Eros and Thanatos; Agape and Phobos

Song of Songs 7:16-8:1

I have been preaching on the Song of Songs these last few weeks, and I’ll preach on it today and next week. Then on February 14^th, Valentines Day, Rabbi Marc Gafni, who’s been sort a conversation partner of mine as I’ve been walking through this, will be here to preach.  But it’s more than just reflections on the Song of Songs that I’m after these last few weeks.  When we get to Lent, we’re going to walk through a series of sermons that are intended to help us talk about our faith; they’ll deal with questions that we have, or our friends have, about living a life of faith.  In order to do that I began to realize that maybe we should get some foundation of what the heart of Christian theology is about, and so last week I spoke about Trinity – probably the most distinctive Christian doctrine.

Today I’d like to talk about the nature of God’s love, and next week we’ll talk about the atonement, but I’ve been doing that while grounded in this incredibly earthy book.  It’s an earthy book; it talks about the reality of this life.  And yet, as it talks about it, it opens a window into the Divine, the nature of God and God’s love for us.  It’s a model for us as to how to live a full, complete life.  Would you listen for the word of God as the Spirit brings it to you?

^NRS Song of Solomon 7:6 How fair and pleasant you are, O loved one, delectable maiden! ⁷ You are stately as a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. ⁸ I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches. Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples, ⁹ and your kisses like the best wine that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth. ¹⁰ I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me. ¹¹ Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the fields, and lodge in the villages; ¹² let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give you my love. ¹³ The mandrakes give forth fragrance, and over our doors are all choice fruits, new as well as old, which I have laid up for you, O my beloved. 8:1 O that you were like a brother to me, who nursed at my mother’s breast! If I met you outside, I would kiss you, and no one would despise me.

Last week I made the statement that the sexual, in the midst of this poem, the sexual was intended to be a model for the fully erotic life.  That is to say, a life that in every way lives out a deep desire for union, is sparked by beautiful imagination, and is in the final analysis generative, life-give, whole and complete.  We used it to put a window on the Divine and suggested this was the nature of the Divine and the way the Divine reached out to us.  A fully erotic engagement.

I’m just guessing that not all of you are comfortable with that language.  I know my dad wasn’t.  He wrote to me this week.  Now he was a preacher for a long time and tries to help me out time to time, and he says, “Well I didn’t mind, but I wonder how the people in your congregation are going to feel about that.”

So it’s worth talking about a little more.  What do I mean when I say the sexual is a model for a fully erotic life?  It can be a little confusing, because lets face it, Eros, that desiring kind of love, has been exiled into the sexual.  Exiled there. At its best we think of the sexual as driving towards union and imagination and generative and full. We don’t think in those terms in other areas of our life.  So it’s been exiled into the sexual.  The trouble is that it’s been exiled so far I think it’s been an exiled out of sex too. The sexual all about union and imagination and life-giving potential?  Is that really anywhere in the sexuality of our culture?  It seems maybe not.

And yet, it’s very interesting to me, that even though that is the case in our culture, it’s also true to the culture of those who put this poem in the Bible.  Nevertheless, there it sits in the midst of our scriptures.  The erotic life, the full and complete engagement, with a generative life, is in fact beautifully modeled by the sexual.

The Hebrews really did struggle with this over the years and they were surrounded by cultures for whom the sacred and the sexual were intertwined completely and in ways that were eventually just part of their worship.  But finally the whole sexual nature of things would devolve into what amounted to prostitution in their worship centers.  I mean it devolved into sexual ritual.

The Hebrew people knew that it could devolve into a kind of usury, consuming sort of thing if you really focused on the connection of sacred and sexual – yet nevertheless, there it sits in the midst of scripture as a beacon of hope saying, “No, the sexual does not need to be like that!  No, the erotic is not all about that!”  There’s something else and to get at it, we take the sexual and use it as a window that allows us to see the nature of God and see that reflected in our own lives as well.

Well things don’t change much, do they?  The sacred and the sexual get intertwined.  We don’t have much trouble looking for ways that happens in our culture, it’s been in the headlines for the last several years.  Priests abusing young children – and please, don’t think Presbyterians have gotten away with it.  No, we just weren’t in the headlines.  But the truth is, spiritual language is used in the midst of that abuse.

One of the problems with being a spiritual teacher is people are drawn to you, their boundaries are down, they look for more from you.  And some people use that, and they might even fool themselves into thinking and even saying, “Well, what I need is your love so that I can serve the people.  I need to be filled so that I can serve and do God’s bidding, so therefore it’s wholly appropriate for you to have sex with me.”  It happens. And not just out there, it happened here in the early 80s.

Just from time to time it’s good to remember it’s not all about people out there – sometimes it happens here.  And when Jim Miller was using vulnerable people – that would be my take on it – sexuality devolved, it was consuming, and people became afraid and shut down.  People felt divided, not united.  Some people knew, some people didn’t, so I hear. That’s what happens when sexuality is used in a way that consumes instead of in a way that brings people united together.

In fact, it finally leads to what the Greeks call Thanatos – sometimes the spiritual death of the community, but the death of the heart of a person, the death of the ability to express love.  Because when you are being consumed you are afraid, and that is Thanatos is first cousin, fear.  We become afraid, we shut down, we become afraid of desire, because if we desire at that moment, we could be owned by somebody who will only consume and finally destroy us.  Well you withdraw, and that dance of fear and death drives us away from each other, drives us, in fact, away from God – that dance we do of fear and death.

When we’re afraid of desire we end up putting boundaries around ourselves, taboos, even.  We figure out that something must be wrong, so we try to hem it in, and it doesn’t do a whole lot of good.  It finally sneaks out from somewhere underneath the bushes.  But one of the things I find more than a little distressing is that a passage of scripture – this one – that is there to reflect the love of God that is self-giving, people have used to suggest that people of same sex cannot express that generative love with one another.  We put taboos on when we’re afraid.  We close things in the dance of fear and death.

And so lets expand it now beyond those human connections, beyond the sexual model.  But instead, see how it works out in the midst of our creation.  Barbara and I were listening to a cosmologist name Brian Swimme who teaches as CIIS in the city the other day.  And he points to the fact that the last massive extinction on Earth occurred sixty five million years ago.  Sixty five million years.  And now because humanity is consuming more than its giving – not giving life to the Earth but taking the resources out of it – (even the thought that we’d consider them resources is a problem)  – because of that, there is another mass extinction going on.  What that means, is that humanity is the worst thing to happen to the planet in sixty five million years – all because of the dance of Thanatos and Phobos.

We end up in bartered relationships: with the cosmos and with one another, afraid to give too much of ourselves.  Trying to grab what we can and what we need.  It devolves, moves down, moves away from union, away from imagination, and finally away from life.  But that is not what this poem sees.

It’s not what the poem sees as the nature of the way life as God has promoted it, is supposed to be.  No, this poem seems much different.  We use it as an icon or a window to see the presence of the Divine.  What we got last week is a sense of God’s deep desire for union within God’s self.  God’s deep desire that was so passionate, so longing, that it exploded in a life-giving presence by pouring God’s self into creation.  God’s desire led to the gift of life.  That’s the model that we look at because if your desire is leaning towards the gift of life then it is not leading towards consuming and death.  You can see the presence of God that unfolds within us because God longs for us.

“I am my beloved’s and His desire is for me. I will go out in the fields, and lodge in the villages; let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give you my love.”

It’s the response of the gift of life, the desire to give yourself over to the other.  But how does it work out?  That fully erotic dance of life, that dance between Eros and Agape, that desire to put value in to others. It’s the opposite dance of Phobos and Thanatos.  In the new dance, our deep desire motivates us to do whatever it is we can to put value and life into the world around us.

And how would it look?  How would it look if we contemplated the world around us – learned not to be afraid of our desire, but instead to learn to love the beauty that we see – to look at the Earth, the trees, the sky, the ocean, the animals, whatever it is – to look upon it, until we had a deep desire to be united with it, to be a part of it?  It would change us and people that looked at it as resource.  The people that looked at it as something we wanted to give life to.

The last century brought genocide.  I’m afraid this century is going to bring it, too.  And you’ve got to wonder how that can happen. One of the ways it happens is because we’re not looking face-to-face with the victim.  I’m just guessing that if we all knew somebody who is in danger in that way – either from genocide or from starvation – if we knew people face to face and had learned to love them and desire a connection with them, it would change the way we act.  It would change the way we express ourselves, rather than shut down and afraid of what a commitment might mean we would be living out a productive love.

Bringing it a little more home here, somebody in the 8:30 service was talking about how much she’s enjoyed each of the things we offer – the Wednesday night programs and the Sunday things we do, and finding that slowly but surely the relationships have developed and she’s watching people share a little more of their lives.  And how, as that sharing takes place, there’s a sense of connectedness and a sense of support, and we’re actually going to be a little more deliberate about that over the next few weeks.

We’d like to get people together in little groups of people who are willing to express to one another their story, why it is the things that are important to them are important to them.  I’d tell you what they’re called but I don’t think we’ve figured it out yet.  But what we’d like to do is have an understanding.  We’ll see each other face-to-face so we can develop a sense of desire to be close with one another.  Not afraid of what might be taken from us if we did.

That’s the dance of Eros and Agape.  That’s the dance that moves towards life instead of towards death.  It is fully erotic.  Completely generative.  And quite a dream.  The challenge for us, the challenge of this text, is to recognize that we are called to live in that dance.  But the hope that lives in the text, for me, is that we are not alone in doing so.  For God is loving us and giving to us.  “I am my beloved’s, His desire is for me” and it drives the life-giving force of the God of love to unfold within us.  And as we look up on the beauty of the life that we’ve been given, we are able more and more to express why giving back the love of God that has filled us.  No need to fear.  No need to fear because God brings love into life into each one of us.