"A Love Song: 
I Will Not Leave You"

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
 On May 14, 2000

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.  

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm;  for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.  If one offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly scorned.

     Song of Solomon 2:8-13,  8:6-7

I have not preached on the Song of Solomon before, probably because it’s a love poem.  In fact, it’s a sensual, romantic, in places even erotic, love poem.  The reason you don’t have verses printed in your bulletin next to the scripture selection is because it wasn’t until after the bulletin went to press that I could find a portion of the Song of Solomon that I was willing to read from the pulpit in front of all of you.  Readers attempting to read the Song of Songs, or the Song of Solomon (it’s known by both names) for the first time are invariably surprised to discover that such provocative language and sexual imagery can be found in the Bible.  In the eight brief chapters of this little red book are some very romantic speeches about love, and passion, and desire, and longing, that will rival if not out place any classic secular romance writings.

One of the gifts, clearly, out of this book of the Bible is the way it affirms for us the goodness of the gift of human sexuality that God has granted to us.  Why is this book in the Bible?  The community of faith has debated it over the years.  It is one of only two books in the whole Bible where the name of God is not mentioned.  But the community has felt the spirit at work, speaking to us through this book, and so it’s included in the sixty-six books of the canon, the sixty-six books which the community has affirmed as being the inspired books of scripture.  And this book is placed in it, I think, in part because it affirms for the us that the gift of human sexuality is a good gift from God, a gift that has to be treated with stewardship, a gift that can be misused through violence or degrading circumstances, but a gift that is meant to be good to give full expression to the human self as God has created us.

It’s no surprise, then, that the matter of the Song of Solomon is the matter of a book that preachers are not exactly sure how to preach about, and one that doesn’t get preached on very often.  “Look, here he comes.  My love, like a gazelle or a young stag."  And then her lover responds, “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."

Mostly what we do with love poetry like this is to read it in private, or to titter and make jokes about it.  I remember how, when I was in high school singing with the men of my own church choir, we also gave expression to this book of the Bible by singing it in an anthem.  The text came from the King James Version.  The sopranos had a lovely line where they read these verses, saying, “The voice of the turtle is now heard in the land."  One of the basses, Paul Nordman, would always holler out at that point in a squeaky voice, “Hey, everybody!" trying to mimic what a cartoon turtle might sound like.  Pretty much ruined the Song of Solomon for me in my adolescence. 

But as I got a little older, I began to appreciate it in a new light.  I understood why it’s in the canon.  God has given us the gift of human sexuality for good purposes, and this book affirms it and helps us to understand that. 

Across the centuries, in every century, the community of faith has not been content to simply leave the purpose of the book or the interpretation of the book in that affirmation.  Again and again, we have made other interpretations and moves with this book.

I want to lift up two of those in the short time we have left this morning.  There are many, but let me share with you at least two.  One of the things that the community of interpreters has heard the spirit saying to us through this book is the importance and the emphasis that the spirit places on tenderness in the life of the community of faith.  And the importance the spirit places on tenderness in the midst of our own relationships.  I remember how the letters to the Ephesians says, “Be ye kind and tenderhearted to one another."

Tenderness.  I want to share with you as an illustration of that tenderness and how the Song of Solomon helps to interpret it and encourage us towards it, by reading a few paragraphs from a nurse named Belle Waring, who writes about her experiences with this tender book.  She had a patient on her wing named Reverend Smith.

Rev. Smith was on the loose again.  Out here with us at the nurses’ station, his leg bandage unwinding like the paintings of the last judgment, where the dead fly up with the strings of their shrouds flying loose.  “Rev. Smith, you’re on isolation because your leg is infected.  You need to stay in your room." 
Rev. Smith was an old, old man who got very few visitors. He was a retired minister, soft-spoken, with a high forehead and intelligent eyes, easily amused and quick as a fox.  “My wife," he told me, “needs to go to the doctor."  Rev. Smith’s wife was deceased.  Stick an elderly gentleman in a cold hospital bed with a lumpy old mattress and he loses his landmarks and starts to jabber.  One day he may just haul off and sock you in the kisser. 
Rev. Smith was walking briskly on his ninety-year-old legs, right to the EXIT sign.  “Now Reverend," I said.  The old devil was making a clean break for it.  “Ma’am,"? he said with a vivid Southern lollop in his voice, “Ma’am, your establishment leaves much to be desired."  I couldn’t argue with that.  Three weeks out of nursing school, and I couldn’t even handle some fragile old pensioner.  “I’ll read to you," I said.  “Just come back to your room and get in bed, and I’ll read to you.  Okay?" 
I got him settled and took up from his night stand his King James Version of the Bible.  Black binding, well worn.  “Okay.  What would you like for me to read?" I said.  “Song of Solomon," he answered, which I had never read before.  Such was the ignorance of my youth.  Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.  “Are you sure I’m in the right book, Rev. Smith?"  “Yes ma’am," he said with a big grin.  A bundle of myrrh is my well beloved unto me.  He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.  This was getting awkward for me. I didn’t go to nursing school to read erotic, if sacred, verses to some old man whose wife was dead, whose daughter rarely visited and when she did, seemed dispirited and cross and yanked him around.  Now you are like the fruit of the vine, and the smell of your nose is like apples. 
The smell of my nose was like a worried kind of sweat.  I had eighteen other patients, and reading poetry was not a priority.  Yet this stuff was healing.  It seemed almost hypnotic to him, and to me.  I found I couldn’t stop.  Who was this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? 
Maybe visitors never came for this patient because they feared what the aging must face.  Maybe I could poke all day around another person’s troubles so I wouldn’t have to look at my own.  Just so, it was clear enough what Rev. Smith was doing.  He was wandering back to when his wife was living.  Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm.  For love is strong as death.
The charge nurse stuck her head in the door.  “The Blood Bank called.  Your two units are ready."  “I’ve got to go," I said to him.  Rev. Smith extended his hand, propped himself up in the bed, and executed a courtly and understated bow.  “You read very well," he said, and smiled.  “Let’s move it," said the charge nurse.

Again and again, in the Song of Solomon, the community of faith has found an affirmation for the role of tenderness in our life together.  Is it coincidence?  I tell you it isn’t, that this book which celebrates the gift of human sexuality to us, calls us also to a mutual kind of tenderness.  What if one of the purposes of human sexuality is to encourage us, to lead us, to model us, towards a kind of tenderness, not just to our best beloved, but indeed to the entire community.

Another thing that the community has done with this Song of Solomon, another move the community has made in finding the spirit speaking to us through it; perhaps, more accurately, a move the spirit has made in speaking to us, is to call us to passionate commitment through this book.  Passionate commitment.  Again and again, when we’ve read from the Song of Solomon, the mind of the church has thought, Jesus Christ and his church.  Isn’t that interesting.  We read this erotic love poetry and we think, Jesus and his church. A passionate commitment.  And yet, did you not hear a passionate commitment in the verses that Jan read from the gospel from John?  “If you love me," said Jesus to his disciples, “you will keep my commandments.  I will not leave you.  I will not leave you orphaned.  I am coming to you.  Those who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

Loving and obeying Christ, even when we don’t understand what he is up to, even when we are uncertain about what God is doing, and about exactly where God is.  Loving and obeying Christ, even when we don’t understand why Jesus felt he had to leave us.  And why he had to die.  Loving and obeying Christ leads us in our own spiritual lives to an understanding, to a feeling, to a conviction, to an inner certainty, that we are not alone.  Loving and obedience leads us to this knowledge that Jesus is still with us.  A sense that there is light in the darkness, a sense that in God’s providence, things will work out according to God’s good purposes, no matter what the immediate future may bring for us. 

As it is with Christ, so Jesus teaches, so it is with one another.  And especially with our parents, who may be easy to love, but who may not be easy to love.  Can we acknowledge that here?  Some people have wonderful parents, and some people have parents who did the best they could. Some people have abusive parents.  This throws us, doesn’t it, on the very difficult mystery of the commandment which says, “Honor your mother and father." 

This may be very difficult for some because of their personal stories, but I hear Jesus, perhaps thinking of the Song of Solomon, talking to us here from the fourteenth chapter, saying, “The secret of what honoring is, and of what it involves, is found in my commandment to you that you should love one another.  That you should love one another even as I have loved you."  Like unto the way in which I have loved you.  To love others, to love our parents, to love my brother, to love our sisters or our neighbors, can be very hard at times.  It was so hard for Jesus one day that it cost him his life.  But he gave that life, he gave that love willingly, because it was what love demanded. 

Indeed in a spiritual sense, love is always demanding that we give up our lives, that we give up ourselves willingly, in some concrete and tangible form.  Concrete, tangible love, be it the love that was commanded by God through Moses for our parents, or the love that was commanded by Jesus for one another.  It comes to us with a promise that in the giving of it, we will not be left as orphans.  That we will not be left alone, but that God will be with us.  When God is with us, then so are the saints that we have known, both here and below. 

On this Mothers’ Day, and in all the days beyond it, we hear the voice of Jesus saying to us, Love one another.  Indeed, love your mothers.  But your brothers and your sisters and your neighbor, as well.  Even love your enemies.  Where there is pain, love them.  Where there is laughter, love them.  Where there is hurt, love them.  Where there is joy, love them.  Always love them, and I will not leave you.  I will stand next to you in that loving.  God will whisper in your ear, and the comfort that you, and indeed all of us seek, will come upon us.  And it reminds us that the only truth that matters in the end is the truth that gives us life and sets us free to be all that God intends for us to be and is calling us to be, even before the day when our parents conceived us.  Honor your mother and your father.  Love one another as I have loved you.  I will not leave you as orphans.  But I will come to you.  Before long, you will see me.  Because I live, you will also live.  This is my commandment, that you love one another.  Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm;  for love is stronger than death, passion fierce as the grave.  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.  Greater love hath no one than this, that we offer up our lives in service, in parenting, in sacrifice, in love, for one another.

© John T. DeBevoise, 2000