Lover and Beloved: A Homily on the Song of Songs

Preached the Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost at Prince of Peace, Wasaga Beach, and at Good Shepherd, Stayner, Anglican Diocese of Toronto.

Texts for this Sunday:  Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

This Sunday marks the beginning of what our Diocese calls the Season of Creation, a chance to reflect on the goodness and fragility of the world that God the Creator has entrusted to us.   You will notice an extra Collect or prayer for creation that we will use throughout the Season, from today until October 4, along with other prayers and activities to help us reflect on the world God has given us.

Today’s first lesson is an also an opportunity to reflect on the created world, what we call nature, as a blessing.   The lesson if from the Song of Solomon, one of the strangest and loveliest books of scripture.  It’s sometimes called the Song of Songs, or Canticles, or sometimes just “the Song”, as I’ll call it in this homily.  

Besides its lush natural imagery, the Song is a love poem, full of poetic and even sensual quality that sometimes seems out of place in the bible.   However, this love language becomes wonderful when we think of God wooing and pursuing us as a lover pursues the beloved, thus challenging our usual perceptions of the God of the Old Testament!

 

The Song is traditionally associated with King Solomon, the son of King David.     Thus summer we have been hearing stories about King David.  Two Sundays ago we heard about David’s death and started to hear about his son and heir, King Solomon.   While he had his faults, scripture celebrates Solomon for his great wisdom, which it describes as the one blessing he asked of God and which God granted him (“I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you” 1 Kgs 2:12).

 

Because of his reputation for wisdom, it was traditionally believed that Solomon was the author of the Book of Proverbs, which we will be hearing some of in September, and of Ecclesiastes.    There was a traditional teaching of the ancient rabbis that Solomon wrote the Song as a young man in love, Proverbs as a mature man who has traded love for wisdom, and Ecclesiastes as an old man, somewhat jaded and well aware of his mortality.    Biblical scholars tend to think that Solomon didn’t write all of these books, and that their actual authorship is much more complex.  However the fact that the Song and Proverbs are attributed to Solomon is certainly one reason why they show up on in the liturgy of the church.

 

When you read it, you might well be surprised that the Song is even in the Bible, because it doesn’t seem very, well, biblical.    The Song isn’t even a Song, really, but is best described as a kind of play in which there are two characters: the two lovers, the Man and the Woman, and then a group or chorus that comments on what is going on.     It’s not a long book, just eight chapters, so it can read in one sitting, but depending which translation you are reading, it can be difficult to follow.   The voices of the two lovers entwine, like a love duet, with expressions of desire and praise for the other’s beauty.  The Song ends, much like our first reading today, with an expression of desire and a longing to be together:

 

"Make haste, my beloved,

and be like a gazelle

or a young star

upon the mountains of spices!” (SgS 8:14)

 

In the rest of this sermon, I would like to focus on three things.   The first is how the Song reminds us of the importance of earthly, human love, something the church has not always been good at understanding.  The second is how the Song describes love not just from the man’s point of view but also from the woman’s point of view, which again is something the church hasn’t been good at.   Finally, I will talk about the importance of nature in the Song and how it connects our human world to the natural world as part of God’s creation.

 

The Song is, as I said, sensual in parts, even erotic, though the language is highly poetic in the language and images of the day.    As the man and woman praise the beauty of each other’s bodies, there are some passages that wouldn’t make the greatest pickup lines today, as when the man says to the woman “Your belly is a heap of wheat, encircled with lilies” (Sg 7:2).   That might not go over too well, like the man’s praise that “Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead” (4:1).  On the other hand, verses such as “your kisses [are] like the best wine that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth”, well, those work just as well now as they did then.  There are times where the Song just crackles with longing.

 

If you are wondering why the church saw fit to keep this book in the bible, that’s a good question.    For a long time, well into the middle ages, the Song was read spiritually, so that it could be interpreted along the lines of the man being Christ and the woman being the church.   However, the fact that someone would want to read the book this way, as opposed to just taking it literally as a love song, says something about the church’s long and tortured history with human sexuality, which goes right back to the story of how the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the garden was a sin, and which continued for centuries in celebrating chastity as godly and the human body as a source of temptation and evil.   In such a worldview, marriage was a necessary evil, good only for the procreation of children.

 

The Song reminds us of the artificiality of this dualistic theology which celebrates spirit at the expense of body.   It reminds us that real flesh and blood people lived in biblical times, just as they did today.  It reminds us that human desire is natural, even beautiful, and that our bodies and our sexuality are gifts that are part of God’s creation.   Our own Book of Alternative Services reminds us of this in the marriage liturgy, when it begins by describing marriage as “a gift of God” in which the partners may “know each other with delight and tenderness in acts of love” (BAS 528).   The editors of the Serendipity Bible, designed for small groups in evangelical churches, uses the Song as the basis for a bible study on marriage and intimacy.   The Song reminds us that our faith speaks to all areas of life, and that intimacy, trust, and affection can be part of our lives as Christians.

 

This realization is made more remarkable because the woman is a full and equal voice in the Song of Songs.  This makes a refreshing change from the story we heard earlier this summer of David and Bathsheba, who never gets a voice and is merely a beautiful object that David wants and gets, however immorally he does so.   In contrast, the woman in the Song is an equal partner in the duet.   She speaks with as much poetry and passion, she relishes her lover’s beauty as much as he does hers, and her longing is just as strong as his:

 

Awake, O north wind,

and come, O south wind!

Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad.

Let my beloved come to his garden and eat its choicest fruits.” (Sg 4:16)

 

The Song reminds us that men and women are equal and full participants in God’s creation.   

 

The final thing I would point out about the Song is the importance of nature and natural images.   In the passage from our first lesson, the woman describes her lover as being like “a gazelle or a young stag” (2:8) or elsewhere as an “apple tree”.  Likewise the man describes the woman elsewhere as being a “dove”, a “mare”, and the woman describes herself as a “rose of Sharon” and a “lilly of the valleys”.   The entire Song is full of references to animals, and one scholar has counted twenty four plant species.    Biblical scholar Elaine James calls the Song a very green poem, written at a time when humans lived much more closely to the natural world than most people do today.    The Song reminds us that the natural world, which appears to be changing and disappearing at a frightening rate, is part of God’s creation, and reminds us of our obligation as stewards of creation to care for that world.

 

So while the Song is in many ways a very sensual poem, full of natural images of the earth and of human desire, it is also a very spiritual poem.  The idea of the earth coming back to life - for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone - is also an image of redemption and salvation.   One commentator I read this week noted that today’s passage would be a great scripture reading for a wedding where one or both parties had experienced a divorce or the loss of a spouse.   Likewise, even for those of us for whom the youthful fires of love might have died down a bit, there is in the Song a powerful affirmation of human love as something that is powerful and wonderful.

 

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm

For love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.   

Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. (Sg 8:6)

 

For those who carry the memory of a love and life well lived, or who nursed and cared for a loved partner through sickness and old age, the Song speaks to them as much as it speaks to young lovers.   The Song of Songs is one of the great gifts of scripture, a reminder that God is with us even in the earthiness of our lives.   

I hope that this homily has made you curious about this wonderful book of the Bible.   I hope that this final thought encourages you, that if two people can have such love and longing for one another, imagine how much more love and longing God has for you. 

 

Amen.

  

A Funeral Homily for James Glassco Henderson

                                                    James Glassco Henderson

18 July, 1929 - 25 July, 2024

Preached at Trinity Church, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 23 August, 2024

Every passing and every funeral is sad, for as the poet John Donne said, none of us are islands, and every one’s death diminishes us in some way.    At the same time, the funeral of one advanced in years is an opportunity to reflect on how the fortunate are blessed with long lives, with accomplishments, and with many of the satisfactions that life affords.  So it is with us today as give thanks for the life of Jim Henderson, and as we remember and recall some of the details of Jim’s life, as you have already heard it described.

Today I’d like you to reflect with me briefly on the importance of remembering a life, even as we are faced with the fragility of memory itself.  Jim’s life was worth remembering, for he was many things:  a soldier, a teacher, a journalist, a father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.   He was blessed twice to be a loving husband.   

My abiding memory of Jim will always be over dinner one night when he told me the story of the Canoe River train disaster.   In November 1950, Jim was aboard a troop train taking men of the 2nd Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, from Shilo, Manitoba, to Fort Lewis, Washington, where they would train before proceeding to Korea.   That train collided with an eastbound train in a remote part of the Canadian Rockies, with many killed and more badly injured.

Jim told me the story of how he and his comrades spent long, cold hours tending the wounded and dying before help finally arrived.    He spared me the details, but he told me the story because he knew that I was a soldier and was interested in military history.    

Story telling is an important part of military culture.   Stories traded in the mess help keep a unit’s identity and culture alive.  Young soldiers, if they are wise, listen to the stories of veterans and learn from them.   Most of Jim’s stories were funny, and I commend his little book of military stories to you if you are fortunate enough to find a copy.  But that night Jim’s story of Canoe River was a soldier’s lesson in the fragility of life and of the bonds of comradeship in desperate moments.

Stories form memory, and memories form history, and but memory is fragile and history is not always remembered.   One historian has called Korea “Canada’s forgotten war”,  which is why the words we say on Remembrance Day, “lest we forget”, are so important.   The stories of our veterans shape who we are as a people, as Canadians, and if we forget them, we lose a part of our identity.   This is why its important for us to remember the stories of our veterans even after they themselves are unable to tell them.   Jim’s memories and stories slipped away from him in old age, when, as his obituary puts it, “he endured a long struggle with frailty and with dementia”.  Today we promise Jim that we will remember him, and that we will remember for him.

They say that old soldiers never die, they only fade away.  As we live longer and as we ourselves move into old age, we see friends and family whose memories and identities slowly fade away.   Perhaps we fear that fate for ourselves.   So today, one of the consolations of the Christian faith that we turn to is the perfect memory of God.

Scripture assures us that we are known to God even we no longer know ourselves.   The psalmist says that “you {Lord] have searched me and known me. / You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away” (Ps 139:1-2).  Likewise we hear elsewhere in the psalms that God  “has compassion for those who fear him. For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust” (Ps 103.13).  Our faith includes the promise that in the eternal mind of God, we are remembered and never forgotten.    The man crucified alongside our Lord seems to sense this when he asks Jesus to “remember me, when you have come into your kingdom” (Lk 23:42).

Today we commend Jim into the eternal care of God, and we fix our hope on the promise that God will remember us when we ourselves may forget and one day be forgotten.     The Christian promise of the resurrection assures us that we will be remembered, raised, and reformed on that day when death and dementia are abolished.    Today we commend Jim to God, trusting that nothing good about his life will be forgotten in the eternal mind of God, until that day when we are reunited with Jim and all those we love who have gone before us.

We Eat a Lot: A Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Yes, I know, I'm on vacation.   Got a pained but supportive look from my lovely wife when I agreed to fill in this Sunday. M+

Preached at Good Shepherd Church, Stayner, Anglican Diocese of Toronto.  Texts for today, the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost (B):  1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

⁵³So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  (Jn 6.53)

Last year our nine year old granddaughter visited us and I was showing her around All Saints church in Collingwood.   The day she visited happened to be when we were setting up for one of our Friendship Dinners when we feed the community.  We talked about why these dinners were important to us.  Then I took her into the church and she pointed to the altar and asked what it was for.

I explained that it’s a table where we prepare a meal that we share on Sundays when we gather for worship. She thought about that for a moment and then said, “You guys sure like to eat a lot”.  And she was right.

It’s true that Christian life tends to revolve around a shared meal.  We talk about table fellowship and about hospitality, and it’s fair to say that our life as church is formed and shaped by common meals and even by the humble coffee hour.   Eating and drinking together forms us as community.  Providing food to others through food banks and soup kitchens has become an important part of our sense of mission.    As Pope Francis has said, “First you pray for the hungry, and then you feed them.  That’s how prayer works”.

I think it’s fair to that we all of our church understanding about food and meals comes from our worship.  We’re taught to feed others because we ourselves are fed at God’s table.    For certain parts of the Christian family, including we Anglicans, the common meal - Lord’s Supper, Eucharist, Mass, Communion - is a central part of our worship, at least when a priest is available.   We hear the story of the last supper, we hear Jesus’ command to eat and drink, and we know that somehow the bread and wine are connected with Jesus’ self-sacrifice on the cross for us.

Now how exactly this all happens is a bit of a mystery and we Anglicans have never felt the need to carefully explain it.   Does the bread and wine somehow become the physical presence of Jesus?   Maybe], we say.  Is the bread and wine to remind us about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins?   Maybe, we say.     

Some Anglican churches treat the Eucharist with great ceremony and reverence, maybe even with bells and incense.  Other churches treat communion with less ceremony, though there is still reverence.  However it is done, when the priest says something like “the body of Christ” and puts the wafer in your hand, you are free to decide what the priest’s words mean.

For those of us who have been going to the communion rail for a long time, our familiarity with the liturgy gives us an advantage over the folks in today’s gospel who balked at Jesus’ words, that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6.53).   Jesus’ teaching here is just too much for many to accept.  

First, it just sounds weird, and we can understand why they would say “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  (Jn 6.52).   Secondly, as Jews, they found this teaching offensive.   In Jewish law, it was forbidden to eat any meat that had animal blood left in it (Deuteronomy 12:23; Leviticus 17:14; 19:26).  So, Jesus’ words were not only creepily cannibalistic, but they were also blasphemous.

However, for those who wanted to try and understand these words of Jesus, they were given a clue when he says that he is “the living bread that came down from heaven” (Jn 6.51).  This is a reference to the manna that sustained the Israelites in the wilderness, literally bread that fell from heaven to keep them alive, but as Jesus says elsewhere when he feeds crowds, real bread will only keep you alive from day to day.  Knowing Jesus and believing in Jesus are what matters, because Jesus is himself “the living bread that came down from heaven”.   

So the bread and wine of communion are really about Jesus coming to us as the son of the living God, who wants to give us what his father offers.   The Father as creator offers life and love, and the Son is the means to that life and love.  If we understand eternal life as the friendship of Jesus, then we are I think at the heart of what communion represents.  Taking communion is as much about believing as it is about eating., it’s as much about accepting the friendship of Jesus as it is about drinking.  In receiving communion, we receive Jesus, we become closer to Jesus, and we come to share his love for the world, which is why we in turn feed people.

All these things are worth us thinking about, even if we have been coming to the communion rail for many years.    They are especially important for us to understand and to explain at a time when fewer and fewer people know the firs thing about the Christian faith.  There are lots of people, people we probably know, who would think our talk of eating Jesus’ bread and drinking his blood are just as weird as those first Jews thought it weird when they heard Jesus.  Our faith can seem deeply weird until we explain it as relationship with the living and real God who loves us and who wants us to live fully and completely.

Let me finish by connecting what I’ve said with the chalice.   I’ve made the decision as your new priest to reintroduce the chalice to our worship.   I know that very few of you will feel comfortable drinking from it because of SARS and because of Covid, and that’s fine, you’re under no obligation to drink from it.  You are however welcome to just let your fingers touch the base of it, as a way of saying that you want to know Jesus fully, that you want to accept what he offers, which is the love, life, and friendship of God.   We may believe these things already in our minds, but touching the silver cup or tasting the wine are ways to more fully enter into the wonderful mystery of communion.   Jesus offers all of himself, body and blood, to us. May we accept all that he offers, so that we may become all that he wants us to be.

 

On Vacation

I'm off through August.   Enjoy the rest of the summer, be safe, and relax.   See you in the fall.