“For Love is as Strong as Death” based on Matthew…

September 2, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Most people agree with Jesus’ parable in Matthew 7: it is wiser to build a house on a solid foundation. I’m less certain that there is general agreement about what constitutes a solid foundation. Before you offer me the obvious, “like Jesus said, build on rock, not on sand,” I am going to remind some of you and inform the rest of you that you are currently sitting in a sanctuary of a “floating church.” When foundation work was being done for this building, it became clear that the bedrock was simply too deep to be reached. An underground stream flows here, and it is deep and wide. Our ancestors in faith decided to build this church on the foundation of oak beams in the stream. As long as the oak beams stay wet, which is as long as the underground stream continues to run, we are sitting on a firm foundation.

I love this little piece of our shared history, because it complicates matters. Not all things are rocks or sand. Sometimes what you have is mud, and even that can make a firm foundation if you do it right!

I’ve been reviewing some of my books about love, romance, and marriage in preparation for preaching today. In the book “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” author Stephanie Coontz says, “only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married. When someone did advocate such a strange belief, it was no laughing matter. Instead, it was considered a serious threat to social order.”¹ In fact, other than in the West for the past 200 years, love has NOT been seen as a reason to get married, and most of the time it has often been seen as a good reason not to. For almost all of history, people have thought that love is shifting sand, and not a solid foundation.

We are here today to disagree. As people of faith, especially, we think that love is THE foundation.

Song of Songs helps us disagree. Many scholars believe that the passage we read from Song of Songs today is the culmination of that book. Song of Songs is a celebration of romantic and sexual love. The book delights in physical bodies and articulates the joy that each of the lovers have in being together. The Song is remarkably nonjudgmental about eroticism and sex. (It is the only book in the Bible where a women’s voices dominate, and she uses her voice to speak of her desire and love.)²

The text is often shocking to the modern reader, but while ancient Israel expected fidelity in marriage, it had a positive attitude toward sexual love, in part because it led to propagation of family and society. “Ancient Israel perceived the wonders of human sexuality, fulfilled in marital love, to be a divine blessing.”³

It is always worth wondering about why this text made it into the Bible, and how people have thought about it over time. Scholars have pointed out that today’s text sounds a lot like Isaiah 43:2. Hear again what we read a moment ago:

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love
all the wealth of one’s house,
it would be utterly scorned.

– Song of Songs 8:6-7

Isaiah 43:2 says:

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.

The words in Isaiah are attributed to God, and aim to assure the exiles that their exile will come to an end. “The peace and security of the eschatological era is thus evoked … in this verse which affirms that nothing can again disturb the tranquil and profound attachment of the Bride to the Bridegroom.”⁴ The comparison between the texts makes the claim that love is similarly relentless, and thus solid foundation.

The seal that is placed on the heart and on the arm reminds me of the commandment in Exodus 13:9, “It shall serve for you as a sign on your hand and as a reminder on your forehead, so that the teaching of the Lord may be on your lips; for with a strong hand the Lord brought you out of Egypt.” Throughout the Song of Songs there is an assumption that “human and divine love mirror each other.”⁵

As one scholar puts it, Pope, “Love is the only power that can cope with Death.”⁶ Throughout the entire book, the Song focuses on transforming death to life. A scholar writes, “Love, through metaphor and simile, is the sum of all pleasures; the lovers represent all the creatures and life-forces in the world; now they and that which animates them are set against death, in the context of birth.”⁷ The same scholar concludes, “If Death overcomes all opposition, it must inevitably engage love, dissever all ties of affection; if Love is of infinite value, it must encounter the ultimate fear, the threat to existence.”⁸

The Song celebrates human love, I believe, because human love is the closest expression we get to Divine love. (Please note that I’m talking about love broadly, not only about romantic love.) Romans 12 gives instructions how human beings can express God’s love for each other. It says that relationships matter, and God is in the midst of those relationships. To be in relationship with God IS to be in good relationship with those around us. To harm those in our lives IS to harm God.

Eugene Peterson translates verse 10b, which in the NRSV says, “outdo one another in showing honour” as “practice playing second fiddle.” As far as I know, second fiddle is usually a harmony part that supports the melodies. It is a role that is needed, but it isn’t the most prestigious one. Most instrumentalists practice to become the FIRST, the top, of their sections. Romans suggests the goal of reflecting God’s love in the world requires us to practice for the supporting roles sometimes. It is about relationships, not performance. It is about supporting each other along the way.

Romans, too, helps us consider how to build solid foundations. The foundation of two people supporting each other is just a lot stronger than if only one supports the other.

Thomas Moore in his book Soulmates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship says, “The word intimacy means ‘profoundly interior.’ It comes from the superlative form of the Latin word inter, meaning ‘within.’ It could be translated, ‘within-est,’ or ‘most within.” In our intimate relationships, the ‘most within’ dimensions of ourselves and the other are engaged.”⁹ This is how human love and Divine love are reflections of each other. Both relationships Divine and loving relationships between humans are profoundly intimate. They inform each other, build on each other, express each other.

Moore says, “The intimacy we pledge at the wedding is an invitation to open Pandora’s box of soul’s graces and perversities. Marriage digs deep into the stuff of the soul. Lifelong, intense, socially potent relationships don’t exist without touching the deepest, rawest reservoirs of the soul. Few experiences in life reach such remote and uncultivated regions of the heart, unearthing material that is both incredibly fertile and frighteningly primordial.”¹⁰ Perhaps this is why for so long, humans lived in fear of romantic love as a foundation. It reaches into the depths of people, and finds the squishy stuff inside.

I keep going back to those those oak beams though. They’re going to hold up this church as long as they stay wet, but they’ll lose their strength if ever they dry out. The foundation is strong as long as the invisible, underground stream keeps flowing. The squishy stuff inside of us, the soul stuff, the primordial stuff, the stuff that intimacy touches – it is wet too. It, too, can look like an unstable foundation, and it too, can keep something like those oak beams strong and steady!

There is enough within us to keep “oak beams” wet and strong too – as long as we keep living into the vulnerable, the primordial, the intimate, the loving. Maybe it sounds weird to build a church on an underground stream – likely because it is. I guess in the course of history it sounds weird to base something so important as marriage on love! But those oak beams have been holding us up for 147 years, and I think there is enough squishiness in love to make a very strong foundation for marriage too. I think Jane and Jim are wise, in building their lives on the foundation of love, and thus on on the reflection of the Divine that is human love. I think their love is as strong as death, and that’s plenty of foundation.

Finally, I remain grateful for the hope that seeing love like theirs offers for all of us. Love, whether romantic, familial, or friendship, gives us glimpses of how the Divine relates to us. And that Divine love is the strongest foundation that I know of, bar none. That love, I’d even go so far as to say, is STONGER than death. That love is the foundation of the universe. Thanks be to God. Amen

1Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (USA: Penquin books, 2005) 15.

2It occurs to me that someone could argue about Ruth, but I don’t think Ruth reflects actual women’s voices so much as a voices ascribed to women by male authors.

3 Roland Murphy The Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or the Song of Songs in S. Dean McBride Jr, editor Hermeneia: A Critical & Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 99.

4 Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary(Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1977), 674.

5 Murphy, 104.

6 Pope, 210.

7 Francis Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs(Sheffield, England: The Almond Press, 1983), 114.

8 Landy, 123.

9Thomas Moore Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships (HarperPerennial, 1994), 23

10Moore, 59.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 2, 2018

Sermons

“The Bible’s Only Self-Description of a Woman” based on…

February 27, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I
find it truly exciting that the only time a woman describes herself
in the Bible she describes herself as “black and beautiful.”¹
The joy comes from both a woman describing herself as beautiful –
which I find incredibly subversive on its own – and the fantastic
inversion of our messed up culture that she is dark-skinned AND
beautiful. It is a lovely match for Black History Month. And then,
on top of all that, Song of Songs is a book of erotic poetry in the
Bible! Its very existence flies in the face of the ridiculous
Christian prudishness that has done such great harm for so many
centuries.

Thus,
I’ve been really excited to preach this sermon for weeks. However, a
few problems have emerged. Song of Songs has humbled my prowess as a
scholar. I’ve done some my most significant Biblical study on Song
of Songs. Yet, when I came to the important questions related to
preaching this text I found that I had NO possible way to discover
their answers. What I would really like to know is (1) how radical
it was for a woman to say “I am beautiful” in that time and place
and (2) how radical it was for a woman to express sexual desire in
that time and place. There are a few impediments to knowing. First
of all, the black and beautiful woman is the only woman in the whole
Bible describing herself AND the only woman in the Bible naming her
sexual desire, which means that there is no one to compare her to.

Secondly,
there are the incredible complications of the text itself. This book
is very, very difficult to make assertions about. To begin with, you
may know it as Song of Songs or Song of Solomon because its OPENING
LINE is difficult to translate and no one is sure which one is more
accurate. That’s only the beginning of the complications. There is
also the issue of determining when it was written, and time ranges
are especially wide on this. Scholars claim anything from 960 to 200
BCE. That’s 760 years of difference. It is possible that the ways
that women’s voices were heard, the expectations of beauty, the
sexual norms of the day, and how much humility a woman was expected
to express might well have varied wildly over 760 years. For
instance, it might be worth considering that many of those things
have drastically changed since 1257, and even since 1957.

This level of unknowing makes it
hard to determine anything about how subversive this woman’s words
and actions really were. I think that there have been cultures in
world history where it would not have been particularly radical for a
woman to claim her own beauty nor her own sexual desire. As a
whole, Judaism has been more sex-positive than Christianity,
including in having an understanding that part of the role of the
Sabbath was for love-making. That may suggest that ancient Judaism
may also have been more openminded than (say) medieval Christianity
and that, in particular, a woman’s expression of sexual desire would
not have been all that surprising.

On
the contrary, though, if this were so normal we might expect to hear
it in other parts of the Bible. Also, we do know a lot about
patriarchal cultures and we know ancient Israel was one of those for
all of those 760 years. In those cultures, women’s voices aren’t
often heard, nor free. Finally, if a woman expressing her desire
were so normal, it would be reasonable to expect that interpreters
through the ages might have commonly interpreted the text literally
and not allegorically, and that’s FAR from true. Most historical
interpretations of this book have been allegorical and or
metaphorical, taking the male character as God or Christ and the
female as the church, Israel, or Israelites.

It
is only relatively recently that this erotic text has been
interpreted as being primarily about eroticism. In the nineteenth
century, a German scholar named Johann
Gottfried Heder
analyzed the Song and
found it to be, “a collection of pleasingly erotic love-poetry.”²
Further research in the early twentieth century connected the Song
to similar Egyptian and Canaanite poetry. In 1990, Roland Murphy (an
American Catholic scholar who taught Biblical Studies at Duke) wrote,
“Any broad agreement among contemporary critical scholars that the
literal text of the Song marvelously portrays the passions and
yearnings of human lovers is a recent phenomenon.”³

Roland Murphy himself says it is notable that Song of Songs is not
only about sex, but it’s erotic and nonjudgmental about sex. (You
might be amazed to note that the text does not say that the lovers
are married, and in fact rather suggests that they aren’t!)

I
suspect that interpretations of the book Song
of Songs
are more reflective of the culture reading the text than they are of
the book itself! Since we don’t know how it was understood in its
first few centuries, so we lack the capacity to know how radical it
was then! It is POSSIBLE that the original meanings of the book were
lost along the way to allegory and metaphor. Additionally, the book
Song of Songs is exceptionally difficult to interpret.

“The
vocabulary of the Song of Songs is also unusual in the proportion of
words unique or rare elsewhere in Scripture… In the brief span of a
little more than a hundred verses there are almost fifty hapax rarely
found elsewhere in Scripture.”⁴
(A hapax is a word found only once in Scripture, making them harder
to translate.) Many commentators identify frequent double entendre
within the Hebrew as well, making it very difficult to render in
English. Furthermore, the love poetry of other parts of the Near
East and the mythology of the Near East offer deepened understandings
of many parts of the text. All of this serves to allow interpreters
and commentators a lot of leeway in their claims, and adds to the
variety of understandings of the text.

If
the text is a drama, the number of speakers in the Song of Songs is
debated. Claims range from man and woman; man, woman, and lecher;
even to man, women, and some eight other characters plus choruses.
Others claim it isn’t even a drama. It is clear the Song of Songs is
written in poetic language as opposed to prose. It is also clear that
the poetry speaks about love. However, claims have been made that it
is constituted by as many as 30 separate poems, yet editorial work
allows for the poems to form an ambiguously meaningful whole. The
Song is not the only love poetry from the Ancient Near East, although
it does have unique elements. Murphy explains,

“As our earlier survey of
Egyptian and Sumerian sources indicated, there is no reason to doubt
that the biblical Song is indebted, at least indirectly, to older
traditions of Near Eastern love poetry. Nor need one quarrel with
the likelihood that some of these antecedent traditions had
specifically sacral significance or that they otherwise witness to
the reciprocity of imagery depicting divine and human love.”⁵

Thus,
although the Song of Songs is very distinctive in the Bible, it does
fit somewhat into the genre of Ancient Love poetry.

You
may wonder why I’ve had to spend SO MUCH time explaining all of this
to you, especially given that I think you are very intelligent people
with a strong grasp on the Bible and history. In the suggested
readings of the church, the three year cycle of “lectionary”
readings, only 6 verses of the book Song of Songs show up. Then,
they’re most often skipped over by clergy who find it easier to
preach on the Gospel (or any other part of the Bible) than on the
Song, despite the fact that they’re among the mildest verses one
could pick from the text! So, I don’t think most people, including
those who have been attending church regularly for their whole lives,
have had much exposure to this book and I’ve had to start with the
basics.

All
of this brings me back to the beginning: there is very little that
can be said for certain about the Song of Songs and that makes it
very hard to make firm claims about it. I would really LIKE to say
that it was radical and subversive to have a heroine who speaks of
herself as beautiful, because it would be in our culture and I think
that’s a a great thing to strive for, but I’m not CERTAIN that it
really was radical then. Perhaps in the time of the writing the
culture she lived in was so body-positive that most people thought
they were beautiful?? Isn’t that nice to ponder? Similarly I think
it is radical that she named her own desire, but I don’t KNOW.

The
projection onto this book of the Bible is non-trivial. I’ve found
that most commentators speaking of the line “I am black and
beautiful” find it necessary to explain how such a line is
possible. They seem to forget that Western Culture’s obsession with
light skin is relatively new and thus doesn’t appropriately fit into
Biblical history. Many, many commentators believe that the black and
beautiful woman is apologetic about her skin tone. Renita Weems, a
womanist theologian and author of the Song of Songs section of the
New Interpreter’s Bible, responds to those assumptions with 3 pieces
of context:

“(1) The word ‘black’ appears
five times in the emphatic position suggesting that the woman’s tone
is confident and her posture assertive – not apologetic. (2)
Throughout the poem the woman’s physical beauty is both praised and
celebrated, not only by her lover but also by the maidens of the
city, which means that others regard her as indisputably attractive.
(3) Although the Song of Songs and Lamentations (and other portions
of Scripture) suggest that a ruddy complexion was prized in men, the
same does not automatically apply to women, since women were commonly
judged by a different standard of beauty.”⁶

If
you are like me, you might appreciate knowing that “ruddy” means
“having a healthy reddish color.” Since the text does not say
who her parents or clan are, Weems points out “We are left to take
heart in her bold act of self-assertion and description: She speaks
up for herself; she is the object of her own gaze; she is, by her own
estimation, black and
beautiful.”⁷
For many cultures in many places and in many times, such a statement
is radical in its positivity and self-affirmation. I wish there were
more space made for people to make such comments in our time, space,
and culture now.

Instead,
we live in a society in which women are barraged with messages about
how inadequate their bodies are in order for corporations and their
shareholders to profit off of those feelings of inadequacy. In
everything from the immediately obvious clothes, shoes, make up, and
diet industries to the also insidious tanning salons, self-help
books, beauty magazines, and even the wedding industry; wealth is
extracted from women by making them feel inadequate and not
beautiful enough. In
such a society, it
seems truly subversive to LIKE yourself.

Throughout
the Song of Songs, both lovers celebrate each other. The woman’s
capacity to find herself beautiful and her capacity to celebrate her
lover’s beauty are correlated. Instead of struggling under a pile of
self-hatred, she was able to live freely in love. Her ability to
like and love herself enabled her to live and love another, and I
choose to believe also enabled each of them to expand their circles
of love into the world. Consumer culture teaches us to find
ourselves INADEQUATE, but
this ancient, dark-skinned, beautiful woman teaches us to savor the
goodness of life. In
the use of her voice, in the way she describes herself, and even in
her willingness to name her own desire, she offers us an alternative
way of life. She offers us the freedom to ENJOY rather than wallow
in life. May we follow in her lead, each of us as we are able, and
find the freedom of God in beauty itself (even our own!) Amen

1 Renita J. Weems “The Song of Songs: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections” as found in the New Interpreter’s Bible Vol V (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 383.

2
Roland
Murphy, The
Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or The Song of
Songs
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990) 39 .

3
Murphy,
40.

4
Marvin A. Pope “Song of Songs” in The Anchor
Yale Bible Commentaries (Doubleday: New York, etc, 1995), 34.

5
Murphy,
97.

6 Weems, 382-383.

7 Weems,
383.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 26, 2017