Valentines Day

Happy Valentines Day!

This Sunday I had the chance to preach at our church, and the text I chose was the entire book of the Song of Solomon. After I finished preparing for it, Kristi (as she often does) asked me how I liked it. I said, "Well, I don't know. They'll either run me out of town, or it will be ok."

I haven't been run out of town (yet!).

I don't usually do this, but below is the text from Sunday's Sermon. Song of Solomon is a hot, steamy, passionate book...OF HOLY SCRIPTURE. Amen to that. On this Valentine's Day, celebrate Godly Romantic Love.

jeff

note: Quotes from Scripture are taken from The Message Paraphrase of the Bible.

The Best Song in the World
Song of Solomon
As you know, this week we celebrate Valentine’s Day, a day which makes flower stores entire years, which Hallmark has stock in, but is also a day set aside where we get to celebrate love and romance.

My guess is that we all have memories of Valentine’s Days past, both bad and good ones.

Some of my earliest memories of Valentine’s Day are going to the drug store with my mom and getting to pick out the box of Valentine’s Day cards to give to my classmates at school (which I just did with my daughter Lucy this past week. She chose the dinosaur cards). And I vividly remember how, even then, young love and infatuation was starting to show its face. If you recall ever taking part in this tradition, for most of the people in your class, you didn’t really care which Valentine you gave them. But it seemed like even then there was always that special person that you wanted to give the most special Valentine to. For me it was Missy Armstrong in the fifth grade getting the coveted Wonder Woman Valentine from me. I picked it out special for her, thought about it, wrote her name on it, sealed it up, held my breath as she opened it. And then I watched as she placed it aside with the rest. I was crushed. And I still have a hard time wondering how she didn’t just swoon for Wonder Woman!

The point is the desire for romance and love run deep and early don’t they? We want to be known. Scripture tells us in its very first pages that God created us to be in relationship with each other, that we were literally created to be together, and that the relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, goes beyond partnership and procreation but to mutual fulfillment, pleasure, and joy.

Unfortunately, our world today has taken, shall we say, a “limited” view of love. For love in our world is often only relegated to sex, with an easy sexuality being the order of the day. You can’t turn on the TV or the computer, open a magazine, or look at a billboard without being confronted fully frontally in the face with the world’s limited view of love. Unfortunately, this opening of easy sexuality has not expanded but atrophied the world’s experience of true love.

On the other hand, the church, while it has maybe done better in celebrating true love, has done no better with the issue of sex, for we have tended to err on the other side, completely divorcing sex from true love. Our Puritan roots in America run deep, as H.L. Mencken once said, “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.” And sex itself has taken a hit in this theological vein. Going way back to St. Augustine in the 3rd Century, the church began to see and teach that sex is a necessary evil to keep the race going, but has little to do with love and fulfillment. In other words, in the church’s efforts to confine sex where it should be confined, in the marital relationship, it robbed it of its unique, wonderful, intimate, joyous properties, which God ordained and gifted a husband and wife.

We’ve got the world on one side promoting a loveless sexuality, and we’ve got the church on the other promoting a love without sex.

It seems that neither the world or the church has gotten it right.

But what does God have to say to us on this Valentine’s Day week?

That is where this very beautiful book of Holy Scripture comes in. The question I get asked most about the Song of Solomon is, “How did this book get in here?” And indeed it is different than any other book of Scripture in its passionate and sometimes erotic imagery. We often ignore it in the church, or at least blush when we think about it. Children’s Bibles don’t even include it. In fact, for centuries it was forbidden for Jewish boys to read this book of Scripture, lest it got them too worked up. But as a piece of love poetry, it is without parallel. And as a way to describe God’s love for us, and His image of our love for one another, it is inspiring. Therefore, we cannot and will not ignore it.

The Song of Solomon (or the Song of Songs as it is sometimes called) is the story of a young, common maiden who is noticed and courted by a king (presumably Solomon, for whom the book is named and attributed to). Throughout its eight chapters, you see their relationship go from courtship, to the wedding ceremony, to the honeymoon night, to their first marital spat, to their mutual forgiveness and final declaration of the deepening of their love. Like many poems it is full of lofty and colorful language, that engages all the senses, from sight to smell to touch to taste to voice.

And it has a lot to tell us about Godly Romantic love,
Godly Romantic Love that begins with desire, is tempered with restraint, and lived out of respect for the one we love.

First, Godly Romantic Love starts with desire. The word desire gets a bad wrap in our world I think because of its lustful, overindulgent connotations. But desire does not have to be bad. As you read this love story in the Song of Solomon, the couple’s desire for each other is apparent. These young lovers can’t get enough of each other. The woman says, “Kiss me on the mouth, for your love is better than wine, headier than your aromatic oils. The syllables of your name murmur like a meadow brook. No wonder everyone loves to say your name!” The man says of his love, “Your beauty is too much for me – I’m in over my head. I’m not used to this! I can’t take it in. Your hair flows and shimmers like a flock of goats in the distance streaming down a hillside in the sunshine.” (6:5) In their description of each other, it is apparent that everywhere they look they see their lover’s face. They desire deeply to be with each other and to express their love face to face.

And desire for each other is a good thing. Even sexual desire is, at its core a good thing. God made us to be known by each other, to long for a union that transcends surface unions. And these young lovers waste no time in describing these longings and desires for each other.

My guess is for the Romantics among us, this makes our hearts melt. But for others of us, my guess is that this seems rather sophomoric, innocent, and immature.

And in some ways, maybe that’s true. Certainly this sort of desire that these young lovers describe happens at the beginning of their courtship.

Yet, I still must believe that desire is a part of love, young and old. For desire is not limited to physical attraction. It is the longing to be one, to be together, to “be” together. God has placed in us the desire to be with others. And part of our responsibility in love is to find those things in the one we love that attracted us to them in the first place. It might take more work, and more creativity, but love is called to live in desire of the other.

What would it be like for each of us to sit down this Valentine’s Day and write out the things we love about our spouse? What attracts us to him? Maybe it will be easy, and maybe it will take some deep creativity, but my encouragement is to tell him, tell her what it is that that you love.

Each of us could do this, with our spouses, or with our children, even with our friends. We need to be in the habit of reminding ourselves and them what it is we love about them and what makes us want to be with them.

You know, that is one of the main reasons we come to worship. When we worship God and declare His glory, we open up our hearts to a greater experience of His love in our lives. That sort of contemplation and expression deepens the feelings of love for God, but also for one another.

Secondly, Godly Romantic Love is desire tempered with restraint. This is another huge lesson for us as we consider love and romance in God’s vocabulary. Throughout the Song of Songs, you can feel the temperature go up in the room as the young lovers dream and fanaticize about abandoning themselves into the others arms. But at each turn, as their fantasies heat up, a warning is given to the young lovers – “Don’t excite love, don’t stir it up, until the time is ripe – and you’re ready.” It points out the need for restraint in love. And that is such an important lesson for us, young and old, in love.

For this young engaged couple, it is pointing out that the time and place for passion and full intimacy to occur is in the marriage relationship, not before. That restraint is needed until love’s full expression can be felt and had in the covenant of marriage. For those of us already in that marriage relationship, love shows restraint by living in fidelity to the one whom we have been united with in marriage. That restraint is not just sexual, but emotional as well. We cling to our spouse, we restrain ourselves for him or her alone. We keep ourselves solely for the other. Why? Because souls cannot be split into pieces. Our restraint in love honors the other and shares with them the love that sacrifice brings. True love restrains itself for the one it loves.

Finally, Romantic Love is desire tempered with restraint out of respect for the other. Ultimately, the way we treat those we love must be done out of and in respect for their personhood. In fact, I would argue that love, romantic and otherwise, is always respectful of the one that it loves.

At every turn in the Song of Solomon, the lovers are affirming and respecting each other. They are building each other up. The woman in the Song of Solomon is of a low caste, forced to work in the fields because of her family’s place in the community. “Do not look on me because I am dark,” she laments, “darkened by the sun’s harsh rays.” In ancient times, fair skin was deemed beautiful because it meant you didn’t have to work like a servant out in the fields. The woman in this story seems to be admitting she is nothing great to look at. She is dark and leathery from the hard work required by her caste.

But her beloved is constantly affirming her, respecting her, lifting up her self-esteem. “Oh, my dear friend! You’re so beautiful! And your eyes so beautiful – like doves!” (1:15). And in response, you can hear the woman’s self-talk change. She says, “I’m just a wildflower picked from the plains of Sharon, a lotus blossom from the valley pools.” (2:1) Isn’t that a beautiful testimony of love? Out of respect for his love, he affirms her, and in turn, she sees herself as lovely.

Even in their marital intimacy, there is this beautiful sense of respect and affirmation, each for the other. It seems that even sex is more than just physics or biology, it is poetry and affirmation in motion.

Romantic Love is desire tempered with restraint out of respect for the other.

So what about us? For some of us here, my guess is that we know this already, and we hear these words as ones of encouragement and empowerment, to renew or keep our desire for our spouse, to restrain ourselves for him or her, to respect them at every turn, to keep those home fires burning. For the young among us, I hope we hear these words as encouragement and a recommitment to restrain ourselves physically until Romantic Love can find its full expression in marriage. For others of us who are not married, or not married anymore, or are in the midst of great difficulties in our marriages or relationships, these passages of Scripture may cause us some pain to hear, at what is not or what has been lost.

Yet, this Valentine’s week, more than any cards or candies that we might (or might not) get, I believe that this passage of Scripture, this romantic poetry is the best news for each and every one of us. For it points out not only that God desires good things for us in our human relationships which gives us hope for the future, but it also gives us a glimmer of what God’s love for us is like. For He desires not only to have a “Fatherly” relationship with us, but He desires to be our bridegroom as well. And God is the God of second chances. If the Song of Solomon teaches us anything, it teaches us that.

It sure makes Valentine’s Day seem bigger to me. The God of Romantic Love is in love with us.

AMEN.