true, deep, passionate love for God and each other.  True, deep, passionate love not only desires the other, but also honors the other, and when we have that true, deep, passionate, mutual love that not only desires but honors, then all of creation sings. 

Such passionate mutual love that not only desires but also honors is a lot of the Kingdom of God that Jesus came to bring about.  That’s in rather sharp contrast to the Pharisees and the Scribes being angry at Jesus because he and his disciples didn’t follow the traditions of the elders in not washing their hands appropriately.  These traditions of the elders were oral tradition based on the laws of Moses.  These traditions were intended to help people remember their deep honoring and love of God.  They just don’t seem to have been overly effective and were certainly not worth getting angry over. 

We have a lot of traditions in the Episcopal Church too, intended to help us draw near to the mystery of God, and open our hearts to God’s passionate love for us.  Some of us follow and understand these traditions really well, and some of us don’t.  Over the years, I’ve known folks would be absolutely incensed if one of the rituals and traditions in our worship didn’t go quite right.  They loved worship and traditions so much that they were angry at people when the worship and traditions didn’t go quite right.  How many parents have I talked to, fearful because their children made noise and were fidgety during church?  I tell them time and again, be not afraid.  Children can be kinda noisy and fidgety, and here in worship is where they belong. 

As Jesus pointed out to the Pharisees and the Scribes, being angry with people because traditions and worships don’t go quite right is rather backwards.  Our traditions and worship are meant to help us love each other and love God with ever greater passion, not the other way around.

We were made to see each other and all creation as beloved of God, and not just beloved, but deeply, passionately desired by, honored, and beloved of God.  We were made to see God, creation, and each other, through the eyes of newlywed lovers, so passionately desirous for each other, that all the world is beautiful.  We were made to live the passionate, desirous, honoring love which we heard in the Song of Solomon.  “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”  Amen.