Words we did not write

Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

In ten years as a priest I’ve done a lot of weddings.  Some have been very simple, like the brief ceremony I did once on the beach for an old friend and his bride, with only my wife and daughter as witnesses.  And some have been lavish church weddings like the one I did for the daughter of a Texas real estate tycoon, with a string quartet and two hundred guests and at least 20 grand worth of flowers.   But the essence of what happens at a wedding is always the same, no matter how much or how little effort people put into making it especially memorable or beautiful or expressive of their individuality.  The most important part of any wedding is the most personal and at the same time it is the most universal.   It is the moment when the couple makes their vows. 

Nowadays a lot of people decide to write their own marriage vows.  I guess they feel more authentic saying words they came up with themselves.  But there’s a way in which the ideal of “personal authenticity” that means so much to us today fails to capture what the marriage vow is all about.  The truth is, I have yet to find that anyone has improved on the poetry of the Book of Common Prayer.  But more than that, depending in that moment on other people’s words, words spoken by millions for generations feels to me like an honest admitting of ignorance in the face of the mystery of love. 

When I stood facing my bride and declared in the name of God that I was taking her to be my wife, to have and to hold, for better for worse, until we are parted by death, I didn’t really know what I was getting into.  No one does.  So when I hear what people come up with who try to tell the world something new about love, about their love, that is so singular and personal that only their own words will do, I might smile to myself, and think that it’s cute, but it won’t make it any easier to believe that it’s true.

Now it’s not that I’m cynical about love or marriage.  I still find that weddings have the power to move me.  I often experience a deep felling affection for the couple, and joy at their happiness, but there’s also something more than that—something more akin to reverence.  When two people make their wedding vows it is a sacred act; but it is not the beauty of the ceremony that makes it holy, or the words that are said.  It is the love that the couple has for one another, but even more than that, it is their willingness to act on that love.  On the basis of their limited experience of love with each other, they pledge their lives to what they only partly know.  And that act of faith, that unconditional commitment to do whatever it takes to sustain that love, to grow with it, no matter where it takes them, and to keep loving all the way to the end, reminds us of the generosity of God.        

The love poetry that fills the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible is just that, love poetry.  It is earthy and, in places, frankly erotic, and is not really that different from the love poetry of Persia or Mesopotamia or other literary cultures of the time.  So it’s fair to ask why the ancient scribes included it in the Holy Scriptures.  To begin to answer that question I think it’s helpful to know that authorship of the Song is traditionally attributed to King Solomon.  Solomon ruled over a free and united Israel, at its zenith of territorial extent and power.  His reign was a brief interlude of stability and security in all the long story of struggle and suffering that is the Bible.   And so Solomon exemplifies for later centuries the grace and nobility of a people at peace, who are concerned not merely with survival, but with cultivating wisdom, and beauty, and all that we might call the art of living well.  And the delight in the sensuous pleasures of earthly life that fills the pages of the Song of Solomon is also the joy of knowing first-hand the fullness of blessing that God intends for his people.  

But if you read the whole Song you notice that its central theme is not fulfillment, but desire.  Chapter 3 begins:

“Upon my bed at night
   I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
   I called him, but he gave no answer.”

These episodes of intense longing repeat throughout the book, and are the key to understanding the tradition of interpreting the Song that developed in Judaism and carried over into the church.  This is a way of reading the Song metaphorically, as a meditation on the bliss of rapture and the pain of desolation in our love affair with God.  The language of human love works so well to describe this relationship because it is in that realm that we experience our greatest pleasure and sense of completeness.  But such moments are fleeting; they slip through our fingers and are hard to regain, and romantic love, or the lack of it, can also be the place in our lives where we experience the sharpest heartache and deepest longing. 

The Jewish sages saw the mirror of this human dance of fulfilment and yearning in their story as the people of God.   And the church brought this tradition into its story of Jesus, whom it speaks of as the bridegroom, the answer to the world’s longing to see and touch and be embraced by God.  And yet in that story the Christ who pitched his tent among us and dwelt with us, is also the one who ascended again into heaven.  His living presence with us in word and sacrament is also the sharp reminder of his absence, and our yearning hope for the fulfilment that still is to come.   It as if in his brief love affair with humankind, Jesus fanned the flames of desire for union with God into an urgent passion for its consummation that is still sweeping through the world. 

Our tradition has channeled that desire in two directions at once.  One has been the path of worldly renunciation and interior prayer.  The Christian masters of the contemplative life, most of them celibate monks and nuns, have left us a vast body of mystical work full of erotic images of longing and fulfilment, including many volumes of spiritual commentary on the Song of Songs.  But here is an equally vast tradition of Christian teaching about another path, the mysticism of loving one’s neighbor.  It’s like the refrain from the old Stephen Stills song: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”  We’ve come to think of loving other human beings, or at least being nice to them, as an ethical demand.  It’s something you do because it’s what good people do.  But here I’m talking about loving others because you are aflame with longing for God.  This is an active mysticism that seeks union with Christ by sharing in his tender, passionate love for every human being, because each one is the image of the Beloved. 

The Christian spiritual masters have always understood that these two paths, the path of inner union and the path of outer service, are really one.  And in these times when the church is in a historic crisis of identity, of vision and of purpose, some of us are seeking renewal in this unitary path of love.  We live in an age when people have had enough of going through the motions of superficial religion, but just can’t shake their yearning for the real thing.   This deep longing drives us to search for personal authenticity.  And for some that quest completely personal.  But it leads some of us to the altar.  So here we stand, amidst the somewhat shabby beauties of a former age, and make our vows in words we did not write. 

They are strange old words, yet oddly fitted to the tongue, and we use them to pledge our lives in love to one we only partly know.  We have only just begun to know Christ, have only have tasted the least morsels of the delights of being his bride, but even that little knowledge is the longing for the complete fulfilment.  Being together in this community gives us the courage not only to open our hearts to that desire, but to act on it, to take our own steps on Jesus’ path of the love of God and neighbor.  But we aren’t just relying on each other—we are listening to the voice of our Beloved, who calls, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away!”   

The way of wisdom

1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

I had lunch the other day with a friend whose 18 year-old granddaughter was struck and killed by a car in June while jogging near her home in Mill Valley.  He told me about what happened, and its aftermath, and of his struggle to make sense of it.  And he said that he’d kept thinking about all the time that she wouldn’t have, all the life that she wouldn’t live, all the years she should have been in the world but wouldn’t be.  And the injustice and flat-out wrongness of it was heavy on his heart and made him angry at God.  But then, he said, something shifted in his thinking, and he stopped brooding on his granddaughter’s death, and began to remember her life.  Instead of dwelling on her absence, he began to give thanks for her presence.  And about that time she came to him in a sort of waking dream, and he knew that God had not abandoned her, had not forsaken him.

We like to think that God is wise, by which we mean that God knows the right thing to do, and does it.  And if we are good and sincere people, we might hope that God will give us wisdom, too. The biblical figure who traditionally exemplifies this wisdom is Solomon.  Solomon, who, thanks to the crafty politicking of his mother Bathsheba, won out over all his brothers and succeeded his father David on the throne of Israel.  The story says that he was young and inexperienced and overwhelmed by the responsibility of governing the nation, so he went and made sacrifices to God.  And though Solomon sacrificed in the wrong places, God answered his prayers anyway.  God came to Solomon him in a dream and asked what he could do for him, and Solomon didn’t ask for long life or riches, or to be rid of his enemies, but for understanding and discernment, so that he might make wise judgements and be a good king.

The idea that God is the source of wisdom, and desires to teach that wisdom to us, is one of the great themes in the theology of the Bible.  The scriptures not only say that God has created the world, and called Abraham and Sarah and their descendants to be his people; God has not only made a covenant with them, and liberated them from bondage; has not only brought them into a good land, and driven out other nations before them, so that they might dwell there in safety and peace; but God has also given them laws, ordinances, and commandments so that they might gain understanding and learn how to choose what is right.  

The anti-Jewish polemic in the New Testament has caused us to think of the religion of Jesus as legalistic, as if the point of the law in the Hebrew Bible was to follow the rules literally and exactly, so that in doing so, God would find you righteous and favor you.  Of course, that’s one way to interpret it, but that legalistic streak runs through all religions.  There are a lot of Christians who read the Bible as a set of laws, absolute obedience to which, is our ticket to heaven.  But if you read widely in the Bible you find a lot of places, especially in the Psalms, that speak of a very different understanding of the law. 

This is the view that the commandments are the handiwork of God, much like the created world and the great acts of salvation history.   They are not simply arbitrary requirements, but they reveal that God’s purposes are faithful and true.  The point for us is not simply to obey the letter of the law, though that is important, but to study the statutes of God, to keep them in one’s heart and meditate upon them, to delight in them and allow them to illuminate one’s path in life, so that, in time, one might gain insight into the mind that gave them.  It is the contemplation of the awesome grandeur, the sublime justice, the boundless compassion and mercy of that mind, that the Bible calls “the fear of the Lord.”  It is called “fear” not so much because of the threat of punishment for those who disobey, but because one has had first-hand experience, a little taste, has dabbled ones toes in the shallow ripples at the edge of the ultimate mystery.   This fear, the Bible says, is the beginning of wisdom, the way that leads to knowing what God wants and even who God is.

That wisdom is partly the ability to make good choices even when the rules don’t tell you what to do.  We may not have to govern a kingdom, like Solomon, but we all regularly face decisions where there is no clear-cut right-and-wrong, when there are competing principles at stake and it’s not obvious which should prevail.  It is like this for me almost every time someone comes to our parish office asking for financial assistance.  Sometimes the request is simple and I can meet it whole-heartedly without thinking about it very much.  But more often the situation is complicated and I have to weigh my choices carefully. 

I have to consider all different kinds of factors—have I helped this person before, and how recently?  Will the assistance I give have a decisive positive impact, or will it just delay the inevitable?  Is there something else this person needs more than money, and if so, what is it, and is there someone else who can meet that need more effectively than I can?  In the end I have to make the best choice I can, within the limits of my power and my knowledge, and then I have to let go.  The same goes for all kinds of choices I have to make, as a pastoral leader, as a husband and a father, as a citizen of my town and country, and a member of the human race.   I assume it goes for all of us—we make the best choice we can, within the limits of our power and our knowledge, and make the best effort we can to follow through on the consequences, but at certain point, we just have to let go. 

Because there are even more fundamental choices we have to make; we have to choose not just between different courses of action but between different basic orientations to life.  It’s like the choice my friend had to make between agonizing over his granddaughter’s death and being grateful for the gift of her life.  There are things we have no power to alter and no way to understand, realities that confront us with the choice between hope and despair, between love and hate, between peace and retribution.   The wisdom that enables us to affirm the goodness and worthiness of life in the face of these realities is indistinguishable from faith.  It is grounded in humility about the limits of our power and knowledge.  It is freedom from the burden of having to know why everything happens the way it does, or of having to find the one right course of action that will make everything turn out okay.  Wisdom is trust that there is one who will take up where we leave off, who will tie up the loose ends, and catch what falls through the cracks.  

I think our faith in Jesus is faith in this kind of wisdom.  It’s not so much that he sets us a practical example of good habits and sound decision-making.  What I mean is that Jesus lives by what he knows of the living God.  The love and goodness of God is nourishment for him, more essential than food.  And everything he says and does is for the purpose of sharing that heavenly food with us, even giving his body like bread to be broken and his blood to be spilled like wine. 

That gift, raised again and renewed by the Spirit, makes Jesus’ whole life a revelation of the wisdom of God.  In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we have an inexhaustible subject of contemplation, disclosing depths that theological theories cannot penetrate, but only the radiance of love.  Such love subverts all worldly wisdom, with truth and power that could only come from an infinite source, from the one who alone can tie up all the loose ends of our ignorance and suffering, and catch what falls through the cracks of death.  And so we give thanks at all times and in all places, because in Jesus we have the bread of eternal life, the wisdom that satisfies a hunger nothing else can fill.