The Summer of Love: Song of Songs

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I gotta tell you, I love weird stuff like this in the Bible. It’s like God said, “Hey, watch me confuse everyone,” and He puts books like the Song of Songs, also known as Song of Solomon, in the Bible. It’s a weird book, but a perfect place to kick off our sermon series on Love. I’m calling it the Summer of Love because, well, it’s summer and we’re talking about love, but also because I think that phrase might stir up some images or memories for some of you. The summer of 1967, which I’ve read about in history books, was a really crazy time, right? And we look back on that time, now, and we think, “Man, people went too far, that was too much.” You know, love is great, but I think they pushed it too far with the drugs and free love and all that stuff.

But then I go and I pick up my Bible and I’m reading the Song of Songs, written by Solomon…and I’m reading…and the more I read the more I think, “Oh my goodness…Solomon was a hippie!” I’m mean, look at the words to some of the stuff in this book. Song of Songs 1:13-16: “My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh that lies between my breasts. My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of En-gedi. Ah you are beautiful my love; ah, you are beautiful; Ah, you are beautiful my beloved, truly lovely.” That could have been a Joan Baez or Tom Paxton song! I mean, that’s some, if we’re honest, some pretty erotic stuff right here in our Bible. Honestly, I don’t know how this book made it through the 50’s without being burned.

But it did. God obviously wants us to read this for some reason. There must be something here underneath all this erotic language that we can glean, right? Like some underlying moral principle, maybe something about chastity or the sanctity of marriage or monogamy. But man, you have to really stretch it to find anything in there about that stuff.

If you read it in the New International Version, the NIV, they help you out a little bit because they put little subtitles above the different sections when a new person starts to talk. And basically we see that there are three different parties speaking here: Beloved, who is a woman, Lover, who is a man, and a group of their Friends that speaks in unison. And basically the man and the woman just go back and forth describing just how in love they are with one another and the friends chime in and say, “Aw you two are so cute together!”

And over the years people have interpreted this book in a number of ways. Some view it as a traditional Hebrew wedding song, which it has been. It was often sang at Hebrew weddings in the past.

Another view is that the Song of Songs is an allegory, and that it shows the relationship between God and Israel or Christ and his Church. This is a pretty popular understanding of the book, and in a lot of ways it makes good sense. Remember, in Revelation the church is called the bride of Christ, and some of the language in Song of Songs could definitely be seen as an example of how Christ loves his church and how we ought to love Him back. Chapter 2 verse 16 says, “My beloved – or Christ – is mine and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies.” Chapter 3 verses 1 and 2, “Upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not, so I said to myself, “I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves.” That I think is a great description of how we are called to seek out Jesus, the one who my soul loves, and how we don’t have rest until we have come to him. But that interpretation doesn’t explain away all that erotic imagery. That’s still weird. That’s still confusing.

I want to suggest to you that there is yet another way to interpret the Song of Songs and I have to tell you, it might change your life. It’s has that powerful of a meaning. When I first found it, I just kind of stared at my Bible and said, “Wow!”

First off, you have to understand something about love. In the Greek language, there are four types of love, four different words used for different types of love. You may have heard this before. Storge is basically affection, like you would feel for a family member. Philos is friendship love, also called brotherly love. Agape is like general affection, but it is also related to Godly love. That is the word most often used for love in the New Testament. But the word for love we are dealing with in Song of Songs is Eros, which is erotic love. The kind of love you feel for your spouse. The kind of love that attracts you to someone and gets you to notice their beauty. It’s passionate. It’s sensual. It is full of desire and longing.

Eros love is the thing that makes your stomach hurt when you have to be apart from the person that you are in love with. Eros love is the thing that makes you do stupid things, crazy things, just to please the other person. It’s what makes teenage boys learn to play the guitar just so they can write cheesy love songs to their girlfriends. It is exciting. It gives you butterflies when that person walks in the room. It makes you break out into a cold sweat and gives you goose bumps when you’re thinking about that person that you love.

And I’m talking about more than just lust here, ok. This is a deep, passionate, longing for someone. Not just, “Wow, you’re lookin’ good,” but more like, “Wow, I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you as a part of my life. I love everything about you. You are beautiful inside and out.”

If any of you have ever been in love, maybe some of you married folks still are, but if you’ve ever been in love, I want you to think back. Think back to that time when you first fell in love. How that person just became your obsession and you spent every waking moment thinking about them and counting down the seconds and minutes and hours until you’d get to see them again. Do you remember how your friends said, “There’s something different about you. You’re acting different.”

And while you’re thinking about that and remembering those feelings, look again at the Song of Songs. That’s obviously the same thing that’s going on here. These two are in love. They can’t stop thinking about each other. They are obsessed with each other. They can’t wait until the next time they get to be together. All they can think about is how beautiful the other is. OK, now hold that thought.

Let me read for you Jeremiah 2:2: God says to Jeremiah, “Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem, Thus says the Lord: I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown.” Do you hear that? God is talking about us, his people, in terms of husband and wife. Talking about the love of a husband and wife in terms of how we have loved him. And the Hebrew, not Greek, because the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the Hebrew word for love here is the same word that is used in the Song of Songs. OK, so there’s something about the love of a youthful husband and wife that is similar to the way God loves us, and we are called to love God. And I read that and I thought, “OK, that’s kind of weird, what does God mean by that?”

And the more I read that and thought about the idea of being the bride of Christ, and read verses like John 3:16: For God SO LOVED the world that he gave his one and only son,” the more clearly I began to see one of the most beautiful truths in all of Scripture. And that truth is this: God doesn’t just kind of love us. His love for us is more than just a creator/creation kind of love. It’s more than just a best friend kind of love.

God put the Song of Songs in the Bible for a reason. It’s like He’s saying, “Look – do you see how passionate those two are for each other? How deep their longing for one another is? How they can’t stop thinking about one another? That’s how I feel about you. That’s the kind of relationship I want with you.” The erotic nature of the Song of Songs is just there to illustrate the deep passion that is underlying. That passion, that borderline obsession that God has for us. He is deeply, madly in love with us. He can’t stop thinking about us. We give God goose bumps. He is beside himself when we ignore him and he is counting down the seconds and minutes and hours until we can be with him. He’s sitting on the edge of his seat waiting for us to just say a little prayer to him, just so he can hear our voice again.

God doesn’t just love us, he SO loves us. He is IN LOVE with us. Everything that you have ever felt for another person that you are in love with, God feels for you 100 times over. Even marriage, I think, is a gift from God, and one of the main reasons he gives us this gift is not just that we can be happy and married to someone, but so that we can see a vision of the kind of relationship that God desires to have with us.

We even say in the marriage service in the blessing of the marriage: O God, you have so consecrated the covenant of Christian marriage that in it is represented the covenant between Christ and his Church.

Basically, Jesus wants to be married to us. He’s courting us. He’s wooing us. Why did God send his son? Because He SO LOVES us! It’s what you do when you’re dating someone. You give gifts. Jesus was a courtship gift. God said, “Forget a bouquet of flowers, here’s my son, the thing I love more that anything else. I’ll give him to you and let him suffer and die just so I can have a chance to be with you.” Everything here on earth is a gift from God, a gift meant for us to notice him. The stars in the sky, the beauty of nature, the gift of the friends and family he has given us: everything, every good and perfect gift from God is intended for us to notice God so that we may say yes to him, to his proposal to us, so that we will live with him forever.

The first time I realized this, it knocked my socks off. I’d always thought of God’s love in terms of creator/creation or at most Father/son. But it is so much more than that. The passion, the desire, the longing. God is deeply, madly in love with us. His desire is to spend eternity with us. Becoming a Christian, in many ways, is not unlike getting married. It’s saying “yes” to God’s proposal. When you picture Jesus on the cross, you might as well picture God down on one knee next to him saying, “Look what I’m willing to sacrifice for you. Look at how much I love you. Do you understand that I loved you before I even created you? Do you understand that I have been there for you through every second of every day of your life? Did you know I created you to be a perfect match, perfectly compatible to me? Look around you: this world, this creation, this universe, it all has one purpose – to show you just how much I am in love with you. Will you be mine? Would you say yes to me?”

Are you getting the picture? The Song of Songs, this example of deep, unbridled passion, is meant to show us just how wide and deep and unfathomable God’s love is for us. But there’s another side to it: He desires for us to love him the same way. He wants us to love Him back. Are you returning God’s love? Or are you still playing the field? Gotta sow some wild oats first? Like you’re putting God on hold right now, because you are in love with money, or stuff, or a certain lifestyle, one that God doesn’t fit into. So you’re saying, “God, I’m sure you’re great, but I’m still young, I’ve got time. I have to go have fun and explore the world and get my kicks. I’m not ready to settle down with you quite yet.”

After I met Holly and we fell in love, we both said the same thing to one another. We said, “I wish I would have met you sooner, so I could have avoided all the hurt I had to go through to find you.” Folks, with God, you can avoid it. You can decide to find him right now. You can decide to say yes to him. You don’t have to wait and go through all sorts of other things to figure out that they won’t satisfy you. Only God will. He is deeply, passionately in love with you and he is on his knees begging you to come to him. All you have to do is say yes to him.

If you’ve never said yes to him, to the gift of his son Jesus, during communion and our closing hymn, just say a little prayer. Just say, “Jesus, I know you love me, and I want you to know I love you too. I’m saying yes to you.” Today is a good day to receive the gift of love.

Pastor Dan Metzger

Van Buren United Methodist Church

Van Buren, OH