Community Church Sermons
September 3, 2006
I enjoyed that reading! Very much so! Did you? I especially enjoyed watching some of your faces while it was being read. Some, who ordinarily doze off during the scripture/sermon time, seemed suddenly to be wide-awake! I think I saw some skeptics out there become believers! And some believers got a look of great concern across their faces as if to say, “What is a reading like THIS doing in a worship service at the Community Church?” Or better still, “What is a reading like THIS doing in the Bible?”
You have to hand it to the organizers of the revised common lectionary! Every once in a while, they serve up a doozy of a reading among the passages assigned for a particular Sunday. And this one is a doozy! I will bet you, though, that most churches that use the common lectionary will pass right over this passage from the Song of Songs today. But not us! We’re sticking with the lectionary today!
The Song of Songs – or Song of Solomon as some of you learned it - is an R- Rated poem celebrating the beauty of love in all its erotic wonder. The passage we read is one of the milder, less graphic parts of the poem. Two lovers virtually dance across its pages, peeking at each other from behind the latticework, bathing for each other in perfume, coming together in the night for the highest expressions of ecstasy. Elements of nature are used euphemistically to describe their body parts and their sensuous responses to each other’s overtures. This is one hot book of the Bible!
And its the book that single handedly saved my 1992 Confirmation class!
I was responsible for the seven or eight adolescent boys in the class and they weren’t much into religion. They were in the class primarily because their parents made them attend, and the boys made it perfectly clear that they were not happy about that! They were not very cooperative and refused to do their homework. So I did what anyone who is a parent would do. I bribed them.
I told them I would reward them if they did their work. They wanted to know what the reward would be. I told them to open their Bibles to the Song of Songs. They weren’t buying it. So I opened my Bible to the Song of Songs and read the first four verses in a rather dramatic voice.
They giggled. “No way! That’s not in there!” they said, with funny smiles spread across their pubescent little faces. I showed them the actual words. Their eyes were wide open.
“You do your work, and we’ll read from this every week!” I said.
That turned out to be one of the best Confirmation Classes in the history of the world! One of the mothers said to me, “I can’t believe how you’ve gotten Jimmy to love his Bible! He reads it every night before he goes to bed!”
Now some theologians in the past,
needing to spoil the eroticism of the poem by giving it a theological cold
shower, say that the poem is really just an allegory describing God’s love for
Israel, or Christ’s love for the Church. Not so. It really does not work that
way structurally, and the prevailing view today is that the Song of Songs is a
work of wisdom literature and that it is wisdom’s description of an amorous
relationship between a man and a woman. The commentary in the New International
Version says, “The Bible speaks of both wisdom and love as gifts of God, to
be received with gratitude and celebration…the Song is a linked chain of lyrics
depicting love in all its spontaneity, beauty, power and exclusiveness –
experienced in its varied moments of separation and intimacy, anguish and
ecstasy, tension and contentment. The Song shares with the love poetry of many cultures
its extensive use of highly sensuous and suggestive imagery drawn from nature.”[1]
This is a poem that simply celebrates the goodness of love.
During the month of September, Tim and I are building a series of sermons about what it means to be a healthy Christian. In this first installment, I want to make the point that healthy Christians build their lives on the foundation of a healthy religion.
We don’t have to look very far in this world of ours to see unhealthy religion, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, even agnostic or atheistic religion. Charles Kimball has a “must-read” book called, “When Religion Becomes Evil” in which he describes five warning signs of unhealthy and potentially destructive religious elements: absolute truth claims (mine is the only true religion and everybody else can go to hell); blind obedience (the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it); establishing the “ideal” time (trying to bring about the end of the world by manipulating history, or trying to establish millennial governments like the Taliban tried to do); the end justifies any means (scare kids to death to get them to accept Christ, blow up an airliner to get ourselves to heaven); declaring holy war (9/11, holy jihad, blowing up abortion clinics). These are my characterizations of Kimball’s warning signs, but I think they illustrate how religious ideas can become extremely destructive and perpetuate terrible evil.
There is a lot of unhealthy religion in our world, and some of it has infiltrated each of our lives.
So what does this have to do with the R-Rated poem called Song of Songs? I suppose we could say that it is better to make love than to make jihad. But that is not really the point of the poem.
The Song of Solomon, instead, tells us to celebrate the GOODNESS OF LIFE! Here are a man and a woman so in love with each other that they look at this world of ours and all they see around them is beauty! Listen:
“See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.”
Do you remember how beautiful the world suddenly became when you fell in love?
Healthy religion begins with the conviction that GOD is good, and therefore that LIFE is good, and PEOPLE are good, too! And healthy religion – because it is a religion founded upon GOODNESS – sends people out to BE good, and to DO good.
But there is a problem here for many of us. If you are a person like me, who grew up with a religious orientation that begins with the idea that the world is fallen, that people are sinners, and that faith is about achieving a right understanding of God – that is, that what you BELIEVE is the test of your life rather than how you LIVE – then it will be hard for you to adjust to this radical concept that healthy religion sees GOODNESS as the basic building block of faith.
I was called to the hospital one night to baptize a stillborn baby. I will never forget the sight of a young twenty-something year old mother sitting in a rocking chair cradling her dead baby in her arms, tears running down her cheeks as she tried to sing a lullaby. The young husband was beside himself, not sure what to do with himself in the moment. But when I came into the room, he almost ran to me and took my hand, and cried, “Thank you for coming. Thank you for baptizing our baby. Losing her is bad enough. We could not bear the additional pain of knowing she went to hell if she wasn’t baptized.”
That was not the time or place to argue that theology. I just baptized their baby and tried my best to assure them that their baby – and they – were embraced in the love of God. But after I left the hospital, I got into my car and just there for a while. How could anyone lose sight of the goodness of a baby and think that a good God would ever consign such an innocent to hell?
Bad religion. Unhealthy religion. It’s in many of us. We grew up with it. And it causes us to see all the bad, all the reasons why God ought to destroy life rather than save it, and transforms the God of goodness into a God who is capable of extraordinary cruelty and evil. Send a baby to hell. My Lord, how could we imagine such a thing?!
And this unhealthy religion is in the Church. Landrum
Shields, one of our Community Church ministers in Indianapolis was telling a
story about a similar though slightly different circumstance. A young teenaged
girl had a baby out of wedlock. She went to her church to ask for a baptism,
but the church said, “No.” They didn’t baptize illegitimate babies. She
went to another church and another and another. No one would baptize the child
for a wide variety of reasons – she didn’t belong to their church, she needed
to be married, etc., etc. Then one day, Landrum says, in the big church
downtown, you could hear the “Clop, clop, clop,” of her shoes echoing through
the sanctuary as this young girl carried her baby down the center aisle, from
the back of the church to the front of the church, all the way to the baptismal
font where she dipped her trembling hand into the water and baptized her
baby herself!
The Church is afflicted with lots of unhealthy religion. Sometimes it takes little teenaged mothers of babies born out of wedlock to show us what healthy religion looks like.
Healthy religion clings to the goodness of God, and celebrates the goodness of life, and cherishes the goodness of people, great and small!
And healthy religion – because it is built upon the foundation of God’s goodness - busies itself with doing good.
In the early days of the Christian Church there was a big debate over what it meant to be faithful. Some argued that faithfulness had to do with believing things. Others held that faithfulness had to do with how you lived. The opinion that won out integrated the two. By our faith, we will be driven to do good works. And by our good works, we will demonstrate our faith.
So in the epistle of James we are taught, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after widows and orphans in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
Look after widows and orphans in their distress. Give cups of cold water to the thirsty. Help the poor. Feed the hungry. Visit prisoners. Healthy religion is expressed by doing good.
I don’t know if you noticed it or not, but there was an
obituary in the newspaper not long ago that announced the death of an elderly
lady who lived in Lenoir City and was a member of St. Thomas Church. In the
obituary, it said that one of the great joys of her life was to be a part of
the Kindred Spirits group at the Community Church – our church. And then it
said something like this, “Thank you, Guffy Pidd and Marian Smith for all
you did for mom.”
Healthy religion! I sent Guffy and Marian notes this week to tell them how proud I was of them, and what a great compliment that little line in the obituary was to them, to our church, and to God.
Healthy religion builds itself on a foundation of the goodness of God, it celebrates the goodness of life, and it cherishes the goodness of people. Healthy religion busies itself with taking care of widows and orphans, and all God’s creatures. Healthy religion produces people who do GOOD -people like Guffy Pidd and Marian Smith who give God a good name, and are the kinds of Christians the world needs.
Healthy Christians have healthy religion. And today, I challenge you to find the health that comes from the goodness of God.
First, go from here today and celebrate the goodness of life – live it fully – squeeze every drop of goodness out of it – find the good in others and draw it out – and give thanks to God for all God’s goodness!
Second, go and practice goodness. Be good. Do good. Let goodness flow from your life just like goodness flows from God.
And finally, go home and spice up
your life! Read your Bible! I suggest you start with the Song of Songs!