Sunday 2 September 2018

The Beauty That Calls Us (Song of Songs 2:8-13)


(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on September 2, 2018, Proper 17)



Sacred Sounds

In our world, some sounds are sacred.  Voices, notes, tones that set our hearts to leaping, that call us to self-abandonment.

The recess bell.   When it rings, the school shakes from inside.  Then the door opens and erupts with children.  They run this way and that, nearly losing it, kicking balls, playing chase, climbing the jungle gym, running to meet their friends in the shade of tall trees—all of them in love with life.

The dinner call.  When my mom opens the back door and calls out, “Dinner,” my brother and I grab the soccer balls and scramble through the door and kick off our shoes still tied and run our hands through an obligatory ten seconds of water and soap and then take our seats, where glasses poured with cold milk and plates filled with food await us—and we are suddenly hungrier than before.

The whistle.  When its sharp ring pierces the waiting air of the playing field, the players lose their worries and then lose their breath—and before long, a fortunate few among them who are “in the zone” will lose themselves completely.

The ring tone.  When its familiar melody anonymously announces a caller, the young soul awakens from the tedium of the everyday and fumbles for the phone in anticipation, hoping against hope that the name on the screen will match the name of their love—and when they see the name, the day is suddenly filled with new life and possibility and adventure.

The recess bell, the dinner call, the whistle, the ring tone—just a few sacred sounds among many.  When they reach our ears, they raise us.  They move us.  They fill the world with beauty and goodness and new life.  They call us out of ourselves.

A Song of Love

The Song of Songs is a scandalous song.  Not once does it mention God by name.  Instead it sings shamelessly about human love.  How it ever made it in the Bible is a mystery.  To this day, scholars debate the reasons that the ancient rabbis included this earthy love poem in their scriptures.

Of course, ever since its inclusion, the rabbis and priests both have done their best to censor this love song by making it into a metaphor.  This song is really about God and Israel, they say, or about Christ and the church.  Certainly the song can be read that way.  But I wonder if it’s not even stronger if we read it simply as it is.  Perhaps it need not mention God because its story somehow is the story of God.  Is that not what John said centuries later?  “God is love.”  Love is how God moves in the world, including how God moves between two human lovers.

But is love only a matter of romance? 

Today’s scripture begins with an incomplete sentence, a sort of surprised exclamation: “The voice of my beloved!” the woman proclaims.  Moments later, she shares with us what her beloved says: “Arise, my love…and come away.”

Isn’t this the call of love?  A call that excites us and raises us up and entices us to abandon ourselves and to go away into the world?  Isn’t this the same call as a recess bell or a dinner call or a whistle? 

Three Beautiful Places Where We Are Called

And don’t we all hear this call?  Maybe for us it’s no longer as obvious or immediate as a particular sound that sets our hearts to leaping, that throws us into self-abandonment, like a bell or a whistle or a ring tone.  Maybe we hear the call in the lower, subtler registers of a particular place or a certain situation.

In the Greek, the word for beauty, kalon, appears to have come from the word for call, kaleo.  In other words, the ancients believed that beauty is what calls us.  (Which sounds to my ear like the truth we have already touched on, that love is how God moves in our world.)  If we reflect for a moment on where we are drawn most deeply to in this world, on what sets our hearts to leaping and leads us into self-abandonment, I imagine that we might find ourselves thinking about matters of deep beauty and joy.

Of course, it is easy to miss the call of beauty.  Caught up in our own plans and programs, our thinking in terms of business and this-for-that and what’s most effective, we sometimes miss the beauty right before our eyes—a sunset, a child, a gratuitous gesture of compassion.  So a couple of years ago, our church intentionally set aside some time and space to reflect on its deepest joys.  There were three places that I heard over and over again: tables, both the worshipful one here in the sanctuary and the messy ones over in the fellowship hall and at Deep Run Park and wherever else we might gather; small groups, like Bible study groups and the choir who gathers every Wednesday; and visiting with the needful, as when we sing carols with the shut-ins or take bears to the hospital or give to the homeless. 

Tables, small groups, and the needful.  Three beautiful places to which we have been called as a church.  Here is where God’s love has moved us.  Here, we have encountered a deep beauty and joy.  I am not talking about the superficial kind of excitement that we might compare romantically to a crush, which is an excitement more often than not selfish in its nature. I am talking about a deep and abiding joy that draws us out of ourselves, a breathless sense that we have happened upon the most precious thing in the world, what matters most.  This is the beauty of the bed-ridden holding a teddy bear and praying tearfully with people who care.  It’s the beauty of multiple voices becoming one and singing melodies and harmonies and lyrical words that express what no lesson or lecture ever could.  It’s the beauty of difference and disagreement gathering around the same table in peace and love.

Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

And is it any surprise?  These three places are where Christ promises us he will be.  The table, where he says “Remember me” and “I will meet you again here” (Luke 22:16-18); small groups “where two or three are gathered” (Matt 18:20); and the needful, for “as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me” (Matt 25:40).

Jesuit priest and poet Gerald Manley Hopkins once wrote that “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”  Perhaps this is another way of saying that these three Christ-haunted places are everywhere, that there is no limit to the ways that we hear the call of the beautiful, “Arise, my love…and come away.” 

Next week when we meet in the fellowship hall for worship, we will pray and ponder how the call that we hear as individuals lines up with our church’s sense of call to tables, small groups, and the needful.  I would wager that wherever you hear the call of Christ, which is also the call of the beautiful—that wherever you see Christ “lovely in limbs…and eyes not his”—it is not too far from a table, or two or three others, or a person in need. 

Prayer

Beautiful Christ,
Whose call to us
Raises us to new life
And draws us into the world:
As bells and whistles
Rouse the hearts and bodies
Of children,
So may your voice
Excite and entice us
To take the risk of faith—
To rise and go away
On your adventure of love.  Amen.


No comments:

Post a Comment