Baptist Bookworm: For the love of God

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

20th August 2023

Song of Songs 2.10-13; 8.6-7

Back in 1996, just as Liz and I were leaving Sheffield to move to Bristol
  for me to start at Bristol Baptist College,
the Sheffield rock group Babybird released an album (Ugly Beautiful)
  which gave them their biggest hit, the brilliantly commercial ‘You’re Gorgeous’.

But it also had another track, which got less attention,
  but is rather more interesting, at least to us this morning
  as we come to the final week in our series
  on the wisdom tradition from the Hebrew Bible.

The song is called ‘Jesus is my girlfriend’,
  and whilst the song itself isn’t all that special, at least in my view,
  the title of the song, ‘Jesus is my girlfriend’, gave me something of a revelation.

Which is that many of the songs we were singing to Jesus in church,
  could just as easily be romantic or even sexualised songs
  sung to a beloved partner,
  with just a minor tweak of the lyrics.

Are we really just singing to Jesus
  as we might to our girlfriend or boyfriend?

Well, the first thing I think we need to note that there is nothing inherently new
  in utilising intense relational imagery
  to describe a person’s spiritual experience of Jesus.

Just recently I was listening to a podcast from The Rest is History with Tom Holland,
  and it was telling the story of 14^th Century mystic Catherine of Siena’s
  mystical marriage to Jesus,
  in which she gave herself in marriage to Jesus in a vision,
              with his circumcised foreskin functioning as her wedding band. [1]

But Catherine is just one example of a whole tradition of female mystic eroticism
  in which monastic women described their ecstatic devotion to Christ
  in decidedly erotic terms.

From the 13^th Century nun Agnes Blannbekin, [2]
  to the 16^th Century Saint Teresa of Ávila, [3]
  to the 17^th Century Catholic nun Benedetta Carlini, [4]
these traditions bear witness to a reaction against a male-dominated church hierarchy,
  and to women who refused to be entirely subjugated either spiritually or sexually.

They also create a precedent for using erotic language
  in the context of one’s relationship with Jesus,
something which, of course, we also find in the Bible itself,
  in those passages that describe the church as the ‘bride’ of Christ
  (John 3.29; Eph 5.22-33; Rev 21.2,9-10).

So come with me to 1850, just a couple of years after
  the founding of Bloomsbury Baptist Chapel.

That early congregation would certainly have sung one the latest hit hymns of the era,
  published in 1850, I’m thinking of the hymn
  ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds’,
  and it contains this verse:

Jesus! my Shepherd, Husband, Friend,
My Prophet, Priest, and King;
My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End,
Accept the praise I bring.

Or what of Charles Wesley’s hymn to mystical union with Christ:

Jesus, lover of my soul,
let me to thy bosom fly,
leave, ah! leave me not alone,
still support and comfort me.
freely let me take of thee;
spring thou up within my heart,
rise to all eternity.

I’m not trying to spoil anyone’s favourite hymn,
  although there is a bit of ‘once you’ve seen it you can’t un-see it’ here…
but I am trying to create the historical context
  that lies behind the more recent explosion of intimate worship.

I’m not going to score easy points now
  by trashing some of the more modern songs that are popular in church life,
but if you are familiar with the contemporary worship scene,
  you’ll recognise the trend for songs where a simple substitution
  of either Jesus or God with the name of your beloved,
  turns them from worship song to sexualised ballad in an instant.

All of which brings me to the most sexualised book in the Bible,
  the Song of Songs,
which sits there in the Hebrew Bible as part of the Wisdom Tradition
  that we’ve been looking at over the last few weeks.

I’m grateful to Judith for reading this for us,
  and I’m sure she was grateful that the Narrative Lectionary
  spared us all the delights of hearing read aloud in church
some of the more purple passages from these lesser-turned pages of our Scriptures:
  ‘This is the word of the Lord, Thanks be to God’.

But seriously – go home and read them!

And just as an aside, do you know how difficult it was
  to choose the hymns for today’s service???
With my double-entendre-radar set to high,
  song after song ruled itself out for us to sing today.

In the end I settled on songs that spoke of God’s love for us,
  rather than the other way around.

But anyway, moving on…

If you were with us when I introduced this series a few weeks ago,
  you may remember that I sounded a note of warning
  about the tendency to ‘allegorise’ the wisdom literature.

This is where people take a text and make it into an allegory for, for example,
  Christ and the church, or the virgin Mary,
  or some aspect of Christian discipleship.

This allegorical way of reading scripture dominated much of Christian history,
  until comparatively recent times.

The danger with such allegorisation is that it strips the text from its original context,
  and plunders it for minor details that can be related to the object of the allegory.

Well, when we come to the Song of Songs,
  our allegorisation-alert needs to be set nearly as high
  as my double-entendre-radar was when choosing our songs for today.

This is because the history of interpretation of the Song
  is one of allegorisation par excellance.

There is a Jewish tradition of reading the love between the two lovers,
  as an allegory of God’s love for the Israelites,
and among Christians, the book is often interpreted
  as describing the love of Christ for his church.

These allegorical readings conveniently allow interpreters
  to avoid having to grapple with some of the steamier moments in the text,
by placing all the emphasis in interpretation
  into the realm of God’s love for us.

But is this book really, in any way, about God’s love for humans,
  or indeed about human love for God?

The evidence would suggest not,
  after all, it’s one of only two books in the Bible
  that don’t actually ever mention God…
  (the other one’s Esther, in case you were wondering).

In fact, the scholarly consensus around the Song of Songs
  is that it originates as a collection of love poems,
  celebrating the joy and goodness of human love.

In other words, it’s great literature, but not great theology.

But, given that this text is in our scriptures,
  and that there is a tradition going back millennia
  of reading it in both Jewish and Christian worship,
  can we really write off God’s presence in this text altogether?

Does God have nothing to say to human love of the physical kind?

In what I’m going to say next, I’m particularly indebted to two female biblical scholars,
  firstly Professor Kathryn Schifferdecker, and secondly Prof. Rabbi Wendy Zierler.[5]

And so here we are, torn between two interpretations:

The traditional interpretation is that it is an allegory
  of the love between God and Israel or between Christ and the Church.
Whilst the dominant interpretation in modern times
  is that it is nothing more than ancient erotic love poetry.

Can it be both?

Perhaps it is both a celebration of the love of two people for one another,
  a love “strong as death” (Song of Solomon 8:6),
  a love reflected in the renewed life of the earth itself (Song of Solomon 2:10-13).

But perhaps at the same time, the Song is also a celebration
  of the love between God and God’s people,
a love that is in fact stronger than death,
  sealed by the Resurrection.

As Phyllis Trible and Ellen Davis have both argued,
  the Song is a reversal of the curses of Eden.

So, the relationship between the loving couple is restored,
  and in place of Eve’s punishment in Genesis 3:16
  where the judgment on her is that
  “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”,
  instead the woman in the Song declares,
  “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.”

In fact, the woman’s voice is the dominant voice in the Song.
  She is in a full, robust, and mutual relationship with her beloved.

But also, the rupture between humanity and the earth is restored.
  Because here, in the garden of the Song,
  there are no thorns and thistles (see Genesis 3:17-19).
  And indeed, the earth itself is said to rejoice with the lovers.

And so the text begins to function theologically,
  even as it speaks of the love between the lovers,
  it points beyond them to God’s greater love for humans and creation,
  inviting the possibility that God’s love fully encompasses human desire.

I remember as a teenager being told
  that I mustn’t do anything with my girlfriend
  that I’d be embarrassed about if Jesus came back whilst we were doing it!

Well, apart from the terrible eschatology inherent in this advice,
  it also creates a guilt around sex and sexuality
  which the Song of Songs deconstructs.

What if there is no need to feel guilt about our existence as human beings,
  what if sex and sexuality are not evidence of the fall,
  but gifts of God given for pleasure and human flourishing?

Rabbi Zierler says,

I look at our world which is filled with explicit sexual imagery
  on every billboard or every street corner,
  on every TV channel and every radio station,
and I am sick at heart for a reading of the world,
  which can elevate my sexuality above base, prosaic level
  to which it is has fallen in daily discourse.

She continues,

This is not to say that the love poetry in [Song of Songs] is casual and base,
  or that one should not, at least at first, appreciate the plain meaning
  of these love lyrics.
[But] what I mean is that I am also moved by the dogged interpretive effort
  in [the Jewish religious] literature
to draw theological meaning from human, bodily experience
  and thereby, to sanctify the material world.

Friends, there is much wisdom here…
  A text doesn’t have to mention God to speak of God.
Maybe God is joyfully, creatively, playfully in all things,
  including our oh-so-human joy in one another.

But I wonder if there is yet more wisdom we can glean
  from the poetry of the Song of Songs.

In the ancient Hebrew world, God was almost always presented as male,
  a divine patriarch, a kingly monarch, a supremely righteous figure of a man.

The corresponding aspect of this was that sins were almost always presented
  as deriving from feminine weakness.

Behind every strong man was a weak woman, trying to bring him down.
  Just look at Adam and Eve!

So if God is the bridegroom, and Israel is the bride,
  as with the allegorical readings of the Song of Songs,
then it is the male God who is faithful,
  and the female Israel who is unfaithful and faithless.

Similarly within the Christian tradition,
  if Christ is the bridegroom,
  and the church is the bride of Christ,
then it is the male Christ who is the sinless perfect one,
  and the female church who is faithless and unfaithful.

This is how a culture of female inferiority
  gets engraved into both Jewish and Christian laws and societies,
as biology itself becomes marshalled
  to the patriarchal system of female oppression.

This is the context in which mystical holy women of the middle ages
  subverted the systems that sought to control every aspect of their being,
with ecstatic visions providing a way of their reclaiming
  suppressed femininity and sexuality.

And so we come to the empowered woman of the Song of Songs,

My former tutor Cheryl Exum once commented
  that the ‘female eroticism in the Song is [never] successfully controlled”
  by the men in the text,
  not by the angry watchmen, nor by her would-be protective brothers.

If we can escape from the allegorical bind of patriarchy,
  this is a text that conveys female agency:
  in which a woman speaks, controls her own life, and her own body,
  and is unashamed, as she is declared and seen to be ‘not guilty’.

And this declaration of innocence, the innocence of Eden before the fall,
  is a profoundly theological utterance.

It is the word of liberation spoken in the Cross of Christ,
  as the world itself is declared ‘not guilty’.

As Stuart Townend and Keith Getty put it in their wonderful hymn ‘In Christ Alone’,
No guilt in life, no fear in death,
this is the power of Christ in me.

The theology of the Song of Songs
  is not found in its allegory for God or Christ and the people of God,
but simply in its innocence,
  in its declaration of love as good,
  in its delight in what it means to be fully human.

This is the good news of Christ, because it is the good news of God,
  and it is good news for us, whoever we are and however we love.
Because as the first letter of John puts it
  God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God,
  and God abides in them. (1 John 4.16)

Amen.