Love is Better Than Wine

The Song of Songs

 

This is how a psychologist talks about love: "Love is characterized by strong feelings of attachment and intimate communication, and, in addition, several more subtle behavioral indicators. If a person is physiologically aroused for whatever reason but is unsure why that arousal has occurred, that person may search the surroundings to find a cause for these feelings, and, spotting an attractive acquaintance, decide that the feelings must be due to incipient love. Whether that relationship will grow or decay depends upon how well matched the couple is in age, intelligence, educational plans, physical attractiveness and so forth." Now, isn't that a hopeful word.

 

This is how a theologian talks about love: "Love as self-giving entails a specific relation to others. It is self-giving to and for them. It thus differs from forms of love that have a possessive character involving self-love. Possessive forms find a representative in eros, the self-giving form in agape. Both forms relate to humankind. Both determine one's nature. Both express one's nature. Both express the same person. But agape corresponds to one's nature, eros contradicts it. Agape respects fellow-humanity in the I-Thou encounter, eros rejects it. This development of the antithesis clarifies Christian love, but Christian love exists in and not by the antithesis. Coming from God, agape excels eros in dignity and power. Hence a conciliatory word may be ventured: God seeks to bring erotic man to his true self by releasing him from self-seeking in agapic self-giving." Hmmm, that's a hopeful word...I think?

 

[NOTE TO READERS: Right now, I am balling up the paper on which these paragraphs are written, and throwing them behind me. Giving them what their due!]

 

Now, let's listen to what a lover says about love: "Love is better than wine...your name is like perfume poured out...take me away with you--Let us hurry!" We can analyze love. We can theorize about love. Or we can love. Which would you rather do? I know how Solomon would answer this question, for the Song of Songs is not only about love, but it is the expression of a lover's heart. It is poetry and passion. And it has a message that we need to hear.

 

Before we get to the message the Songs has for us to hear, however, we need to do a little detective work. We need to ask around about the book and its life among God's people. We know, of course, that the Songs is a book of love poetry. It captures the essence of love in all its spontaneity, beauty and power. It shares the pathos of love experienced during moments of intimacy and separation, ecstasy and anguish, contentment and tension. It can be read straight-up, as poetry expressive of the love between two people. Or it can be read as allegory, as a poetic means to describe the love between God and Israel, or Christ and the Church, or Christ and the individual soul. Either way works...for love is love whether we are talking about our love for God or our love for another. Either way there are moments of intimacy and separation, ecstasy and anguish, contentment and tension.

 

As we continue our detective work, we find that the Songs has held an interesting place in the lives of God's people. The Songs is one of the books known as the megilloth. The megilloth are five Old Testament books that are associated with five different Jewish festivals, one book for each festival. The Songs is linked with the Israelite festival of Passover so to understand the Songs we need to understand something about the Passover. The Passover remembered the ultimate act of salvation in the life of Israel: the Exodus. Every Spring, Israelite families gathered for the Passover meal. As part of the meal, they would retell what God had done to save his people from bondage in Egypt. They would tell about the yoke of slavery, and the ten plagues and Pharaoh. They would hear again, as they had heard every year since their birth, God's words to Pharaoh: "Let my people go!" They would hear about the Israelites being chased by Pharaoh's army, Moses parting the Red Sea, and the people of Israel being delivered into freedom on the other side. The message of the Passover festival was clear and unmistakable: "We, as God's people, are defined, shaped and centered, not by any political, or military, or environmental forces, but by an act of God. We are who we are because of what God has done that we could not and cannot do for ourselves!" In a word: Passover celebrates salvation. Then, at the end of the meal, the Songs were read...which seems to me a bit curious. Why the link between the Exodus and the Songs? What do they have to do with one another?

 

Perhaps we can grasp the link between the Exodus and the Songs by framing the question in our own context by asking ourselves about the link between Easter and the Songs. After all, Easter is the celebration of the Christian Exodus. At Easter we celebrate our salvation. We celebrate that our salvation is an action of God. We celebrate that our salvation is that action of God whereby we who are caught in the miry clay of sin are pulled up and out and set upon the firm foundation of Jesus Christ. God frees us from bondage to sin just as he freed the Israelites from the bondage of slavery. God takes our fragmented lives and restores us to wholeness. God takes our alienation from his love and restores us to perfect communion. God puts us in a position to live in free, open, and loving relationship with God and with one another. God parts the grave and leads us to the promised land of eternal life. What a gift salvation is! Don't you think? Don't you just wake up every morning like it was Easter morning and say to yourself, "What a gift salvation is!" Somebody give me an Amen.

[NOTE TO READERS: My guess is that only a few, if any, will say amen...We'll see.]

By the, shall we say, reticence some of you displayed giving me an amen, I think it is safe to assume that you do not wake every morn as if it were Easter morn...neither do I. We may not realize it, but I think we are close to discovering the meaning of the Songs in the life of God's people. The stories of the Exodus, for the Israelites, and Easter, for Christians, are stories that celebrate the great impossibilities that are realities with God. They proclaim the indescribable gifts of grace that come from God's hand...year after year...over and over and over the same thing...and even great stories get a little stale after awhile. It's hard to keep our enthusiasm for the same old, same old. It's kind of like love. Year after year...over and over and over...the same thing with the same person...and even love can get stale after a while.

 

How many marriages begin with couples who have stars in their eyes? We might find a cloudy night or two but my guess is that the answer is most all of them do. How many stars are in the eyes of couples married five years or twenty-five years? My guess is no one knows because after twenty-five years of marriage most of us aren't outside looking up at the sky. Love seems to lose some of its sparkle over time. The Songs seems to acknowledge this fact of human nature. After its lovey-dovey beginning of "Love is better than wine...your name is like perfume poured out...take me away with you," the Songs returns to our daily reality. In chapter three we hear, "I looked for the one my heart loves; I looked for him but did not find him...I will search for the one my heart loves." In chapter five we hear, "I arose to open the door for my lover, and my hands dripped with perfume, my fingers with flowing myrrh. I opened the door for my lover but my lover had left; he was gone. My heart sank at his departure. And so I looked for him " It seems here that the Songs recognizes that our intimacy with God and with one another has holes in it. There are dark nights where we long for God and do not find him. Nights when we long for the fervor of our first love but do not find it. There are times when love gets stale.

 

Did you know that our body sends out chemical signals and produces chemical responses during the first months of a relationship?  When we kiss, we exchange all sorts of chemical information and attraction is based on whether our bodies sense that the chemistry is right between us or not.  This explains why a prospective boy/girlfriend can look good on paper – have all the right qualities – but not spark a flame.  Yet the body’s chemical secretions that draw us together, usually in overwhelmingly powerful ways, begin to dissipate after about 18 months. What is required then to maintain “coupling” is that we learn to love for deeper, more lasting reasons; what is required is that we learn to love for love’s sake!

 

Stephen Covey tells the story in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People of a woman who came to him for counseling.  “Stephen,” she confessed, “I no longer love my husband, but I don’t want to get a divorce.  What should I do?”  “Love him,” Stephen replied.  “But I just told you I no longer love him.  How can I love if I don’t feel?  I can’t just flip a switch a love him.”  “You are confusing love as a feeling with love as an action,” Stephen told her.  “If you love, as an act, then love as a feeling will eventually follow.”  Covey’s wisdom is strong, for what greater act of love has there been except Jesus’ love on the cross?  Yet does anyone want to say that Jesus was feeling all lovey-dovey on the cross?  No!  Rather, Jesus’ love was expressed as a matter of will.

 

There is a message here for our discipleship as Christians and our discipleship as lovers of one another. The message is a word about patience and persistence in our search for love, God's love as well as human love. It is an invitation not to let our language about God become common, cliché ridden phrases but to remember the earthshaking, soul-changing vision of the world as seen from God's perspective, the glimpse of what life can be when it is lived under the shelter of God's love. And the message is a challenge. A challenge to take what we have glimpsed of God's love for us, and through devotion and adoration, allow the glimpse to become a more permanent vision, for as we are patient in our devotion and persistent in our adoration the love we felt so strongly when we said, "Love is better than wine" will return to us. Our beloved will find us and we will find our beloved.

 

Sociologist Tony Campolo tells the story of giving a guest lecture at an elite, all women’s university in the East, Vassar or something like that.  He was asked to talk about traditional marriage, and he was in favor of it.  However, during the question and answer session that followed his talk, these bright, sophisticated, feminist young women started to challenge Tony, who says, “They were bright, and they were good.  And I was going down!  But then I remembered a story.  A husband had just lost his wife of 54 years to illness.  The man and his three adult sons gathered to bury their beloved wife and mother.  They had the funeral and the reception at the church, and at the end of the day returned home together where they sat on their front porch looking out across the land.  No one spoke.  Finally, after the sun had set, the man stood up and said to his boys, “Well, it’s been a good day.”  None of the boys thought it was a good day.  Finally one of the sons had the courage to ask his father, “How can you say it’s been a good day?  We just buried mom.”  “Yes,” replied the father, “and because we did we saved her the pain of having to bury me.” 

 

Love that deep does not happen overnight.  Love that deep endures the ups and downs of a relationship and perseveres.  Love that deep grows slowly and blossoms fully only over time.  And when we see love like the man and his wife shared for one another we must say: not only is love better than wine, but true love, like fine wine, improves with age.

 

Now that is a hopeful word!

 

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