August 30, 2009:  PASSIONATE HOLY                            
       Song of Solomon 2:8-13, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Eileen Parfrey -- Springwater Presbyterian Church

        Do you remember that time of year before those brutal runs of 100-degree weather?  The time when the woods were still filled with bird song, not the August silence punctuated by crows cackling.  Before the ground turned to dust, the time when the smell of wet, fertile earth filled your nostrils.  Before the smell of ripe blackberries drowned out the subtle smell of flowers.  When the leaves were succulent and swollen.  When the profusion of flowers and color made your eyes drunk, the day you went out to the garden and found, “Good news from the broccoli!”  Back-to-school sales remind us we are at the tail end of summer.  The neat rows of prize-winning rows of vegetables at the Clackamas County Fair only hinted at that earlier time when they were just potentialities, still in seed packets. 
        That’s the time of year to which the Song of Solomon draws us.  For me, it evokes the first summer we were in Oregon.  One day, early in the summer, the sun came out, and everyone just seemed to drop what they were doing to walk outside and stand in it.  I’ve seen it happen every year since, the day when sunshine and flowers and new life emerge from a swaddling of fog and mist and cloud cover, and it always seems to happen so suddenly that people can’t help but be lured outside to revel in it.  Humans and animals alike are seduced and enticed out to the sidewalk or the front steps or the open shop door.  We linger at the parking meter, or wish for a clothesline in order to have an excuse to be outside, or suddenly need to tune up the lawnmower, which can only be done in the driveway, because that’s where the sun is shining.  It is that kind of day in which the Beloved calls to Solomon’s heroine, “Come away with me!”
        Contrast that lyrical song with the crabbed, stingy, parsimonious questions Jesus gets in the lesson from Mark.  “How come your disciples don’t wash their hands?”  You can hear the parenthetical, “The right way.  Why don’t they follow the rules?”  The closing verses in the Mark passage are so easy to preach.  It’s a whole catalogue of sin, something a preacher can really work up a head of steam over that.  Sin is something you can sink your teeth into!  Sin has got metaphor and imagery!  Most of us don’t know what to do with the Song of Solomon.  Read the whole, short book sometime, and you’ll see why it’s hard to preach.  Is it erotic literature or an elaborate metaphor for God’s relationship with the Church?  Most scholars peg it as metaphor for God’s relationship with Israel or Christ’s relationship with the Church—and there’s certainly plenty of evidence to support that—but most pastors just relegate the Song of Solomon to wedding sermons. 
        Today, I think it’s an effective foil to the questions the Pharisees put to Jesus.  These are the religious professionals who seem to think that God’s will is expressed as Law (capital L), and that to be truly religious is to live in subjugation to that Law by following the rules associated with it.  Yes, they had to be religious professionals, because any person in ancient times wishing to remain as kosher as the Pharisees said the Law required, to be that “religious” meant you would need a staff to accomplish it.  Literally.  Who’s gonna haul all that water for you, insulate you from touching unclean stuff, safeguard your privacy during cleansing periods?  The necessities of existence shut out most ordinary mortals from a strictly religious life.  It’s more than a little self-serving for the Pharisees to get all holier-than-thou about Jesus and his disciples washing their hands correctly.  Of course, we don’t get all wound up about that kind of thing today.  Our religious superstars urge folks to greater and greater heights of Biblical study, attendance at religious services, intercessory prayer, mission service, and evangelism.  While clearly spelling out the sins to avoid (fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly), they urge us to send our contributions to the number printed at the bottom of the screen (and they are now accepting Visa and MasterCard).  Getting right with Jesus has gotta cost something.  We still use faith practices to exclude and control.
        Rather than thinking in terms of Law (capital L) and subjugating oneself to it, Thomas Merton speaks of God’s will as if it’s a creative act.  What he means sounds like Song of Solomon, that as God’s will is expressed in and through us, we are invited to new life and to creating a new world.  This is such a lovely text for a day in which we welcome our newest sister in the sacrament of baptism.  But the notion ought to be earthshaking for all of us, this notion that God’s will is God’s creative act, and that God needs our cooperation to bring it about.  We’re not in charge, we don’t get to steer, but it is God’s desire, God’s will, that a new world happens in and through us.  God’s will as an invitation to love, God seducing and enticing us:  “Arise, come away with me.”
        You’ve heard the saying, “You can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar.”  Anyone who has ever tried to train a dog knows this for a fact.  In dog training, positive reinforcement is always more effective than punishment.  When Sadie and I were doing agility training, I learned that “go tunnel” is not something a dog wants to do naturally.  You can’t force a dog to go through the tunnel, but you can certainly entice her to do any number of things.  “Sadie, go through” and the promise of a piece of cheese will get her into and through a tunnel every time.  But pushing her little dog butt at the entrance to the tunnel will only make her turn around and come back out.  Yelling at her when she wants to go visit her dog buddies won’t keep her in the yard, but the enticement of even a miniscule dab of peanut butter acts as a virtual fence.  That’s what Song of Solomon teaches:  God seducing and enticing us to transformed lives as God’s own, cherished beloved.  A crabbed and stingy observance of parsimonious rule abiding is not discipleship.  Being willing and able to call God “Beloved” is.
        It is God’s desire—God’s will—to act in love by and through each of us.  To be love in the world through us.  Love doesn’t happen because of rigid rule-keeping.  Love doesn’t happen through subjugation.  Although, I’m pretty sure it takes humility and gratitude to admit that God should be in charge.  Not only that, but humility and gratitude will trust God to be the one who steers, who masterminds and motivates and creates. 
        Humility and gratitude will trust.  It takes trust, friends, but it’s not passive, this life of discipleship.  Unless we establish a loving relationship with the One whom the Law reveals, we’re stuck with the kind of discipleship that needs strict adherence to rules.  The sooner we embrace the notion of discipleship held in the Song of Solomon, the better.  Without love, all we’ve got are rules.  Song of Solomon writes of a time of fruitfulness, potential, and above all, of love.  The woman to whom this springtime rhapsody is attributed, the woman standing in her window focused on her Beloved, is attentive, listening for his invitation.  She’s in love, friends.  Danika’s baptism is a visible reminder of that call to each of us.  As you witness her baptism today, listen again for the Beloved calling you, “Arise, come away with me.”