Love Songs: A Sermon about Desire

by Bromleigh McCleneghan

In the spring of 2009, the small congregation I was then serving as a solo pastor began to consider what it might mean for them to become a “reconciling church” — open to all people, regardless of sexual identity.  The church was located in a Chicago suburb, and most of active members were over 50, though we had some children and younger families.  I had been at the church for three and a half years at that point and we all knew each other pretty well.  Most were already fairly comfortable with the idea — were not convinced that homosexuality was inherently sinful — but we needed to know how to talk about these convictions in terms of Christian faith.  

The sermon series I preached ran five weeks, beginning with Christ’s appearance to Thomas after Easter (“Body and Soul”) and running through Pentecost (“The Reconciling Church”).  The other weeks I strayed from the lectionary, and preached on gender (Genesis, Psalm 139, Galatians 3), desire (Song of Solomon), and marriage (Ruth and 1 Corinthians).  This sermon was the third in the series: “Love Songs.”

Primary Text: Song of Solomon 3:1-5

Of all the embarrassing photos from my adolescence that I now routinely hide from view, of all the images that show off my terrible glasses and awkward stance and ridiculous hairstyle choices, there is one that I will always cherish.

Taken in October of my sixteenth year, it is a posed photo in a friend’s living room, a moment captured in the minutes before the Homecoming Dance.  My date – who would become my first boyfriend and my first love – and I stand side by side: formally, not touching, beaming.  We look as though we are about twelve years old.

This is what astounds me now.  How young we appeared.  How young we were.  And yet, this night will stay forever in my mind because of what happened to me – for me – after the dance.  We had returned from dinner and the dance and were all – maybe a dozen kids – spread out on the floor, the couch, watching a movie.  I could not for all the world tell you what we saw, for I spent the film’s duration entirely focused on my date, who, at some point early on, took my hand and did not let me go.  

This, for me, was the birth of desire. For two exhilarating hours, I was more aware of my body, of my heartbeat, of the pulse of the universe than I had ever been before.  I was enraptured by the feeling of his fingers tracing the lines of my hand, by the way another person’s touch could be so very familiar and yet so very new.  When the movie, whatever it was, came to an end, and we turned the lights on, and the boys went home, I sat, comically dazed, already longing to see him again.

It’s not much of a story, in our rather sex-obsessed culture.  Even back then I had trouble describing to my girlfriends, the ones who spent the night at Kim Jaeger’s after the boys went home, the import of what had transpired in those hours.  It was not, I might point out, the first time that a boy had held my hand for a prolonged period of time.  It was simply the first time I had felt my heart swell with fullness, with contentment, while at the same time I longed – in the pit of my stomach – to know him more, to have him become a part of my life.

It’s not much of a story, plot-wise, and yet I’m a little embarrassed to share it with you.  As your pastor, from the pulpit.  The place from which I pray each week to the Lord our God that my words and meditations might be acceptable, might proclaim a good Word, might incarnate the Gospel.  I’m a little nervous… because in telling you this story, I feel almost like I am confessing a sin.  That I am telling you something just the tiniest bit naughty, when I ought to be speaking of the Holy.  I am nervous, because in sharing a cherished memory, this important moment in my growing up, I am inviting you to know me, to see me.  This invitation renders me vulnerable in a new way.

It’s not much of a story – but I’ll tell you, I don’t think it’s my own hang-ups that make me wonder about sharing it.  I wrote something, almost a year ago now, a web piece for The Christian Century, on adolescent sexuality.  With this very story in mind, I suggested that “desire – particularly that joyful adolescent desire that springs from something as mundane as hand-holding – can be a critical sign and experience of the abundant life which Christ desires for us.  Rather than blaming our bodies for leading us astray, we might teach our children to trust their bodies and listen to what they are telling them: the sinking feeling in your stomach that tells you something is wrong, the way one’s heart skips a beat when a beloved draws near.”

And, oh, how the comments section went wild.  There was talk of teen pregnancy and disease and heartbreak and sin and the critical and biblical ideal of abstinence!  Hand holding?!? That’s the least of it!  Fathers across the country voiced their complaint.

In American Christianity, and in a host of times and places throughout the history of the church, we’ve been pretty jumpy about any talk of sexuality, any talk of desire.  There are reasons for this: the pietistic strands of our tradition, which encouraged believers to shun all manner of things – dancing and movies and drinking and gambling and, most certainly, anything that looked like it might lead to sex – in order to live holy lives before God.  There are those who believe that all this temporal, body stuff is just physical baggage, that the real good stuff of life is that which is spiritual – heady, ethereal – and talk of human sexuality is simply base and unimportant.  There’s the rational, Enlightenment faith that a lot of us borrow from extensively, that furthers the notion that what’s going on in our minds is what’s important – the heart of reason is the seat of faith… not the passion and longing of our creaturely bodies.  And then there’s the school of thought that fears, desperately, the power of sin and temptation, that believes that our bodies and our hearts are very rarely, if ever, to be trusted; that worries how quickly and fully we might stray from the path of righteousness if ever we were to indulge our human desire.

And, you know, of all of those folks, the ones I actually have the most affinity for are the fearful ones.  Because they seem to understand, at least instinctively, that there is danger inherent in desire.  That there is risk involved.  That we make real connections with other people, and that we are changed by them.  That we are drawn to others for reasons we often do not know.  That we often experience connection as a powerful pull, as impetus and inspiration to act against our better judgment, in wild and unpredictable ways.  That two hour hand holding session, just by way of example, transformed me from a ridiculously shy girl who could barely make eye contact with her date when he asked her out in class, into the kind of brazen young thing who actually kissed this boy on the cheek as he left!  This is scandalous, powerful stuff!

And yet, just as our Scripture readings from last Sunday – from Genesis, and the Psalms, and Galatians – seemed to affirm the goodness of our bodies, of God’s creation and its creatures, so does our Scripture lesson for the day affirm the joy, pleasure, and wonder of erotic love.  Erotic love?  Yes, you heard that right.  The Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, is an extended love poem, extolling the many wonders and virtues of a rather intimate, romantic relationship.  The two lovers each speak throughout the poem, as does a chorus, which is primarily in dialogue with the woman.  They describe the great love they feel for one another – and its basis in a thousand virtues – not a few of which are physical.  The woman describes the man as the one my soul loves, but it is clear that she is attracted to him, body and soul.  So, too, does the man speak of his beloved’s beauty, in metaphor largely unfamiliar to our ears, but with a specificity born of intimate knowledge.  There is talk of breasts and thighs and hair and hips and legs and, perhaps most revealingly, of scent.  These folks are lovers.  And, I feel I ought to point out, against a host of conservative Christians trying to reframe this theologically challenging book for the purposes of the abstinence movement: any decent textual study reveals that these two are not married.  This is a biblical book celebrating erotic love between two unmarried people.

That may be more than a little difficult to make sense of at first.  What are we to do with this book?  Perhaps, despite our discomfort, we might open our hearts to hear its wisdom.  What moves me about these poems is how accurately they depict the emotions, the experience, of longing for one’s beloved, and the passion with which one clings to the object of one’s affection once he or she is finally found.  Our morning’s reading demonstrates, too, the way desire and longing for those we love draws us forward with uncertain steps, down unknown paths.  In these short verses, we hear the woman describing a dream, in which she is desperately, feverishly seeking out the one whom her soul loves.  She cannot find him anywhere, and wanders the streets of the city, asking all those around – sentinels, strangers: have you seen him?  She will not rest until she has found him, and when, at last, she does, she embraces him, and promptly takes him home to bed!

It is a powerful thing, to feel this way for another person, and those of us who have been blessed in such a way know that it can be an uneasy thing – to lose perhaps momentarily, one’s sense of balance, one’s footing or grounding.  We, successful, thoughtful, faithful folks, are used to having a certain control over ourselves.  But desire sneaks up on us, striking when we least expect it.

Song of Songs is not the first to speak of this, nor, certainly is it the last:  this week I’ve had a number of love songs running through my head.  Do you remember Some Enchanted Evening?  "Some enchanted evening/You may see a stranger/ Across a crowded room/And somehow you know,/You know even then/That somewhere you'll see her/Again and again." Or that old Johnny Mercer song, Something’s Gotta Give? "When an irrepressible smile such as yours, warms an old implacable heart such as mine, don’t say no, because I insist, somewhere, somehow, someone’s gonna be kissed!"

We saw the new Star Trek movie on Friday night, and there, on screen, we saw a new actor portray the lovable Lothario, Captain James T. Kirk – the kind of guy who was smart, and handsome, with just the right self-assurance, the kind of guy that women just flock to.  There are lots of things to love about the Star Trek universe, but one of my favorites is the way that attraction, chemistry, and desire transcend species.  Kirk makes out with a green girl.  But, the one girl he really seems to want, has been drawn for wholly other reasons to another…  It’s a mystery.

So if desire is unpredictable, and leaves us wandering the streets, hearts all aflame, what is it that is good and worth celebrating? Well, as we have said in previous weeks, first is the acknowledgement that our bodies are important, and help us to experience life.  We are who we are because of how we inhabit our bodies – gendered, subject to time and illness, aware of pleasure and pain.  But desire is also important because in the longing for another, we experience in powerful ways the longing for communion, for relationship.  And the coming together of people – in a host of ways – has been at the heart of our faith since the very beginning.  Those early church fathers, and the medieval mystics, and the rabbis long before them all, read the Song of Songs as allegory: as a testament to the powerful affection and longing for communion that is inherent in the relationship between God and the people Israel, and Christ and his Church.

This is where it helps to read the Scriptures on multiple levels – literally, as a love story between a man and a woman, symbolically, as those early church leaders, and theologically, experientially, and on and on.  John Wesley, dear founder of our tradition, spoke of the means of grace, ways in which we would come to know and experience God’s loving presence and forgiveness; one of the primary ways in which we do this is socially – in relationships – especially close, intimate, loving ones – we can bear witness to God’s love, and we can know the assurance and comfort and trust that follow from an experience of that grace. So the longing for another can be one way in which our souls – not just our bodies, not just our minds, but the whole of our being – seek out the goodness of God in another person.

But longing and desire also remind us that, always, communion is never ultimate, never lasting and permanent.  We come together, in love, in relationship – but our selves remain.  We are yet two.  And so while we experience fullness and unity and joy, we are also always reminded of the limits of our selves.  So it is with God.  We experience oneness and communion with God every so often, momentarily – but we ourselves remain – our souls enriched for the experience.

We are, of course, exploring these great topics of gender and sexuality because they are fabulously interesting and under-discussed, but also because we are exploring what it would mean for us to become a reconciling congregation, open to all people.  In hearing from the Song, in discerning the place of desire and longing in our lives, I am impressed by the mysterious and divine pull to be in relationship with others.  Christians in recent decades have made much of how human persons are created male and female, how we are made to complement one another, how we are not complete until we have been joined in heterosexual marriage.

But the vision of intimate, self-giving love expressed in the lengthiest depiction of romance and sex in the whole Bible, doesn’t seem to depend in any real degree on the gender of the speakers.  Don’t get me wrong: we’re definitely reading about a man and a woman.  There’s nothing here, though, to suggest that their differences are immutable; that their pairing is a result of complementary physiology.  In fact, unless we’re paying close attention to pronouns, we often cannot be clear whether it’s the man or the woman who is speaking. 

As we discussed last week, gender matters.  It shapes how we experience the world, it is a part of our very selves.  And yet, it is not the ultimate category of our lives.  We are first human beings, drawn into relationship with one another, drawn into relationship with God.  Through our experiences of desire, we come to understand ourselves in new ways; we are reminded that we are not simply rational actors, that we are not endlessly in control.       

The 4th century church father Augustine of Hippo famously wrote, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in thee.”  We have long known that communion with God, receiving God’s grace and spirit, make us holy, draw us into God’s perfect love.  The heart of God, we confess, is our heart’s true home.  We have a tendency, though, to tame our love for God — and our love for one another.  To make it an intellectual proposition or a course of action.  The Song of Solomon reminds us that the love that moves the universe and our human relationships is powerful and unpredictable, holy and beautiful.

The poet writes:

“love is strong as death,

  passion fierce as the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire,

  a raging flame.

Many waters cannot quench love,

  neither can floods drown it."

Hear the Good News, and go in love. Amen.

Bromleigh McCleneghan is associate pastor and director of Christian education at Baker Memorial United Methodist Church in St. Charles, Illinois.

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