Passionately in Love with God: A Sermon on Song of Solomon 2: 8-13

Ah, love! Everything is beautiful, flowers are blooming outrageously, birds burst into song every time your beloved walks in the room and your heart beats a quick little pitty pat in time with the Disney-esque twirlings of adorable mice. Heck, you might even have a fairy godmama or two whirling around with her magic wand while glitter flutters down upon the two of you. You walk around feeling like you’re in a Julia Roberts movie. No, not “The Pelican Brief” or “Sleeping with the Enemy.” If your love feels like that, come see me and we’ll talk about a good divorce attorney. For now, I’m talking “Notting Hill.” You know the way everything seems luscious and grand when you first fall in love. The writer of Song of Solomon captures that newly-smitten feeling gorgeously in today’s passage, so popular at weddings. We didn’t read it yesterday at Sam & Stephanie VanHouten’s wedding, but that same kind of giddy excitement was in the air and the atmosphere at Carillon Park during the reception certainly reflected that natural beauty spoken of in the scripture. I’m going to read the passage again and ask all of you to close your eyes while I read, reflecting on these words and your own first weeks in love.

8The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. 9My 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. 10My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; 11for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. 12The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. 13The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Now, think about your relationship now. I don’t mean to dampen the mood of wedding excitement, but probably by their 10th anniversary, Sam and Stephanie won’t be giddy in quite the same way. Usually, we settle into routine and, while our hearts may still dance in the presence of our darlings, work, kids and so many other things compete for our energy and enthusiasm. So, by the 10th anniversary dinner, while you may still deeply appreciate that your sweetie butters your bread for you, it probably won’t send the same thrill through you as it did at first. Oh, to be cared for so well! I would argue that there is definitely something to be said for the mellow patina of years of love and trust, but it doesn’t feel all ripe-figgy and scented-blossomful the way it does at first. A gazelle or a young stag might not be the first animal that comes to mind when your love arrives home…on occasion, perhaps a bear or a crab would be more apropos? And there is certainly rain and even winter. Bitter winter. It can’t all be dusky summer twilights alive with fireflies, the scent of wisteria on the breeze, juicy tomato and corn and watermelon dripping down your chins as you giggle together.

If you’re lucky (and I am), you’ll still get amazing arrangements of flowers on a perfectly ordinary day and go off on weekend adventures just because you can. If you’re smart, you’ll dust off the glitter jar and get the magic wand down from the attic every so often so you can feel the sparkling glow of that first blush of romance all over again. The glitter doesn’t have to be a diamond ring. The wand doesn’t have to whisk you off on a cruise. A candlelight dinner on the porch and a few moondances to Van Morrison can be just as effective. If you keep that up, always having the glitter jar close at hand, you may well end up like my grandparents. The first year Jeannene went to the fireworks at Gaunt Park in Yellow Springs with us, she was charmed by the sight of my grandparents, 60 years married at that point, holding hands under the spangled sky. They remained madly in love the entire nearly 65 years of their marriage.

It’s the same way with our relationship with God. I’ve been pretty attached to God my whole life, so I’ve never felt the dizzying swells of love and rapture (no, not the kind where your car & your pets get left behind) of a born-again experience. But I have seen newly-converted people weeping and dancing and waving their hands in excited joy at the God they have found. I have known friends in this new rush of relationship who have stayed up half the night exploring their God, have had relatives who couldn’t stop talking about Jesus, as bad as I was when, as a teen, I couldn’t stop gushing about whatever crush I had at the time. I had a patient mom, I’m telling you. My friends and I would tell stories late into the night about our crushes and new converts get like that about God. They look about them for signs of the Holy Spirit, getting as excited as I did as a young woman when I would hear a motorcycle & rush to the window just to see Steve Allison ride by my house. Oh, the swooning! Oh, my poor stepdad.

And, you know, all of this excitement seems, I think, a little much to folks in mainline churches, folks who have been going steady, as it were, with God for years now. It seems perhaps a little juvenile, a little put-on, a little…well, just a little silly. We are settled comfortably into our routine lives with God, no longer flying to the door to greet God at the end of the day, but waiting in our chairs in front of the t.v., continuing to help the kids with the homework, immersed in just another little bit of work on the laptop we tote back & forth with us, chopping carrots in the kitchen…and calling out a hello from where we are. Sometimes, we have even entered into a chilly silence with God. Sometimes we yell at God. “Why didn’t you fix this? Why didn’t you handle that? Are you just completely going to ignore my honey-do list???” It’s okay. It’s okay sometimes to be mad. God can handle it. God can handle being ignored, too.

But we can’t. It’s not good for us only to rage at God. It’s not good for us only to hand God a list of chores and never a bouquet of flowers. It’s not good for us to get so focused on our own concerns, our busy lives, our never-ending “to do” lists, that we don’t take the time, make the effort to let God know how appreciative we are. God’s not going to ask for a divorce because we take our relationship for granted. God’s still going to bring us flowers. Have you seen the lilies everywhere? I love those bright yellows & oranges! God’s still going to adore us. But when we refuse to take (make) time for God, when we neglect to be intentional about our relationship, we suffer. A love relationship that is being tenderly maintained by only one partner cannot help but become hollow, no matter how hard the one partner works at it.

“Okay,” you may ask, “so what do I do about it? It’s not like there are Marriage Encounter weekends for me & God. If I called a couples counselor to help me & God learn to communicate better, I’d definitely get a notation on my file that says nutcase.” But, really, God asks very little of us in the everyday. God just wants to know that we care about the same things, that we notice all the glorious gifts we are given, that we try in our own ways to scatter joy in the world and that we love God right back. It doesn’t have to be all breathlessness and adoring googly eyes and non-stop chatter about this God with whom we are passionately in love. It can be as simple as making sure people are fed, the way my grandmom always carried dinner in to my granddad during hockey finals. When we feed others, we are nourishing God and ourselves.

But sometimes a little flushed excitement, a little fidgety waiting for God to gaze in at the windows, to look through the lattice is a real thrill. There’s no reason good UCC folks can’t engage in some shameless flirtation as we respond to God’s call to come away. Come away is a constant refrain in love songs. Norah Jones beautifully sang about this the first time Jeannene and I saw her opening for the Indigo Girls at the Fraze many summers ago. You don’t want me to try to sing it, you really don’t, but I want to read you the lyrics of this gorgeous song. Imagine God singing it to you:

Come away with me in the night
Come away with me
And I will write you a song

Come away with me on a bus
Come away where they can't tempt us
With their lies

I want to walk with you
On a cloudy day
In fields where the yellow grass grows knee-high
So won't you try to come

Come away with me and we'll kiss
On a mountaintop
Come away with me
And I'll never stop loving you

And I want to wake up with the rain
Falling on a tin roof
While I'm safe there in your arms
So all I ask is for you
To come away with me in the night
Come away with me

God does call us to come away in the night, to fall into peaceful sleep knowing we are cared for and loved, safe in God’s arms. God does write us songs. I’ve been hearing some beautiful insect & frog music in the evenings lately. Going away with God where you can’t be tempted by lies? What a splendid idea! Perhaps a trip to a retreat center away from the media lies that everything here on earth has gone bad and there is no hope. Maybe a weekend media fast can help us hear the truth of goodness God whispers in our ears. The verse about walking with God “where the yellow grass grows knee-high” took me back to the labyrinth at Bergamo last Tuesday afternoon. As part of the spiritual formation portion of the SALT summer activities, we are studying and trying on various spiritual practices. For our field trip on meditation in motion, Nico, Geoff and I, along with Pastor Brian, headed over to the retreat center on Shakertown Road to walk their meadowsweet labyrinth. Made up of tall grasses and wildflowers, the labyrinth is one of the best places I know in the area to get away with God.

God does kiss us, brushing our cheeks so gently with feathery lip touches that we mistake it for the breeze. While we don’t have to go to a mountaintop to be with God, the peace of Ruby’s Hill, on the way back my mama’s lane, is another beautiful place to fall in love with God all over again (once I can stop huffing enough from the exertion of getting up there and if I can stop dreading the rest of the hike back to the house). I have been known to go to Gaunt Park hill in the dark of the morning on Winter Solstice to greet the sunrise with exuberance as I connect with my beloved God. No matter the way we discover is best for us to come away with God, God will never stop loving us.

For all the millennia that people have been, some of us have been head-over-heels, crazy-in-love with God. Regarded as fools by some and holy fools by others, scripture and religious history are full of those who have been passionately in love with God. From the writer of Song of Solomon, who wrote so beautifully about human love, to medieval mystic Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote 86 sermons on Song of Solomon, to modern mystics, people have lavished much attention on God as the Beloved. I don’t think it would hurt us to try the same approach. Why not revel in romance?

So, let God lure you from your closed-off world into the world of sensual delights and deep connection that has been prepared for us. Revel in the mutuality of relationship with God! Look for God bounding over the hills, ever approaching us, wishing to bring us flowers and share with us the best fruit. No distant clockmaker, our God, but overflowing with love and throwing pebbles at our windows in an attempt to get our attention and show us all the lush beauty and enlivening passion available to us. Make the time to come away with God. Why save the Song of Solomon for weddings only when we are invited to live it out in our own relationships with God?