Homily: Proper 17. Grace, Camden
[Lectionary]ia(http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp17_RCL.html)
Introduction
For the next 4 Sundays we will be hearing from a part of the Heb Bible most of us are unfamiliar with: Wisdom literature. We hear from the book of Psalms every week. We kind of have a sense of what they are. We’re a little less familiar but accustomed to hearing words of the prophets. And we have listened to historical narrative material – as with the readings from the book of Samuel this past summer long.
But Wisdom literature comprises some very different kinds of material: the book of Job, Song of Songs (Solomon), Ecclesiastes, Wisdom of Solomon, Ben Sirach. These are less familiar. We have a chance to listen to some of it during the next weeks. This week we hear from the Song of Songs, then for 3 weeks we hear from the book of Proverbs.
Listen to the readings from Proverbs. Some people make a regular discipline of reading a chapter from Proverbs every day in a month (31 chaps). The last of the 4 readings comes from the last chapter which has to do with what a good wife is like. You might want to stick around for that one. Though I can’t imagine very many clergy would choose to preach on that passage.
Song of Songs
This is the only passage in our Sunday lectionary from this book.
The first reading represents an extraordinary book in the Bible.
… In fact, two biblical books never mention God. The first is the book of Esther, a story of Jewish survival in the face of an attempted genocide. The second is the Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon, which is essentially a collection of erotic love poetry involving a young woman and a young man. Both books were controversial additions to the biblical canon, and one thing that helped them make the cut was reading religion back into them. Thus many interpreters have seen God working behind the scenes and between the lines in the story of Esther, whose name in Hebrew can mean “I am hiding.” And many have interpreted the Song of Songs as an allegory about the loving relationship between God and Israel, or Christ and the church. That said, you can still read them literally if you want. note
One way to read the passage is as a special form of Wisdom literature. The Proverbs readings are much more reflective of that particular kind of writing. Song of Songs has also been understood to be allegory. The allegory code is that the lover in the poetry is God and the beloved is the Church, or Israel, or the People.
The text itself is very similar to a kind of marriage poetry that was found in a number of different cultures in the ancient world. It can be read as a drama, with the voices of 2 lovers going back and forth. There is no one right way to interpret Song of Songs.
And yet there is a real impulse to ask, “What to make of it?” The rabbis who gathered in northern Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem spent time deliberating just such a question. They were the ones who ultimately decided what would be in the Jewish Bible and what not. Canonical status:
For myself, the importance of the book’s presence in the Bible is similar to the view of one of the most famous of those rabbis, Rabbi Akiba. He said about it: ““For all the world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the holy of holies” (Mish. Ya daim, III, 5)”
God and Love Story
In the last few weeks the reading in the Northumbrian Prayer Book that I use had the following excerpt:
Our world is full of planners and programmers. They make things work, sometimes with deadly efficiency. But we also need people who put a bit of magic back into our world. The clown, the trickster, the seer, the songster, the artist, the poet. And we don’t need these simply to provide a bit of comic relief. We need the seer and the poet to help us see what we should have seen, but dared not. In the process of unveil- ing and opening up of new possibilities, the artist and the poet take on the mantle of the prophet. They lilt us with the lullaby of long forgotten dreams and dare us to live again with boldness and hope.
If we can no longer soar and dream and hope, we are dead while we live. But if the magic is still there, we will live, no matter how great the difficulties and pain. Charles Ringma
One of the things that this reading does for us is it calls us away from the leaden formulae that theologians have passed on to the people of the Church. Often for very good and sound reasons. But also often they have provided justification for arguments and abuse within and without the church.
- The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
…
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away."
However you place yourself in that text. Perhaps you are the beloved. Perhaps God is the beloved. However you hear it, if you do hear it, it’s difficult to not feel the invitation to come away from this ordinary life into the extraordinary life of love. God is love, said John in the New Testament.
It is all Gift:
If our lives are in fact love songs, we can’t help but experiences life as a gift. As a surprise, extraordinary, new thing to wake up to every morning. That’s how James words are to be heard.
“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”
The letter of James, from which we will hear for the next 3 weeks, has often been the object of theological debate. Luther thought it should be thrown out of the Bible because it seemed to him that it denied the reality and power of salvation through Grace alone – as he understood it.
I think we should pay attention to it. It helps us to embody the gifts that God has given us through Jesus Christ. James helps us to get out of our intellectual self-confidence and to put our lives on the line.
“… let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness … be doers of the word not just hearers …”
This book begins with a reference to every perfect gift from above. That’s the kind of gift the love story gives us. It’s not meant to be tabulated and formulated, it is to be celebrated. In song and dance. In poetry.
I have met many a child who has big eyes and wonder in the face as he or she anticipates the gifts to be received at Christmas time. Children know how to anticipate the receiving of gifts. At some point children may hear that “Santa Claus isn’t real. Or someone might claim that Dad is the one who puts the tooth fairy money under my pillow.” And they have lost that look of wonder. Perhaps they will discover it again when they begin giving the gifts.
I have also met more than a few children, raised in the church, who still display the wonder and joy of receiving God’s perfect gifts. Often I have seen it in their faces as they receive bread and wine at the altar rail. I have seen it also in the solemnity of night and candles at a Christmas Eve mass.
When did you lose the extraordinary sense that God’s gifts surround us on all sides? Can you identify the time? My spiritual director of some years ago helped me to identify one of the times when I lost it. It was during the period when my parents divorced.
It was complicated. It was messy. I felt guilty and responsible.
I can also place one of the times that I began to get the sense back. It was when my first child was born. It was the most overwhelming experience I had known up to that time. I was overcome with emotion. I began to cry and cry. Tears. Every perfect gift is best accompanied by tears.
Old and tired eyes
Today’s scripture readings help me to remember that God has a special fondness for children, for innocent or uncomplicated people. It helps me to understand Jesus’s clear preference is for sinners and outcasts.
The Pharisees and scribes didn’t miss the boat because they were Jewish, or even because they were religious. Not because they were the Liberals and Conservatives, the Democrats and Republicans, of their day. They missed the boat because they had lost the ability to see with new eyes, to feel with new hearts, to perceive with new songs, to celebrate with new dance – the perfect and extraordinary gifts that God had bestowed upon them.
“‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; …”
Today – my friends – Arise to the invitation to come away to where wonder is an everyday happening and religion is pure and undefiled before God – like little children, come into the presence of the Living God.
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