August 30, 2009, Proper 27
The Rev. Dorian McGlannan
I need not tell all of you Michiganders, all you who come from multigenerational families, about the beauty of the lakes in this state. From the Great Lakes to the small inland lakes, the healing power of water surrounds us. During my days of vacation, some of which were spent at home, I found a perfect swimming lake about 45 minutes from our house, a lake where there is no development, no cottages and best of all no power boats, just the occasional kayak and people who appreciate the cool clean water of a protected lake. As I floated and swam, looking at the sky and the graceful trees that surround this lake, I felt at one with God and with the world. As I swam far into the lake, I experienced the kind of quiet that I long for, a quiet that is kissed simply by the sound of the breeze in the trees or the calls of the water birds that bless this lake. Deep memories of Ross Lake in WA State surfaced, a lake on which my husband and I used to go kayak camping, a place that is sacred to us, a place where our love deepened.
And so when I read today’s reading from the Song of Solomon, my heart returned to these lakes because this reading in set in God’s creation. It is a reading can be understood on so many levels. At first blush it is a reading about lovers, a woman calling her lover who bounds over the hills to take her away now that winter has past. It is a passage that talks of flowers, fig trees and fragrant vines. This beautiful passage, as well as others from the Song of Solomon, is often read at marriage services. The entire book of the Song of Solomon is woven with sensuality and human and divine love. It is an epic poem of how God wants humans who love and honor each other to celebrate their love. God calls us to bond through emotional and physical love.
Sexuality is incredibly mysterious. When I talk with the couples I am preparing for marriage, I am very frank with them about ensuring that the sexual aspect of their marriage stay alive. “Don’t let this slide or become unimportant,” I say to them. Couples need the powerful connecting moments that come through making love. Yes, love becomes different when you marry, but physical love is a beautiful aspect of married love that needs to be celebrated and nurtured. In fact, the Talmud, the Jewish book of law, mandates, yes, mandates the frequency and quality of love-making. It states that married couples need to set aside at least one time a week for sexual intimacy.
The Song of Solomon, one of the most unique books of the Bible, celebrates feelings of passionate desiring and knowing oneself to be passionately desired. This part of scripture lets us know that sexual love between married couples can be a transformative experience that leads us to praise the creator who made such joy possible. One of my favorite stories is that of a couple who had been married for many years. They shared with me that whenever they made love they would end their time together by singing the doxology. It s a great story that has made me smile over the years.
The Song of Solomon, believed by many to be an exchange between King Solomon and his peasant bride, has had many other interpretations over the years. Some have seen it as an extended poetic metaphor of messianic expectations. The long winter has past and the messiah is now upon us. Others have seen this poem as an allegory of the love between Christ and his church. But I prefer the simple sensuality that is at the heart of this poem.
Our culture is obsessed with unhealthy expressions of sexual love and suffers from a lack of understanding of the kind of Christian love that keeps couples together for years and that is found practiced in many aspects of Christian life. All we ever hear about or see in the media are distortions of romance or disturbing images of uncommitted sex. Nobody ever talks about the simple love shared by couples all over the world. In fact, I can’t think of a movie I have ever seen that had a good sex scene between people who have been married for any length of time! We have almost no models in the larger world but we who have ventured into this church this morning have had the experience of this reading from the Song of Solomon.
Love, of course, is much more than sexual love. There are many, many different ways of loving. Our English language is lacking because we only have one word for the word love while Greek has several. In the Greek eros is passionate love. While it includes sexual and romantic love, it encompasses much more than that because it is not limited to love between people. Plato said that eros helps the soul recall beauty and contributes to the knowledge of spiritual truth. Most of the famous spiritual writers and saints from the Middle Ages, such as Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and St. Francis had profound experiences of God preserved in writings that would best be described as writings about eros, a deeply passionate love of Jesus.
Agape, a term that is familiar to many Christians, is the unconditional love we direct toward others regardless of our feelings about that person. Agape is what makes us give of ourselves. It is what C.S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, describes as charitable love. It is a love that serves, something which we experience in this congregation on a daily basis through people serving meals at Crossroads and St. Leo’s soup kitchens, preparing food packages for the poor at Gleaners, teaching VBS in the Dominican Republic, tending the grounds at St. John’s or any other vast number of ways in which the people of St. John’s love Christ through service. Agape is clearly the most discussed kind of love talked about in Christian circles. This agape or unconditional love is the love parents have for their children and the love that keeps couples together during times of challenge. Agape is what keeps us together when our spouse becomes ill or loses a job. There are, without a doubt, times when the discipline of agape is the foundation that keeps the house from falling down. But when those times of crisis pass, the playfulness of eros returns. It is the ebb and flow of life; agape and eros interplay with God always as the guardian and gardener who keeps love alive. Greek also has the word philia, a word that means friendship. But philia is a deep friendship; it is not just someone with whom we have surface conversations. In philia we bear our souls and share our heart’s desire. On one sunny Sunday afternoon this past month when I took the girls to the lake I sat in my chair and talked for over three hours with one of my former senior wardens in WA State. We share a deep philia, a level of profound friendship. Our families are close. I love his wife and he and my husband are close. It is a tight circle of friends; on that blessed day we talked until our phones died. Philia is what I share with many of you; knowing that the more time I spend with you, the stronger that philia becomes. When you come up for communion, I feel a bond with those of you whom I have come to know through life’s experiences.
In our life as a community, we experience all of these aspects of love. Readings such as we heard today remind us of the multi-faceted aspects of love, a rich love that binds us together in faith and hope.
