FESTIVE LOVE
Rev. Douglas Olds
Summer of Love Sermon Series
First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo (CA)
16 July 2017
Song of Songs 2.8-17
The
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.
14O my dove, in the
clefts of the rock,
in the covert of the cliff,
let me see your face,
let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely.
15Catch us the foxes,
the little foxes,
that ruin the vineyards—
for
our vineyards are in blossom.”
16My beloved is mine
and I am his;
he pastures his flock among the lilies.
17Until the day
breathes
and the shadows flee,
turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle
or a young stag on the cleft mountains.
Let's go back fifty years. 1967's mind-bending summer came after winters of discontent. Discontent with the status quo, discontent
with the national security state. Discontent with the church and economic
establishment. Nationally, groups were
experimenting with social change. With its crowds of playful, skateboarding, face-painted
hippies and slogan of “music, love and flowers", San Francisco drew crowds
trying out peacemaking, play, and obliterated boundaries. The ongoing Vietnam
War was a border war on a global scale, and the war's protesters presented
themselves in the Summer of Love by an explicitly political context. Presenting
themselves as patriotic “Volunteers,” they urged Americans to “tear down the
walls” so that “we can be together.”[i]
On the other hand, I was an 8-year-old in Michigan where
there was an opposed experiment toward social change: by violence—in what were
called "race riots" in Detroit and in my hometown of Grand Rapids.
Returning late one night from Expo '67 in Canada, my family's station wagon was
stopped by shotgun wielding police. They demanded of my father why we were
breaking curfew enacted to combat local rioting and arson.
I was young so didn't participate immediately in either
experiment with social change, yet unknowingly that summer was born in my
soul. From these small dreams in the
summer of 1967, my older peers began to try out a civilization with love as its
foundation. Practitioners in personal
liberation let their love live as if all were watching, and lived as if their
love could create primeval nature anew, could bring down boundaries, lived out
in a delirious festival of live and let live, personal liberation, and playful
passion.
Ira Chernus writes that "The psychedelic rock shows,
light shows, and posters were all meant to turn life into that single swirling
stream, dissolving every imaginable boundary line, and so teaching that reality
itself is just such a stream. To quote the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman
(as so many did [that summer]), let yourself be “loos’d of limits and imaginary
lines” and “you are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.”[ii]
In this, the seekers accepted the "Be-In" with its traditional Christian emphasis of a divinely-ordained, benign order to the universe.
However by 1967, young "people had gotten tired of the austerities
of Christian discipline and the misanthropy of the [church’s] Doctrine of
Original Sin."[iii] Indeed,
Original Sin found no place in the reunited Presbyterian Church’s Confession
of 1967—a Confession that could warrant its own sermon regarding the heady
days of that time. The environmental
crisis was a foremost theme in the Confession of 1967, like for the seekers in
the Summer of Love.
By a dream of a civilization founded on love, the young in
San Francisco "dramatized for themselves a world that never knew Original
Sin, and so still existed in a state of original blessing. In that imagined
world it was no sin to ‘dance, sing, feast, make music, and love.’”[iv] They reconnoitered a new Renaissance hand in
hand with Spirit and nature, to set up a counter to the puritanism that runs
deep in American society which accepted environmental degradation as a
consequence of the Fall of humankind from grace.
Yet the Summer of Love’s attempts at a new civilization of
unbounded love "accepted the inevitability of insecurity, the truth that
in the stream of life, the next moment is always as unpredictable as it is
uncontrollable."[v] It was an attempt to recapture both
responsibility and innocence. Theologically the era had much to do with our
churches recapturing the doctrine of humans universally being made in the image
of God, and therefore primevally good.//
Our text this morning suggests the same desire for a liberating, festive love, and a pristine time before the fall of original sin. The Song of Song is scripture’s most delirious and at times psychedelic ode to sexual and playful love set in nature:
Song 6. 4 You are
beautiful as Tirzah, my love…
5Turn away your
eyes from me,
for they overwhelm
me!
Your hair is like
a flock of goats,
[streaming] down the slopes of Gilead.
6Your teeth are
like a flock of ewes,
that have come up
from the washing;
all of them bear
twins,
and not one among
them is bereaved.
7Your cheeks are
like halves of a pomegranate…
…and so it goes,
suggesting a surrealistic fascination with the loved one--a psychedelic
blending of desire and nature. This is an exploration of what it means to be
made in the image of God.
The Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon) has
been a curiosity to Biblical readers for millennia. There is no direct mention of God (save 8.6),
and its unabashed sexuality and forward female voice were elided by ancient
ascetics and later churchmen. In order
to downplay the physicality and bring forward theology, premodern commentators
primarily read the Song as allegory.
That is, the Song of Songs is read as a love poem between Israel’s God
and the people, or later, Christ’s love for his church.
In contrast with an allegorical reading, modern interpreters
have tended to recover the Song’s historical sense. It is read now as a literal poem of sexual
expression and longing for the garden.
Our friend Annette Schellenberg formerly at San Francisco Theological
Seminary proposed that the Song of Songs was a performed drama at ancient
Jewish festivals. If this is the
appropriate reading, we may note the Garden metaphors and images, so that God,
even if unnamed, might be approving of this mutuality and physical desire for
egalitarian closeness that harkens back to the creation of Eden and the male
and female Adam and Eve. Unlike in the
rest of the Old Testament where sexuality is linked with the need for posterity
and procreation, in both the pre-fall Eden and in the Song of Songs, physical
closeness and mutuality between the sexes is idealized in and for itself.
The woman’s love is
not something to be taken nor even earned—it is given freely, mutually. It is a message for our current age of taking
advantage or commercializing love for sex.
The Song of Songs dramatizes physical flourishing and
mutuality of an idealized community—a lush primeval Garden outfitted by the
Creator for the freely chosen enjoyment of its denizens. The Song of Songs
reenacts this innocent and childlike delight in the Creation where sex is
unencumbered by violence, commerce, coercion, manipulation or
one-sidedness.
The Song of Songs’ desire is not a modern eroticism. It is mutual, other-directed, and not
narcissistic. The Song's desire is the desire for the God-given qualities of
the lover. The metaphors of creation and
of peaceful and harmonious communal life in the Garden thus locate the desire
in God’s peace and wholeness. Reading
the Song of Songs has us meditate on the lovers’ desire for noble qualities in
the other—what is God-given--and not on some base qualities or shallow characteristics.
There is no sense of that modern affliction, narcissism, in view of the Song of Songs. Narcissism is concerned with fulfilling the self's objectives. At one point, the lover notes the object of her affection likewise desires her. But she shows no inordinate thrill at this prospect, other than idealizing the mutuality of desire, clearly God’s intention for love.
So much of modern erotic desire fulfills the narcissist’s
craving. The movie Jerry Maguire had the
line, “you complete me.” The
narcissist’s desire is on personal fulfillment, the “You complete me” which is
not in view in the Song of Songs. Seeing myself in the lover's eyes is not in
view of the Song of Songs. Concerned with commerce and market relationships of
supply and demand, the modern Don Juan narcissist commercializes sex and
derives self-worth from a bevy of lovers admiring his sexual
"fitness."
The Song of Songs does not have such commercial or market
aspects to sexuality. The woman is not
given in marriage by her parents, but freely chooses her beloved. We indeed
encounter an ancient’s understanding of what erotic love is inside a Garden of
beauty and sufficiency (which is not to say glut or hoard). And in that ideal Garden space, love is other
directed, playful, and mutual. This is a
world in which marriage's highest values are loyalty and care taking, not
personal fulfillment or the self's private happiness. Such a love mirrors the divine love, the
ideal desire for what is beautiful, elegant, and good.
The Love desire in the Song of Songs might therefore be seen
as an invitation by God to Israel to be created anew by love and then take part
in further new creation through it. It is the love shown by the woman who poured
pure nard on Jesus’ feet, unconcerned with its scarcity, unconcerned with its
interpretation by onlookers. It is
lavish and sensual, a Garden-pruning act readied by virtuous servant-love. It
brings harmony and solidarity to the family, neighborhood, and nation.
In the Song of Songs, we hear the invitation to come into
such a garden of new creation: “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.”
Come, dear ones, into a world of
grace! This world has transformative power in relationships, in nature, and in
creation. However grim things may have been in seasons past, winter will yield
to spring, [degradation to flourishing, suffering to joy]. The rain will go,
flowers will appear, and the season of glad songs will arrive at last.
Who does not know the joy of the
end of winter? People shed their heavy coats and scarves, trading them in on shorts
and flip-flops. Gratefully they gather on college campuses or in public parks
to enjoy a picnic…in the sun, listening to music from the park stage,
pretending not to notice as lovers kiss, turning to catch a glimpse of a game
of Frisbee from the corner of their eyes. In such a [summer], love delights and
explodes in [a boundless stream of] playfulness.
Indian theologian K. P. Aleaz
[suggests], “God starts the play, with God as the starting point and then
proceeds to [the Garden] creation. Humans, on the other hand, start the play in
creation and then proceed to God. Both meet by play[ing in the Garden]. The
connecting [movement between God and human] is play.”
In today’s passage from the Song of
[Songs], [festive] love and playfulness are profoundly integrated with all of
life’s realities. Even when love is frozen, hurricanes devastate…,or [withering
climate change is in on the horizon], God’s love for creation and creation’s
interplay with God explodes and blossoms anew. God’s grace transforms the
world, even as the grace of the world transforms God. Playful grace causes all
kinds of metamorphoses to take place.[vi]
These metamorphoses proceed when we alter our landscapes of
violence and apathy with festive love of neighbor. The Bible, like our seekers
from 1967, has the deep ethical trajectory to make love and not war. Violence and playfulness
are opposed. //
As a postscript to Detroit’s 1967 “racial unrest:” by the
Summer of 1968 it avoided a recrudescence of violence by being brought together
in the World Series run of its baseball team Tigers. The Detroit Tigers’
success brought neighbors together in a way that avoided other city and police riots
after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. This was festive love on a
city level. People could sense the
garden in the play of the ballpark. Detroiters
broke down the borders between neighborhoods and took up the spirit of the
Summer of Love.
The Song of Songs is telling us that when lovers are happy,
the community flourishes in the guidance of its God. God, who created the
Garden, invites us to complete the Garden by our love and not by our
oppression. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang at the time: “We got to get ourselves
back to the Garden.” God has put it in
our hands to restore the garden. We finish God’s Good Garden by
combating coercion, climate change, injustice, and apathetic destruction of
life. This coheres with what the seekers
of 1967 were experimenting.
Don’t look for someone or something to complete you—to take
away your hard-wiring for suffering. Look
instead for someone you can love completely and can help you build God's world! This is the kind of love in view
in the Song of Songs and for the adored in Psalm 45. May we all be privileged
to glimpse this festive, selfless love from our lover and in our neighborhoods.
Imagine a world that could be, even though those in power insist such a world
is both impossible and undesirable. Instead, we all have the grace to reach
toward a festive love, garden world. Let us take up anew the vanguard of the
Summer of Love with playfulness and without narcissism's self-regard.
Let it be so for you and me.
[i]
Ira Chernus, The Summer of Love Had the Right Idea: Tear Down Those Walls So We
Can Be Together, Alternet June 19, 2017. http://www.alternet.org/human-rights/psychedelic-spin-national-security
accessed 27 June 2017.
[ii]
Ibid.
[iii]
Ibid.
[iv]
Ibid.
[v]
Ibid.
[vi] Henry-Crowe,
S. T. (2009). Pastoral Perspective on Song of Solomon 2:8–13. In D. L. Bartlett
& B. B. Taylor (Eds.), Feasting on
the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B (Vol. 4, p. 4).
Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
