Sermon for the Nineth Sunday after Trinity - Simon Oliver

In this morning’s scripture readings, we read from one of the strangest but most beautiful and influential books of the Old Testament: the Song of Songs, sometimes known as the Song of Solomon. This is strange because it’s the only book in the Bible that does not mention God in any of its versions. The Song of Songs is a vivid and erotic love poem about a woman, a bride, and her beloved, the bridegroom. It has a dream-like quality: the passage we read this morning begins, “I slept, but my heart was awake.” Hear are just a couple more verses from this morning’s first lesson:

My beloved is all radiant and ruddy,
   distinguished among ten thousand.
His head is the finest gold;
   his locks are wavy,
   black as a raven…
His body is ivory work,
   encrusted with sapphires.

In the early centuries of Christianity and throughout the Middle Ages, the Song of Songs was an incredibly important and popular text. Bede wrote a commentary on the Song around the year 716 and it became one of the most influential commentaries right up to the Reformation. Why were they so fascinated by a book that doesn’t mention God?

One of the main reasons for this fascination is that the Song of Songs is what we call allegorical. In other words, it’s a very symbolic book. A literal reading isn’t enough to uncover its deep meaning and truth. Most early Christian interpreters understood the bride or the woman to represent the Church and the bridegroom to represent Christ. So the Song of Songs becomes a love poem about the Church’s longing for Christ and Christ’s longing for his bride, the Church. Let me give you an example of how the symbolism works for early Christians. The Song of Songs speaks of the bridegroom as a leaping deer:

“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.”

So the early commentators interpret the leaps of the deer-like Bridegroom as symbolising the leaps of Christ from heaven to earth in the Incarnation, from earth to the tomb, and from the tomb to heaven. For Bede, this is an entirely natural way of reading a deeply beautiful and symbolic text. It’s also a deeply erotic text: it’s about desire and love. It’s about a lover’s longing to be united with the beloved.

We get a sense of God’s longing for us in our second reading from the second letter of St. Peter. Peter writes:

“Thus he has given us, through these things [the divine power and knowledge] his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants in the divine nature.”

We’re not talking about lust but love, and that phrase that you ‘may become participants in the divine nature’ is one of the most important in the New Testament. We are to become ‘participants in the divine nature’. In other words, God wants us to share his nature, to draw us into his life, to be united with us eternally. It does not mean that we become God, but we become sharers in God’s life in all its fulness through Jesus Christ.

At the same time, we can draw a contrast between the vibrancy and energy of the Song of Songs and the setting of St. Peter’s second letter. Peter’s letter was written to all who have received faith in Christ, not to a particular church or community. It’s written at the very end of his life – he tells his readers that his death will come soon. He tells his readers that he will keep on reminding them that God has called us by his own glory and goodness and has given us his precious and very great promises, that we may share God’s life. It seems that Peter is concerned that love and the life of God can be forgotten and grow cold. He’s realistic about human experience – our tendency to be forgetful, neglectful, despondent, when the life of faith is little more than routine, or for those of us who work in the church, when the life of faith seems little more than admin, compliance and mandatory training. At the end of his life, as he tries to come to terms with the person of Jesus and all that he has experienced, Peter reminds us: Thus he has given us, through these things [the divine power and knowledge] his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants in the divine nature.

But this is the core message I’d like to offer you this morning. If our life of faith is sometimes a struggle and the demands and worries of life bring little more than distraction and exhaustion, perhaps the first step is not to try and rekindle a kind of spiritual fervour and love of God by our own powers. The first step is most definitely not to blame ourselves or beat ourselves up. Perhaps the first step is to remember that what comes first is not our love for God, but God’s love for us. St. John in his first letter is very clear about this: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” But it’s sometimes difficult to think of ourselves as loveable – as the object of someone else’s deep desire and longing. There are times when I struggle to think of myself as particularly loveable. We can think of ourselves as ordinary or sinful or broken or wounded. That comes quite naturally to many of us, me included. But the Christian mystery, the Christian revelation in Jesus Christ, is this: that we are the object of God’s eternal love and desire. The ancient Hebrew love poem known as the Song of Songs gives us a beautiful and vivid image of God’s desire for us. St. Peter in his letter teaches us that God desires nothing less than union with each of us.

It's difficult to come to terms with this truth: God desires you and me eternally. In Jesus Christ, in arms outstretched and wounded body, the love of God for you and me is revealed that we might become one with God, participants in the divine nature. It’s too much. The erotic Hebrew love poem that we read this morning, the Song of Songs, is exotic. It’s really not very English!  But this is the depth of the Christian mystery. Our lives are all about coming to terms with God’s loving desire for every human soul revealed in Christ: he died that we might live and share his life. That’s what we hold fast to.

Let us pray:
Almighty God,
Source of life and love,
In your Son Jesus Christ
You seek out and save the lost;
Come into our hearts and claim us as your own,
That we may know your love for us each day,
and at the last become partakers of your divine nature
and live eternally in your loving presence;
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.