A Love Song

Song of Solomon 6:1; 1 Kings 18:20-29

Robert M. Watkins

8:30 am Service, April 22, 2007

 

The Song of Solomon is the only love poem in the Bible and it is indeed a deep celebration of human love, relishing in the physicality and desire inherent in the love shared between a man and a woman. Often this makes Song of Solomon one of the least read and seldom preached books in the canon.

 

There is, however, another way of reading the book. Back in the 12^th Century, there lived a mystic named Bernard of Clairvaux. He was a monk who devoted himself to prayer and contemplation and composed some of the most poetic reflections on scripture ever written. In one such work, this ancient mystic reinterprets the Song of Solomon not as a text on human love, but as a parable for the relationship between Christ and the Church, a symbol of the love God has for God’s people.

 

In a time such as this when violence rips through a school and the world seems drenched in bloodshed, this interpretation affords us a way to respond from depth of our faith to the calamity unleashed all around us. Taken mystically, the question posed in Chapter 6, Verse 1 of the Song becomes the central question—

          Where is your beloved?

We can hear the world asking, “Where is God when chaos reigns? Where is God when the innocent die?”

 

It is a fair question. It is a question that we within the community of faith cannot shirk or pretend is simply a cynical response from a cynical world to what it views as a hopelessly irrelevant stance. It is a reasonable question for an insane time—where is your beloved? How can the God who ordered chaos to make creation be invoked when chaos rules?

 

Images of horror always beg the question.

 

I inadvertently stumbled on the tragedy at Virginia Tech Monday afternoon. I had come in from taking Perry to his guitar lesson and flipped on the television to “Pardon the Interruption,” one of my favorite sports talk shows. The mood, usually light and flip, was somber as Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon, veteran columnists from The Washington Post, opened the show by saying, “In light of events today at Virginia Tech, our topics from the world of sports seem completely irrelevant…”

I immediately switched stations to MSNBC and saw the ubiquitous scrolling of the names of the dead at that bottom of the screen while the anchor jumbled through the still sketchy details of a mass shooting in Blacksburg, Virginia.

 

Where is your beloved? How can anyone say God abides when such terror erupts in place as quiet and still as Blacksburg, Virginia? Maybe images from Baghdad or Gaza no longer carry such weight—but Blacksburg, Virginia? Where is your beloved?

 

It is the same question that runs through a story about the prophet Elijah. Elijah was called by God to critique the reign of King Ahab and his queen Jezebel. They were leading the people Israel far from the rule of Yahweh, so Elijah appears to call them back. At one point, the beleaguered king has grown sick of Elijah and threatens him with death. Elijah responds by challenging the king’s prophets to a contest, a battle of wills. They will build an altar and offer sacrifice upon it, but they will not set fire to it. That will be up to the god invoked. Whichever god responds will be revealed as the true God. The king’s prophets pile up the altar and set about the rites and rituals prescribed, but nothing happens, not even a spark. Elijah taunts them and asks, “Where is your god? Has he turned aside?”

 

I cannot tell you what the actual meaning of the Hebrew is here on Sunday morning in the sanctuary, but basically Elijah is asking if the prophets’ god had to excuse himself. So, too, might the world be asking us, “Did God have to excuse himself? How else do you explain what happened? How else can you proclaim God in the face of evil that has touched so many in an instant?”

 

Where is your beloved?

 

The ripples of evil are amazing. It as if a metaphysical tsunami has washed through the world. The violence in Blacksburg has rippled to touch families hundreds and, indeed, thousands of miles from there. We have felt the ripples here as one of the murdered students came from Martinez. Folks within our congregation know his family. The ripples have flown as far as South Korea as a journalist from that country wondered aloud what the effect would be on the relationship between Koreans and Americans, since the murderer was Korean.

 

The event has united us with people all over the world who deal with violence and bloodshed. We are suddenly one with families in Iraq and Afghanistan and Darfur. Children have died for no reason other human madness.

 

Where is your beloved?

 

The truth of the matter, though, is we have an answer. Our answer comes from something we say nearly every Sunday without much thought or care—it is simply a routine part of our worship.

 

Every Sunday we affirm our faith and almost every Sunday we use one the most ancient statements of faith that we have, the Apostles’ Creed. Within that creed comes a statement that makes some people of faith extremely uncomfortable. In fact, it makes some folks so uncomfortable that they edit the creed before using it within worship. The statement comes in the second paragraph, the one dealing with the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, and it says—and he descended into hell…

 

What does that mean? Why would anyone make that statement a part of a confession of faith?

 

Because of events like those we have witnessed this week. Hell broke loose on the campus of Virginia Tech. Hell on earth erupted on a cold spring morning.

 

The creedal statement tells us that Christ was there. Where was your beloved? Jesus Christ was there as hell broke loose. He descended into the maelstrom. He was there with all who suffered and died. He was there with all who were terrified beyond reason. He was there. He was there with the power of redemption. He was there with the promises of resurrection. The evil was human, but the comfort, the hope, the healing that began as students and professors clung to one another, as a community bound itself up, as they held one another and wept, that came from Christ. A light shone within the darkness.

 

I was struck by one story in particular from the day. One of the professors who died was a survivor of the Holocaust. He died shielding his students from the gunman by blocking the door so they could escape through the windows. This was a man who had seen evil that none of us can imagine. He had seen the complete and total depth of depravity that human beings are capable of. He had seen it and yet he responded. He responded by protecting those in his care from the touch of evil. He died so others could live.

 

Does that strike you as ironic? The man was Jewish and yet acted in accord with Christ’s descent into hell. That should not seem odd in the least. Our God is a God of all and for all. Christ descended into hell for all of humanity, for all human beings. The professor revealed that love in his actions. He had been through hell and was determined to keep his students from passing through it.

 

In the end, Christ asks no less from all of us. The only appropriate response we can make to the evil we have witnessed is to respond as Christ has done. We are to respond in love. We are to seek out those who are lost. We seek out those who are in pain. We are to seek out the suffering. We are to bind up the broken and we are to stand for life in a world of death.

 

In this way we counter the power of evil and we stand for something more.

 

We also answer the question of the world—where is your beloved? We answer with the affirmation that God is wherever there is someone in need, whatever that need may be, however great that need may be. Where is God? Right there.

 

Amen.