SunAug302009
Scripture: SONG OF SOLOMON 2:8-13
“My early experiences with dance,” says a man named Ronald Kotzsch, “were less than satisfactory. When I was nine years old my mother sent me to Dolly Ellen’s Dance Studio. There I sacrificed six sunny Thursday afternoons trying to learn the fox-trot and the waltz. On the seventh Thursday, a rainy one, I played hooky, bought a box of M&Ms, and went to the library. Anticipating my mother’s inevitable ‘What did you learn at Dolly Ellen’s?’ I checked an encyclopedia article on dance for ‘types of . . .’ When the maternal query came, I answered innocently, ‘Today we did erotic and orgiastic dancing. It was more fun than usual.’ My mother dates her old age from that moment, as do I” (Utne Reader, January/February 1993, p. 130).
It may come as something of a surprise to you, as it did to me when I first came across it, to learn that the Bible essentially has its own book of “erotic and orgiastic dancing.” The Song of Solomon, sometimes called the Song of Songs, is a kind of ode to love—physical, sexual love. What a shock it is to read in the Bible, of all places, an affirmation of that part of us that we don’t usually speak about. If you haven’t read it before, you might want to take a flashlight to bed with you and read it under the covers! Listen to some of its unexpected language: “your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely” (2:14); “upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves” (3:1); “I held him and would not let him go until I brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me” (3:4). There are long passages praising the beauty of the lover’s eyes, hair, teeth, lips, cheeks, neck, and breasts (4:1-4). “You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride, you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes” (4:9). And another passage that’d make me blush if I read it to you! But I’ll give you chapter and verse and you can look it up later: 5:4-5.
This is tremendously sensual language. And it affirms that our native sexual energy is a good thing. Many centuries ago, the rabbis debated long and hard whether to include this book in scripture. And they finally decided they would because, even though God is never mentioned in the book, there’s something about the rhythmic power of the words and images that affirms the blessing of this tremendously earthy part of us.
Now if you’re like me, you’re already well into your list of “yes, buts.” Isn’t it true that other parts of the Bible are pretty negative about sex, or at least some sexual behaviors? Yes. Not only that, but didn’t the churches most of us grew up in seem pretty punitive about sex? Very much so. Guilt, encouraged by the church, is a tremendously prevalent feeling for many when the subject is sex. The great twentieth century theologian Karl Barth once said to his class that not everything, but a great deal about us, can “be explained by the fact that we are continually hungry, sexually unsettled, and in need of sleep” (cited in Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit, p. 256).
Sexually unsettled is right—long-standing marital tension about how much sex is the right amount, feelings of guilt about powerful desire, despair over lustful compromising of vows, astonishment at the prevalence of sexual imagery in the culture, the travesty of rape and sexual misconduct, the texting of nude photos to friends. From one angle, it seems ludicrous to praise the goodness of sex. On some level, it just seems wrong—so wrong, in fact, that when I mentioned something similar in my last church, a long-time member left the church. It just seemed irresponsible to him. And even though this is the Bible’s testimony—not simply my personal agenda—he was adamantly opposed: “The culture is way too sexualized as it is,” he said, “and you’re just encouraging more of it.”
So let’s see if we can do a little better this time, and not lose any members over this! The current issue of Sojourners carries a thought-provoking article about just this subject. Sojourners is a progressive evangelical journal that explores the implications of Christian faith. The article is called “Sex Without Shame: You Know the Don’ts. Here Are the Dos” (Sept.-Oct. 2009, pp. 20-27). Keith Graber Miller, a philosophy and religion professor, first rehearses society’s highly negative attitude toward sex, noting that in medieval England, you’d be prescribed ten years of penitence for certain sexual behaviors, and only seven years for premeditated murder. With that as a prominent part of our history, is it any wonder that guilt and shame weigh us down when it comes to sex!
The issue, and what makes for this huge tension in us, is that, with all our appropriate wariness about sex, at the same time we were still born with this powerful draw toward others, a draw that we can’t do anything about. Paul Tillich, another great theologian of the last century, said human beings were created to seek reunion with that from which we are separated. So we seek, on many levels, to be connected with others, and part of that urge—God-given and unavoidable—is a sexual one.
So this drive of ours for connection is a good thing. But, as we all know, it’s also been perverted by exploitation, selfishness, violence, and addiction. What then are to believe? What should we tell our children? That sex is good, or that it’s bad?
Maybe the best answer is that it’s some of both. The other day, I heard a movie reviewer speaking about the film director Ang Lee. He mentioned that one of Lee’s earlier movies is called “Lust, Caution.” And the reviewer said that what Lee does brilliantly in much of his work is combine those apparent opposites—that a whole life entails, on the one hand, yielding to our appetites and energies—lust (used here as a metaphor)—and, on the other hand, needing to control their excess—caution. Perhaps it would be better to talk of “yielding” and “control.” If you eliminate the lust, the yielding, you’ve killed the spirit. If you eliminate the caution, the control, you’ve violated countless boundaries. Lust and caution; yielding and control—both. Since those two things—lust and caution, yielding and control—often run smack into each other, there’s a fine kind of discernment process needed to resolve that tension healthfully.
In the Sojourners piece, Miller proposes six guidelines to help us traverse this mine field. The first, unsurprisingly, is that “we need to talk openly and directly about sexuality in our homes and churches.” For most of us, secrecy exacerbates the tension. If you don’t talk about it, it just gets more powerful and destructive.
Miller’s second guideline is that “we need to recognize how embodied our lives are, and we need to embrace the fundamental goodness of that embodiment.” Think about Jesus: as God-in-the-flesh, he knows the full range of human feeling and desire, and he understands it. If Jesus was born without sin, then surely his sexuality is not, by definition, shameful. Sexual pleasure is a gift.
Miller’s third principle is that “to love sexually and live faithfully, we need to keep in mind the Sexuality Big Picture.” The deep travesty to the world, sexually, is not homosexuality, which is what often gets fingered as the culprit. The real threats to us sexually, says Miller, come from “infidelity, too-early sexual engagement, promiscuity, sexual objectification, sexual exploitation, and sexual violence.” Those are where our problems lie, not with same-gender love.
Miller’s fourth conviction is that “we need to become thoughtful critics of exploitative sexual images in our culture.” The problem with so much pornography, he says, is “not that it shows naked bodies (some of our finest art depicts bodies in the buff), but that the sexuality it depicts is casual, meaningless, often violent and degrading, and pervasively about unequal power relationships between men and women.”
He goes on to warn about the “corrosive nature of the ‘soft-core’ exploitation of sexuality in advertising and Hollywood—especially the way women are objectified to sell products or draw viewers.” To which I would add my own spin on this: a large part of the problem is that it’s so tempting for us to objectify each other. This can happen anywhere: how can I use you to get my way? If we see the wait-staff or the caddy or the cleaning woman as just there to do our bidding, rather than as a real flesh-and-blood person, then, from the perspective of faith, we’ve done them a tremendous disservice.
The same is true of people we see in pictures or on the street: if all we’re aware of is a sexual object, then we’ve failed God and them. It’s natural to be attracted. It’s a failure of grace, though, if we don’t at the same time step back and remember that this is a person with hopes and dreams and failings and fears. No one is there simply for our pleasure, and certainly not for our possession. Everyone has a life and integrity and freedom of their own.
Miller’s fifth point is “We cannot assume that all that passes for sexual freedom actually is.” The phenomenon of “hooking up” has become much more prevalent—people having sex with casual acquaintances. At one university, some 80 percent of the students are involved, averaging 11 hook-up partners in their college careers. Part of how they justify this hooking up is to claim that it’s “safe sex.” But the retort of two ethicists is right on the money: “Purportedly ‘safe’ sex ‘does nothing to protect partners from the boredom of mechanical sex; from the hurt, betrayal, and jealousy that frequently accompany promiscuity; or from the grief and depression that accompany a broken heart.’ There’s no condom for that, no prophylactic strong enough to contain such brokenness.” There’s no way, in other words, to pretend that a sexual relationship can be shrugged off as merely a casual encounter. Something much deeper happens.
Miller’s last point is this: “we need to recognize that what we really yearn for in life is intimacy rather than the stimulation of genital nerve endings.” I can do no better than to quote Miller here: “‘sexual intercourse is only one small, nonessential part of true intimacy in a world that often acts as though it is the only thing . . . [For life really to be full,] We need to be loved, to be understood, to be accepted, and to be cared about. We need to be taken seriously, to have our thoughts and feelings respected and held in confidence, and to be trusted.’ We need to know our companions will be there for us when we really need them. That sort of intimacy can be embraced by young and old, gay and straight, married and single people.”
That’s Miller’s take on this. These six guidelines can shape our understanding of sexuality in ways that are true to the vision of the Song of Solomon: talking directly and openly; celebrating the goodness of our bodies; refraining from sexual objectification of others; being critics of sexual exploitation in the media; acknowledging that sex is not a casual thing; and remembering that what we most yearn for in life is a trusting, loving intimacy. We might sum it up with that Ang Lee movie title: lust, caution; yielding, control; attraction, and at the same time an enormous respect for the integrity and wholeness of the other. Remember that in our scripture passage, the lovers’ engagement has about it a deep mutuality and fidelity.
Interpretation of the Song of Solomon historically emphasizes two major themes. The first, which we’ve stressed this morning, is that sexuality is a good thing, a gift of God over which to rejoice and give thanks. The other theme the church has explored in connection with this unique book is that it testifies to God’s love for the people of God. You know the way the two lovers look at each other through the lattice, hungering to get at each other? That’s the way God looks at us—with a passionate longing, a deep yearning for intimacy, a bottomless appreciation for all of who we are. To those of us who have thought of God as this cool, distant presence somewhere far off in the universe, this is an almost inconceivably shocking image. So go home this afternoon and remember that: that God loves you the way the lovers in the Song of Solomon pant after each other. And God loves everybody else the same way: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”