The Time of Singing

Message for worship at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 11th of Fifth Month, 2025

Speaker: Brian Young

Scripture: Song of Solomon 2:8-13

Photography by Eugenia Mills

Good morning, Friends!

8 The voice of my beloved!Behold, he comes,

leaping upon the mountains,bounding over the hills.

9 My beloved is like a gazelle,or a young stag.

Behold, there he standsbehind our wall,

gazing in at the windows,looking through the lattice.

10 My beloved speaks and says to me:“Arise, my love, my fair one,and come away;

11 for lo, the winter is past,the rain is over and gone.

12 The flowers appear on the earth,the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtledoveis heard in our land.

13 The fig tree puts forth its figs,and the vines are in blossom;they give forth fragrance.

Arise, my love, my fair one,and come away! Song of Solomon 2:8–13, NRSVUE

The time of singing has come, and the flowers appear on the earth! It is a most precious time of year, for anyone who loves being outside. Here in Richmond, the early trees

—the redbuds, and the magnolia in front of the meetinghouse—are done flowering, and are leafing out. But in our yard at home, the flowers of our pagoda dogwoods are just about at peak, and they’re buzzing with scores of bees and flies and wasps, all of them doing their important work of pollination. And in the flowerbeds, the columbine and the violets and the golden alexander are all showing off.

Most of you know that Stephanie and I are birders, so for us the time of singing is especially exciting—I know it is for some of you, too. This is the season when all of the migrants are returning... and so yesterday was the “Global Big Day” for birders, when birding organizations were encouraging everyone to get out, identify some birds, and report what they see. Stephanie and I stayed close to home and just walked over to Clear Creek Park, but we had a couple of good sightings. But our friend Nathan Sheets isn’t here with us today because he and a crew of fellow Earlham staff are on a birding road trip that will take them as far north as Winnipeg, Manitoba! I hope they’re getting a good birds-per-mile ratio, because that’s a lot of driving (it’s also a fundraiser for the college, which I’m sure will avail to much).

The writers of the Song of Songs knew that their winter had ended when the migratory turtledove came back to their land. But here in Richmond, we have the chipping sparrow, the goldfinch, the field sparrow, and the gray catbird. All of these summer residents have been here for a few weeks, and we’ve been hearing them in the trees and the hedgerows. And just in the last ten days or so, the warblers and the vireos have been coming through: the yellow and the yellow-rumped and the chestnut-sided warblers, and the studious blue-headed vireo, with his spectacles on.

Each of these returnees is a bright-feathered gift, each kind singing their particular song or peculiar call. They are, of course, calling to one another, but I feel like they call to Stephanie and me, too, saying, “Oh, get up, dear friends, our beautiful lovers—come to us!” The time of singing is indeed most precious.

Now—I’ve begun here by relating to the background of the poem that is our text for this morning, from the Song of Solomon, also known as the Song of Songs. I do not mean to ignore the human figures in the foreground; for they are the ones who hear the call of the turtledove, who see the bright faces of the flowers, who smell the fragrance of the vines. And yet they are most concerned for one another. The passage that we’ve heard together is generally understood to be the voice of a woman, thrilling to both the sound and the sight of her beloved. She speaks of how her beloved calls to her as he bounds over the hills, peering through the windows of her dwelling, bidding her come away with him.

These two figures in the foreground are the two main voices in the Song of Songs. But make no mistake—their bodies are there, too. And for that reason, we don’t often read from this part of the Bible. This collection of Hebrew love poems is amazingly frank in its depiction of sexual desire and physical love (if you know the Song, you know that there are other passages that are much more frank than this one—and if you don’t know it, check it out...) So this, of course, poses a problem of interpretation—certainly for the preacher, and maybe also for the reader. What do we do with all this sexy love poetry?

Prior to the modern period, almost all interpreters of these poems spiritualized the sensual imagery. They constructed allegories that made the Song’s love relationship in some way about God's love for humanity, and humanity’s response to God. This had begun by the first century of the Common Era, around the time of Jesus. Jewish interpreters generally made the male lover into the Lord, and the woman into Israel, reading many of the details of the Song as parts of Israel’s history. So in our passage, the rabbis saw the woman as a figure of captive Israel in Egypt, and her beloved as God, leaping over the years of slavery as he comes through the mountains, peering in through the windows to see the blood of the lambs slain for the Passover; here, the call to the woman, “Arise, my love.. and come away” is God's call for Israel to come out Egypt.

Christian interpreters continued and expanded on this tradition. The second-century writer Origen used the end of winter in our passage as a metaphor for Christ's resurrection. Some medieval writers were especially keen on the Song of Songs: Bernard of Clairvaux, Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross. And especially, there’s Mechthild of Magdeburg, a German mystic nun whose sensual but spiritualized writings were heavily influenced by the Song. For these writers, the man usually figured as Christ, and the woman either as the Church or as an individual soul, as with Mechthild.

So the allegorical interpretations of these mothers and fathers in the tradition, while incredibly imaginative and creative, negate what appears to be the clear sense of the text, and that is somehow unsatisfying. And yet, the Song is in the Bible—it’s part of our group of sacred texts—it seems inadequate to say it's sexy love poetry, and that's all it is. So we need (I need) a way to understand it theologically—does it tell us something about God, and about ourselves as beings created in God's image?

Many of you have heard me say that I am a “both/and” person. I seldom choose one option over another if there is some way that both options can coexist. I think that applies here. So perhaps one way to think about the Song is in terms of analogy rather than allegory. The Hebrew poets sing of the passionate attraction between two human lovers. In what ways is that love like God's love? In what ways is the sexual attraction of two people like the regard that God has for each one of us?

Many of us we have probably heard of the distinction between agape and eros—the first is God’s love for humanity, and the second is sexual love like what is described in the Song. Many preachers make the case for the superiority of the first over the second. That isn’t really what I want to do here, today. Rather, I want to suggest a few ways that these two kinds of love are like unto one another. This has to do with what I will call sacred intimacy.

First, I think intimacy is integral to spirituality. Spirituality is all about relationship with the Divine. Relationship implies intimacy and vulnerability. The more intimately I allow God to know me and I come to know God, the deeper my spirituality becomes. And intimacy figures in our human community as well: the more deeply we allow ourselves to know one another, the deeper our collective spirituality becomes, and the closer we grow to God, together.

Second, we have all heard the voices decrying the ways that sexuality has been debased and coarsened in our culture. In response, some advocate for a greater collective sense of sexuality as a sacred thing. We might not all necessarily agree with every implication of this response—for example, this call could far too easily lead to further restrictions on women and their ability to chart their own life outcomes and care for their own health. But I think it is clear that our culture has lost a sense of the sacred in this area, and that we somehow need to reclaim it at a spiritual level.

The late author, pastor and teacher Eugene Peterson wrote about this issue of intimacy as he saw it in the Song of Songs, in one of his many books; Peterson wrote:

All horizontal relationships between other persons, when they achieve any degree of intimacy at all, are aspects of sexuality. All vertical relationships with persons of the Godhead, when there is any degree of intimacy at all, involve prayer. And since there are never instances of merely horizontal relationships and never any solely vertical relationships—we are created in both directions... both sexuality and prayer (or either sexuality or prayer) can be used to explore and develop personal relationships of intimacy. Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work

So intimacy with God is thus made from the same stuff, the same energy, as intimacy with other people. Pursuing intimacy in our horizontal relationships is the same kind of work as pursuing it in our vertical relationships. It is in this sense that an intimate relationship with God can be like the passionate, all-consuming relationship of the lovers in the Song.

I do realize that human love changes, going through phases as a relationship develops. Passion like that described in the Song cools. Sometimes love's streams deepen and run into new channels where previously they were too frothy to go. Sometimes the streams dry to a trickle. Should we expect the same of God's love, or of our love for God?

When it comes to God’s love, I am reminded that the word that is perhaps used the most in the Bible to describe God’s love is steadfast. There’s actually one Hebrew word, chesed, that in English we need at least two words to represent properly—so it is often translated “steadfast love,” or sometimes “loving-kindness”. Steadfast, loving-kindness, love that stands for each of us, present all of our lives through, available in each moment as we turns our hearts towards God’s heart. In my own life, I feel like I have discovered just a few of the riches of this love, and that there can only be more to experience.

This brings me back to birding for just a moment, if you’ll allow me: birding, like any pastime, can be taken on and pursued with a variety of motivations. For some, it can be almost like hunting; “we bagged 25 species in one hour...” It can acquire the sense of

competitiveness that permeates so many other aspects of our culture. Instead—at least at this stage of my life—I hope to approach each day I go birding as an opportunity for wonder at God’s creation (even if all I see that day are starlings and pigeons and house sparrows). With this frame around it, each moment I am out listening and looking is an opportunity to experience the loving-kindness, the steadfast love, of God.

Friends, we live in a time when it is far too easy to become estranged—estranged from the people we love the most and the things that matter the most. The constant firehose of bad news on the national and international scale is overwhelming. The fear that so many marginalized people in our society have—of having their rights taken away, of being deported without due process, of having their personhood denied under the law—these fears seem more and more justified each day. Many of us know people in these various conditions, and we fear along with them. All of these pressures can inhibit our intimacy, estranging us in our relationships with our beloved ones, and in our relationships with God. Perhaps you are feeling this sense of estrangement today.

In the midst of all of that, let’s remember the sacred intimacy that we are called to, with one another and with God. As we focus on that intimacy, may we come to a place where we can all testify...

to the time of singing, to the flowers appearing on the earth,

and the vines in blossom that put forth fragrance, on the other side.

And may we hear the voice of Our Beloved, saying, “Arise, my loves, my fair ones, and come away.”

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