Love is Strong as Death

Song of Songs 8:6-7

I’ve been preaching over the last few weeks from the Song of Songs; I’ve been letting the Song interact with what I’ll call major Christian doctrines.  So a couple of weeks ago we talked about the Trinity, as if the sexual could be a window on the divine life, that generative, imaginative union that we see in the presence of God.  Last week we talked about the dance of love as being the opposite of the dance of fear and death.  This week as we read from the Song of Songs I’d like to talk a little bit about another Christian Doctrine – perhaps the most problematic of all for us – and that’s the doctrine of the atonement; that’s Jesus’ death as cleansing for us.

This passage today is a little different than the ones we’ve read.  The one’s we’ve been reading are sexually charged and there’s a kind of urgency at the root of them.  We’ve reached the end of the poem and now there’s a sober depth that comes out of that passion, a deep kind of grounding love.  And so I ask you to listen for the word of God as the Spirit speaks to you:

^NRS Song of Solomon 8:6 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. ⁷ 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.

I’m struck by how impersonal the stories are.  I was at Presbytery yesterday with a group of wonderful people who were doing the very best that they could.  And one group in particular is doing the very best that they could to encourage all of us to give from our hearts to the 2 cents a meal offering, to give for the hungry.  And so they stood up before us and gave us some statistics so that we’d know the depth of the hunger problem in the world.  They told us the number of the girls in the world who are not educated; the number of children that die from diseases that are preventable.  Wonderful people doing the best they could, but the stories were impersonal.  They were out-there, distant, and I wondered if they really had enough strength and power to make the difference.  (We are taking up the 2 cents a meal offering today, by the way.)

But those stories don’t have the power because somehow we’re not all together connected in a way where we can express our love to those individuals that are being talked about, because we’re disconnected.  And truth be told, maybe we don’t want to get that close.  I mean frankly it’s a little scary.  Getting that close to poverty, we tend to shrink away.  For one thing we feel like maybe we could be swallowed whole by the problem itself. There’s nothing we can do, so afraid, we shrink away.  And we begin to do that dance we talked about last week.  That phobos and thanatos dance.  That fear that draws us in and then leads to death, certainly the death of desire and the death of connection and the death of imagination and the death of that generative power.  We do the dance of phobos and thanatos; the stories seem impersonal.

We struggle with it a little bit here in this congregation, too.  When somebody is in the midst of a crisis here, we have in our bulletin a little listing that says please pray for somebody who is in this situation.  And it’s fascinating to be involved in the discussions about what we’ll put in and what we won’t.  There’s a tendency not to want to put too much out there, and I’m not being critical, but I wonder if sometimes that doesn’t have to do a little bit with fear.

You put out whatever you think it is in your life you’d like prayers for and what are you going to get back?  What are you going to get back when you are facing death?  What are you going to get back when you’ve got this disease that’s taking your body down?  The trouble is that sometimes what you get back is pretty stupid.  I think sometimes that’s why we shrink away, we think, “no, maybe I won’t put so much in.”  I always tell people who are grieving and about to be at a loved one’s funeral, I say, “you know people are going to come up to you today and they’re going to say some really inane stuff because we don’t know what to do or what to say.  So you should probably take whatever they say and say to yourself, ‘They’re telling me they love me.’”

It just gets too personal and people shrink away from that when they’re afraid of it, or maybe afraid to put things out there because it’ll expose some vulnerability in their life.  The thing is, that’s that dance again. That phobos and thanatos dance, that fear and death dance that makes us shrink away from one another.  We lose sight of the other dance.  We lose sight of the dance that the poet knew; as the poet begs her lover, “set a seal upon my heart.”

The seal was the most valuable possession somebody had.  It identified who they were.  “Set me as a seal upon your heart, upon your arm.”  That’s the dance she was looking to have, the dance that begins with that reaching out for intimacy, letting go of the fear, allowing one’s self to be touched.  And she finds life rather than death.  The dance becomes a dance of intimacy and she finds love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.

Fierce as the grave?  In what way is it fierce as the grave?  Because in the end, we’ll all die.  To what degree is love stronger than death?  In what way is love stronger than death?  That’s my question.  And so I wonder if we might take this passion, this deep love, a sexual intimacy, and as we have the last couple of weeks, make it a window on the Divine life, the life of the presence of God that we’ve understood as a Trinity throughout the centuries.

When we look at the divine life from that perspective, we can see the second person of the and Trinity.  We can see Jesus consistently crying out to the presence of the whole God.  “Set me as a seal upon your heart.  Let me be identified with you.”  Deep in the midst of the wilderness I can just hear him saying, “Set me as a seal upon your heart.  For love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. In the midst of the conflict with the religious leaders and the political leaders, “set me as a seal upon your heart!  For love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.”  He’s surrounded by people deeply in need, draining the strength and the power that he had.  Can’t you hear him?  “Set me as a seal upon your heart.  For love is strong as death, passion fierce.”  In the garden of Gethsemane and finally on the cross itself, “Set me as a seal upon your heart.  For love is strong as death.”

And what the Christ found at that very moment, was that he was united, brought into the presence and the love of God, and from there new life flowed from him.  That’s what Jesus found.  He was united, brought in to the presence and the love of God and new life flowed from him.  That’s what Jesus found.  He atoned.

You may have seen sometimes that word split up “at-one-ment”, atonement.  And I always thought that was just some cute thing because it was clever, but it turns out that’s actually what it means.  Someone made up that word: at-one-ment.

So what Jesus did at that moment, by the giving over of his life, by the begging in the midst of everything that happened, to set the seal upon the heart of God.  Jesus atoned, became one, with this God: generative, imaginative, united.  And when we look at that through that window we recognize it’s in the nature of God to reach out to each one of us, just as Jesus reached out to God.

We are all, always, atoning.  All of us, always, when we open our lives to the presence of God, we are seeking that union, and love is strong as the death we fear.  Love is strong as the death that meets us at the end.  But we are not abandoned from the presence of God.

We all seek it.  We all seek that union at the moment of discouragement, at the moment when we feel as though life is slipping away.  And what we hear back from the presence of God is “Come to me all of you are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you perfect rest.”

It’s a dance, a different kind of dance, from desire to creativity.  It’s one that we’re called to, one we can do right here.  It becomes a model, then, this deep passion, this grounded kind of connection between the poet and her lover, here.  It can be for us.  I think it’s what I’m talking about when I talk about accountable community.  Of all our four goals that’s the one that probably seems the most nebulous.

We know what opportunities for service are, we can figure out what intelligible faith is, and, well, spiritual path, we’re working on that one, too.  But accountable community, that’s when we’re able to be personal to one another.  Rather than shrinking away in fear, to reach out, and ask, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, that love may be strong as death.”  Of course, that’s tricky, because you don’t all-of-the-sudden just decide to risk everything and bear your soul to everyone in the room.  No, trust has to be built over a matter of time.

I remember when I was preparing to be a pastor I was in a program called CPE, which is clinical pastoral education, as if there could be such a thing.  It wasn’t such a pleasant experience, some of those programs are really great, but it wasn’t for me anyway.  There was a demand to share the things that were going on in your life, and it was a rather brutal kind of atmosphere in which this was occurring, and at one point one of my instructors said, “You’re not willing to risk!  You’re not willing to share yourself!”  And I said, “You’d have to be nuts to share yourself in this environment.”  Because the trust hadn’t been built.  But that doesn’t mean trust can’t be built.

We’re going to try to do that in little ways over the next couple of months here.  I’m not talking about bearing your soul, but we want to get together in little story telling circles (I think is what we’re going to call them) as an opportunity to just tell stories about what’s important to us because there’s so much we don’t know about each other.  Stories about things like what made you come to this church.  And maybe someone will say, “well I came because of the children.”  Really?  It would be pretty easy for that conversation, as you’re listening, to go towards, “and I really miss the fact that there isn’t that children’s life here.  But I’m excited to see it bubble up again.”  Or maybe “I’m sorry that my children aren’t going to church anymore.” You know those things aren’t bearing your deepest shame, but they are an opportunity to begin to connect with one another.

We had a woman named Meredith, an administrator from Rodef Shalom and Rodef Shalom did some of these stories circles and she told the greatest story about what happened.  She said she couldn’t quite put her finger on it but the other day during the pouring rain she saw somebody going into the meeting house and they had an umbrella and they turned around and saw someone running up in the midst of the rain, and this person went out with the umbrella and held it over the other one.  Meredith said, “A year and a half ago that wouldn’t of happened.  We got closer to one another; we cared about each other more, because we knew one another’s stories.  There was no need to be afraid, instead we were connected.”  Love is strong as death.

It begins with this dance.  It begins with a step away from fear.  It begins with a trust in the presence of the Divine Life with the love of God, knowing that God does not seek destruction, but instead always reaches out with life.  So that even when the shadow comes, and death begins to take over and approach, we can cry out, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, passion is fierce as the grave,” and we’ll know that we are at one in the presence of God.