September 2, 2012 – Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Love Comes, Love Bids Us Come Away
14th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 22] – September 2, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
It’s lovely on this Labour Day weekend to rest from our work and hear this wondrous word
from the Song of Solomon.
My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”
The poem clearly seems to be about a man and a woman and their intense love for one another.
Their longing for each other.
Their delight in one another.
Their mutual giving and receiving love.
It’s a very bodily poem, full of celebration of the human body and
the love that is possible between two people.
In form it consists mostly of a dialogue between the man and the woman,
with the woman given slight prominence, a very unusual feature in ancient poetry.
The drama in the poem is generated by the awareness of something that menaces this love.
There are forces working against it.
There is something getting in the way of their being together.
There is a barrier to their love. Winter is never far away.
Nevertheless, when they do manage to find each other,
it is as if spring comes with all its colours and scents and sounds.
I think it’s right to celebrate this poem as a picture of what human love can be.
Of how much human beings can delight in one another.
Of the mutuality that we are intended for by God in our relations with each other.
But I wouldn’t be truthful if I didn’t say that for most of the last 2000 years,
the church has interpreted this poem not as a celebration of human love,
but as a celebration of the love that is possible between God and human beings.
God is love, we read in First John.
And I think most of us believe that.
And along with Jesus, we are named beloved in our baptisms.
And I think most of us believe that that is so.
God is love, and we are beloved.
Some writers, though, have struggled to put into words just what that means.
Some have struggled to articulate the intense longing with which we are longed for by God.
The intense desire with which we are desired by God.
That there is a vast love at work in the universe that we call God that is
responsible for all that is.
A love that never ends, as Paul says in First Corinthians 13.
A love that sang creation into existence in order to love it.
A love that fashioned the universe and the galaxies and the sun moon and stars with such
beauty and loving care.
A love that seeks to bind all things together – all things! – into a loving communion.
A love that has its heart in the ever-giving ever-receiving love of the three persons of
the Triune God.
A love that comes to us by shedding all glory and seeking us where we may be found in
the person of Jesus.
A love that speaks to us and invites us to come away from all that is not love.
But this is difficult.
We find it so difficult to trust God’s love and care for us.
That is the barrier to becoming the people God creates us to be,
the image of Christ who is the image of God.
The elderly Roman Catholic nun Ruth Burrows, recently wrote this,
All our selfish choices derive from lack of trust in God’s love and care for us. . . . If we really, fully grasped “how much, how sweetly and our tenderly our Maker loveth us,” we would drop our self-concern and anxious self-protectiveness. (Love Unknown, 51)
And we would be free to love.
God offers himself in total love to each one of us. Our part is to open our hearts to receive this gift. . . . We think we must first save ourselves, perfect ourselves and then offer ourselves to Love. No! Only Love can save, purify, and cause us to expand and expand to receive more and more. (ibid., 39)
Christian life at its most basic is not complicated.
We receive love. And we give love.
And we give as we receive: without conditions and without consideration of merit.
To be sure, there are many ways to love.
But the impulse remains constant.
James says much the same thing this morning:
Everything good comes from God as a gift. True religion is to care for the vulnerable.
Our congregational life works on the same principle:
our community of First Lutheran Church seeks to mirror the life of the Triune God:
constantly receiving love from one another,
constantly giving love to all in need.
On this Labour Day weekend, let us rest from our labours for a while.
Let us be at rest in this love that seeks us.
Let us stop and simply drink from the fountain of immense graciousness.
Let us be tranquil,
Tranquil in the certainty that our Lord looks on us with infinite compassion and love.
Tranquil in the truth that our great God, our holy Creator, has . . . thrown off his robes of grandeur and run out in eagerness to meet us, to be with us where we are. (ibid., 13)
He gazes in at the window.
He looks in through the lattice.
And he speaks to us.
He invites us to stand, to be his resurrection people.
And to come away with him.
Will we come away with him when we leave this feast?
Will we go where love beckons, into the streets, into the sick rooms, into the hunger and
poverty of this neighbourhood?
Will we go, confident that with him spring will come?
May we rest in his love as he comes to us in this meal.
And may we go with him when he sends us out.
Receiving a love beyond our imaginings, and giving this without conditions.
And together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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