Before I read the scripture for this morning, I need to offer up one other brief text, well actually it is just 3 statistics…
Overall, women who were full-time, year-round employees made 82.3 cents for every dollar men made in 2019. And in the case of women of color the numbers are even more troubling, with Asian American women making as low as 52 cents on the dollar…
One in four women, and one in 7 men experience domestic violence…
One poll of transgender individuals reported on the National Transgender Task Force website noted that, “A staggering 41 percent of respondents reported attempting suicide compared to 1.6 percent of the general population”
These are just three facts, three observations of current realities… and we will get back to these, and why I shared them in just a few minutes…
Our scripture passage this morning is a short passage from the Song of Solomon 2:8-13,
The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
My 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.
My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;
for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
is heard in our land.
The 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.
There are mixed feelings out there about the role and place of the Song of Solomon, or as some know it, the Song of Songs. It is not like most of the scriptures, with the possible exception of the psalms. The Song of Solomon is a poem or a love song. It is thought to be written to describe the relationship between God, and the people of Israel, or that is a commonly held understanding that we will run with for now. Parts of this book are a bit racy, even outright steamy. The text does not shy away from the physical as a means of exploring the depth of the love shared between God and their people. But we will look a bit deeper than the surface of this poetic text this morning, to see what it might have to share with us.
The text opens with an exclamation, excitement in our narrator’s voice as they hear the voice of their beloved in the wilderness around them, and then we hear the description of their beloved, and we are offered descriptions of strength, beauty, and wildness as a gazelle, or a young stag. The image of a deep woods creature, bounding muscular graceful, but not away from our narrator, as human experience often finds these creatures, but bounding, leaping, quickly toward them… the image is odd, exciting and even a bit scary to imagine. And then this great chiseled stag is standing just beyond the wall, peering in, searching, in a way that sounds almost playful, for our narrator, and then they speak, “Arise my love, my fair one, and come away”, and that for me, sitting where I am in this life, and I might bet for you as well, where you are, is the most important line in this morning’s scripture, but we will come back to it in just a moment…
The scripture continues to say that winter, or the rainy season as that probably refers, is over and the time of singing has come. This phrase describes the time for pruning crops in preparation for the summer harvest to come… there is work to be done. “Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.” The poetic nature of this text is somewhat challenging for those of us looking for clear direction, yet I believe that it offers something greater than words used for direct and specific meaning, it offers a story or a moment, or an image for us to explore. I have to admit that when I read this text the first time I had a hard time making heads or tails of it, but on the fourth or fifth reading, I was reminded of the story of Jesus last supper from the Gospel of John, one of those passages we should keep close to our heart, in it he sets out the clearest definition of Christian that I have found to date, love one another as I have loved you, and they will know you are of my flock… to be of Christ’s flock one must simply love the world as Christ loved it, admittedly not the simplest of tasks, but clearly laid out none the less. That is the work! And we can truly relate to our narrator this morning, for we have been beaten down, driven to ground, and are in many ways hiding, unsure of how to emerge. It has truly been a rainy season, Covid 19, racism, political anger, hunger, poverty, the world we live in, the world we are charged to love, has been a hard unwelcoming place, and as we face transition, and an unsure future, it continues to look pretty bad out there…
but wait, can you hear that… it is the voice of God, our beloved, calling!
Look at this place, this room, these faces, listen to this music, to these stories, these prayers, these voices… look out the windows at the world around us, moving, living, learning. It is broken, just as we are broken, but with time, and care it might learn to heal, to live a better life. If we love the world as Christ did, love it enough to speak hard truths, offer kind words, and share of God’s abundance with all who need it, we might teach the world to live that better life, we might help it to heal. This will not be one of those instant gratification things, where we walk out the door, name an inequality, and instantly fix it all… this is not the time of harvest, it is still the time of pruning, the time of singing. What we do in this time will make that future harvest so much greater!
Arise my love my fair one, and come away, can you hear it?
We sit at the cusp of a new church year, on the precipice of a change of leadership, the beginning of a new school year, the start of Autumn sits just weeks away… this is truly a time of change, a shifting of seasons for us, but also for the world, as each new day brings the reality of choices made, and the possibility of those yet unmade… at the beginning of this message I offered a few statistics, troubling, difficult statistics… those numbers are hard to witness, yet they are just three points of concern amongst many… it is easier to sit quietly in a darkened hiding place, than to truly witness those realities Christ charges us with addressing, and yet here we sit, staring truths in the face that deny people the ability to rise up, even as we face a call to rise up ourselves.
Friends, the winter is over and the time of pruning is upon us, I know you can feel it, you can hear the call. I can see the beginning of movement and action at the fringes of our community as we return from summer vacation and dream of what “normal” life might be. So rise up and move away from your comfort, and from the bliss of ignorance that we all treasure, and out into Gods creation to act with love, pruning away injustice and pain, that God’s harvest of love, mercy, grace, and peace might be enough to spread throughout the world! Amen