Sermons from St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Pentecost 13, September 3, 2006

The Rev. Melissa Skelton

From the Song of Songs:

Our reading from the Song of Solomon this morning was the subject of some e-mail between Debra Sequeira, our lector at the 10:30 mass, Catharine Reid, the coordinator of the Sunday lector schedule and myself this last week.

On Tuesday, Debra sent Catharine and me an e-mail entitled “Song of Solomon.” It said the following: “Do you have any suggestions as to how I’m going to read: “The voice of my beloved! Look he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills….” with a straight face?”

A few hours later Catharine responded: “My only suggestions are prayer, and possibly a small stone in your shoe.”

I read this exchange with amusement but also with great interest, fascinated to see how the three of us would respond to this passage, this outpouring of unbridled romantic love that causes some to roll their eyes, others to shake their heads, and still others to get in touch with their own vague sense of yearning for union with God or with a beloved.

The Church over the ages has had similar struggles with and reactions to the entire book of what’s called the “Song of Songs.” Just barely making it into the canon of Scripture, it has been variously poked, prodded, allegorized, discussed, dismissed and embraced. In the early 12^th century, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, connecting it both to the relationship between Christ and Mary as partners in humankind’s salvation and to romantic love is an image for the soul’s ecstatic union with God.

Closer to our own time, Charles Williams, one of the group of twentieth century writers called “the Inklings,” who included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein, wrote and spoke about what he called a theology of romantic love. Williams maintained that romantic love could be a gateway to the divine and that “any occupation exercising itself with passion, with self-oblivion, (and) with devotion, towards an end other than itself" could serve as such a gateway. Eamples of such “occupations,” as he called them, could be found in the pursuit of learning, in politics, in art, in nature and in friendship, and in "any relation of (human beings) into which the element of sincere and single attraction enters.” All of these, Williams said, could be a gateway to God.

This, of course, was a very different approach from the Pharisees we hear about in our gospel this morning. The Pharisees who significantly are mentioned as coming from Jerusalem, the seat of access to God, believed that the gateway to God lay in maintaining “the practices of the elders,” actions such as the ritual washing of hands before eating. These actions, originally part of the oral law, aimed at extending temple holiness to everyday life. But instead of extending the holy into everyday life, it had, according to Jesus, become not only an empty practice to hide behind but a control mechanism for determining who was inside and who was outside the community of faith.

And so in our gospel we see a Jesus who as the lover of souls, has little use for these practices--- for they have become habits of the deadliest kind: walls standing between God and those whose hearts God is seeking, distractions that keep people from hearing the voice of God as holy lover calling them to arise and come, to open the gate and admit God into the inner sanctum of the soul, the place of awkward groping where holy woo is pitched and the transformation of the heart, the mind and the will can occur and where habits of the heart are forged.

And so this morning we are invited to ask ourselves:

• Where in our lives are we caught up in empty habits, our own version of “the practices of the elders”?
• Where are we engaging in actions that distract us and keep us walled off from the lover of souls who seeks to gain entry into our hearts?
• Or to go back to some of Williams’ words, what new occupation involving our passion is the lover of souls inviting us to undertake with our whole hearts. What self-oblivion and devotion toward an end other than ourselves are we being invited to consider?
• What new habits of the heart are wanting to take shape in our lives?

The writer Annie Dillard has lived these questions as she has struggled over the years with following the path of her writing, a path of self-oblivion and devotion that like love itself demands both an openness to something or someone larger than herself as well as the giving of her whole heart and her energy to the task and, yes, the habit of writing. In an essay that appeared in the New York Times some years ago entitled “Write Till You Drop” she describes the interplay of sacrificial effort and seemingly undeserved grace that are a part of giving herself to her vocation. She also describes a kind of flow of generosity she participates in through this same vocation. For me, her description of her process of surrender as a way of coming to herself, of giving away in order to receive is a window into the kind of spiritual and vocational lives the lover of souls wants to give us.

“At its best” Dillard says, “the sensation if writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then and only then, it is handed to you.. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it.”

And then later she goes on to say: “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book: give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something will arise later, something better. These things fill behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep it to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything that you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and you find ashes.”

The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.

My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag.

Look, there he stands
behind our wall,
gazing in at the windows,
looking through the lattice.

My beloved speaks and says to me: 
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away…”

Yes, in the 12^th Century Bernard of Clairvaux would write eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, exploring the self-giving romantic love as an image for the soul’s ecsatic union with God. A hundred years later, a Persian poet whose name is Rumi in a different religious tradition would say it another way. As in our passage from the Song of Songs, Rumi’s words come from the mouth of a human being who is drawn toward union with God as beloved.

I would love to kiss you.

The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,

What a bargain, let's buy it.

Melissa M. Skelton

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Works cited or consulted

Owen C. Thomas “Beatrice or Iseult? The debate about romantic love”

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1997

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3818/is_199710/ai_n8778599

Annie Dillard “Write Till You Drop” from the New York Times May 28, 1989