Good for Evil (Gen 37:3-8, 17b-22, 26-34; 50:15-21)

Preface

I imagine you’re familiar with those lists of infelicitous church bulletin bloopers—you know, like “Don’t let worry kill you, let the church help!” or the announcement that a minister had recovered from illness, which said, “God is good! Our minister is better.” Perhaps you’re wondering if today’s sermon title is worthy of joining their ranks. “Good for evil”? To the unsuspecting ear, it might sound a bit like saying, “Hooray for evil!” Rest assured, that is not what I intend to say at all. But rather than clear up the meaning straightaway, I’d like to preserve an element of suspense a bit longer. My hope is that by the end of my message, the meaning will be unmistakable.

Special

If there’s one thing I learned in Sunday School about Joseph, it’s that Joseph is special. He’s Jacob’s miracle child, the unexpected son of Jacob’s beloved, late wife Rachel. He wears a special robe that his father gives him, a robe that singles him out as his father’s favorite son. But perhaps most special of all is his gift of dream interpretation. If Joseph is the eventual hero of the story, then dream-telling is his special power.

All of this is true, and yet it is only the superficial truth. If this is how we see Joseph, then we see no deeper than the robe that he wears. Joseph is special–but not only because of his father’s favor, not only because of his special ability. More than any of that, Joseph is special because he is born in the image of God. The divine breath fills his lungs. Which is all to say, Joseph is just as special as you or me or any one of his brothers. The danger of a Sunday School reading is that Joseph’s special robe and special gift of dream-telling cover up this deeper truth. Joseph is special because he is a child of God.

Evil for Evil

And here’s why this deeper truth matters. If Joseph is a child of God, he certainly doesn’t act like it at the beginning of the story. To start, he lords his favored status over his brothers, repeatedly bragging about dreams in which they bow down to him (Gen 37:5-10). A superficial interpretation might point out that Joseph’s dreams come true. But the deeper irony is that they come true not because of Joseph’s character but in spite of it. In other words, the eventual happy ending results not from Joseph’s boastful character but from a gradual transformation of character wrought by God’s patient grace (which we’ll explore in a moment). 

In the middle of the story (which our scripture selection omits), after Joseph has been sold into slavery by his brothers and endured thirteen dark years of servitude and prison and nine more years of life away from home, he finds himself suddenly and unexpectedly with the upper hand over his brothers. They have come to Egypt looking for food, and Joseph, who has risen through the ranks to become Pharaoh’s second-in-command, meets them. They do not recognize him, but he sure recognizes them. And he puts them to the test, speaking harshly to them, subjecting them to false accusation and imprisonment. Some biblical commentators make the case that he effectively makes them endure all the hardships that he has had to endure as a result of their original mistreatment. In other words, he responds “an eye for an eye.” He returns evil for evil.

Conformed to the World

I don’t mean to judge Joseph. On the contrary, I can sympathize with his motivations. After years of suffering at the hands of his brothers, uncertain if they have changed and can be trusted, Joseph makes what many of us might consider to be a pragmatic response. I only mean to observe that, according to Jesus’ insistence that God is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” Joseph here does not resemble the child of God that he is (Luke 6:35). He is not merciful like his heavenly father (Luke 6:36).

We might say instead that Joseph is, to use Paul’s language, “conformed to the world” (Rom 12:2). That is, he’s following suit. He’s behaving according to the pattern passed on to him by his parents and grandparents and prior generations all the way back to Cain and Abel. One way to read the book of Genesis is as one long history of fraternal rivalry and violence. It seems that no family is big enough for even two brothers. Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob. The details of each episode differ, but the larger pattern holds. Insecurity, envy, and competition erupt into a violent anger that destroys the relationship, if not mortally then emotionally. No two of these brothers end up living in the same land.

Transformed

But if Joseph is conformed to this pattern initially, something changes along the way. Because he and his brothers do reconcile and end up living together, miraculously reversing the pattern of their ancestors. I am particularly struck by how, in their final scene together, Joseph’s brothers approach him as the prodigal son approaches his father. Both the prodigal son and Joseph’s brothers feel the full weight of their guilt and shame. They expect some sort of recrimination and therefore throw themselves on the ground as slaves. But just as the loving father receives the prodigal son, Joseph brushes aside his brothers’ groveling and gladly receives them as the family that they are.

Of course, in Jesus’ parable, the loving father is actually a model for God. Which is to say, whereas before Joseph returned evil for evil and did not resemble his father in heaven, here he has become like God. He resembles his father in heaven, who is kind to the wicked (Luke 6:35), who returns good for evil (Rom 12:21). There is a subtle little bookend that poignantly highlights Joseph’s returning good for evil. At the start of the story, we’re told that the brothers cannot “speak peaceably to him” (Gen 37:4). But at the story’s end, we find Joseph nonetheless “speaking kindly to them” (Gen 50:21).

Joseph is special. Not just because of the coat or the dreams. He is special most of all because he is a child of God, born in God’s image, filled with God’s spirit. At the beginning of the story, it was hard to see, as Joseph had been conformed to the pattern of the world, the pattern of an eye for an eye, evil for evil. But over the course of the story, he is, to use Paul’s language, “transformed by the renewing of his mind,” so that his will becomes aligned with God’s will (Rom 12:2). He begins to live like the child of God that he is; his mercy resembles the mercy of his father in heaven (Luke 6:35-36).

Acting Like God

“How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity” (Ps 133:1). So the psalmist declares, having caught a glimpse of God’s grand reconciliation project, which Jesus called the kingdom of God. In today’s scripture, we catch a glimpse of this ourselves. God’s reconciliation happens when people imitate their father in heaven and return good for evil. Of course, we see this most fully in Jesus. But it’s encouraging for me to see echoes of it elsewhere, to see that we can indeed be transformed from our patterned, kneejerk reactions of an eye for an eye, evil for evil.

In fact, what may be most encouraging for me in today’s story is that there is no obvious, pivotal moment of transformation in Joseph. Rather it seems to have been a process. But there is one constant across the Joseph story that I think is fundamental to Joseph’s transformation. Periodically the narrator stops and mentions that God was with Joseph. I think that through the course of his travails, Joseph gradually wakes up to the reality of God’s presence. And as he increasingly puts his trust in the God who is with him, he becomes secure. The fraternal competition and revenge that previously fueled his eye-for-an-eye, evil-for-evil behavior no longer makes sense. He finds his security not in personal victories and control, but in God. Which is a great thing by itself, but even greater because it enables Joseph to begin acting like God himself. With no need to win or prove a point, he can open his arms in embrace—like the father of the prodigal son, like God Godself. He can return good for evil. A child of his father in heaven, he can be a part of God’s grand reconciliation project, the kingdom of God.

Prayer

Merciful God,

Whose patient love is working in us and in our world,

Reversing generations of trauma

And centuries of hurt:

Ground us, like Joseph, like Jesus,

In the assurance of your steadfast presence,

So that we might become more like you

And faithfully bear your image in our world.

Encourage us and guide us

To be ambassadors of your reconciliation.

In Christ, who returns good for evil: Amen.

A Starry-Eyed Faith (Gen 15:1-6)

The Promise of the Future

I remember being seventeen and gathered with a handful of friends one Friday night, a couple of us leaning on the trunk of a car, others sitting on the curb in a neighborhood cul-de-sac not far off Pump Road. We had been playing video games to pass the time, but it seemed that video games could not hold our attention when there was something much bigger looming ahead of us all.

The sky that night was as flush with stars as our hearts were with the future. College was less than a year away. It felt as though a cosmic-sized door were about to open, spilling before us untold possibilities–the careers we might pursue, the people we might meet, the places we might go.

I don’t remember a single word spoken that night. It’s just as well. We were all shooting in the dark. What I remember was the feeling of promise. As much as we had enjoyed our lives so far–and, the drama of a teenager’s existence notwithstanding, I imagine we’d all mostly enjoyed our lives–it felt somehow as though life was only now beginning.

An Unlikely Dreamer

At eighty-five, Abraham (we’ll call him by his eventual name) is long past any youthful sense of possibility and promise. Whatever doors had once been open to him, they have one by one been shut–just as it seems, for example, that his own wife’s womb has been shut. Abraham is now an old man without child, an immigrant far from home, at the mercy of foreign rulers and their policies, dependent each year on a good harvest. Abraham is on the bottom rung of the ladder, and at this stage he is too weak to climb.

All of this to say, Abraham is worlds away from where I was that night when I was seventeen. It is true that he has received promises from God, promises of land, descendants, and blessing. But as an eighty-five year-old nobody in a strange land, these promises seem more and more like a pipe dream, and Abraham is honest enough to say so. If we are to praise Abraham for his faith, as we so often do, it seems imperative that we also appreciate his honest doubts, because they are what immediately precede his legendary show of faith. They are the unlikely road to faith. In today’s passage, he twice voices his misgivings, one after the other without any space for God to respond in between. The impression of this eruption is of pent-up grievance no longer able to contain itself.

When God can finally get a word in, God responds with neither an explanation nor proof of power. Instead God simply invites Abraham outside and says, “Look up at the stars” (cf. Gen 16:5). And somehow, suddenly, Abraham is standing beneath the same sky that I stood beneath when I was seventeen. His heart is flush with the future. However many doors had been shut, that many more had suddenly opened up. 

A Model of Faith

In his letter to the Romans, Paul holds up Abraham as the original model of faith (cf. Rom 4). Abraham’s “own body,” he says, “was already as good as dead” (Rom 4:19); yet Abraham believed in the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17). According to the example of Abraham, then, faith is not the natural feeling of promise and possibility that a privileged teenager feels when the world’s doors open wide before them. Faith, rather, is seeing a world of closed doors and trusting that God can open new ones. Faith is sitting beneath a night sky of stars as an eighty-five year old…and feeling like you’re seventeen, like life is just beginning. (Perhaps this is what the Psalmist means when he says the Lord regularly renews our youth [Ps 103:5]?)

But the incredible thing about Abraham’s faith is that it sees promise not only on the horizon of his own future. His faith concerns the fate of the world. God had promised that all the families of the earth will be blessed through Abraham and his family. To put this more simply: Abraham is the beginning of God’s grand reconciliation project. Paul says in his letter to the Galatians that the blessing God had promised Abraham finds its fulfillment in Christ (Gal 3:14, 16), which is another way of saying that Abraham’s faith is a precursor of Christ’s. When Abraham gazes up in wonder at the stars, he catches a glimpse of what Christ sees in its entirety, namely the promise of the kingdom of God. This is why Paul says (and John the Baptizer says it too!) that to be a true child of Abraham is not a matter of blood but a matter of seeing God’s promise, a matter of having faith in what God is doing (cf. Rom 4:16-18; Luke 3:8). 

Becoming the Blessing

In Abraham, we see the beginning of what God is doing in Christ. What God is doing in all of us who have faith. It is no more a mistake or coincidence that Abraham is a nobody in the backwaters of the ancient world than that Jesus is an itinerant, homeless rabbi and an eventual criminal convicted and executed by the Roman Empire. This is how God works. This is how God’s grand project of reconciliation happens, believe it or not. Not with force from above. Not through the halls of power. God’s power is not of the sword but of the cross. It is not force but faith. It spreads not through edict but through example.

This is the meaning of God’s promise to Abraham in its most basic form: “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing” (Gen 12:2)–or as it might be more literally translated, “I will bless you…now be a blessing.” Abraham will not be a mighty man who makes things happen. He will be a model–or what Jesus calls “salt” and “light” (Matt 5:13-16). God does not talk about what Abraham will do or accomplish but about who he will be. “You will be a blessing.” It’s not on Abraham to make things happen. We might say that at eighty-five-year-old in a strange land, that ship has sailed. It’s only on Abraham to be faithful to God, to trust God and follow God’s guidance. That, our scripture concludes, is what God considers “righteousness,” a word elsewhere translated as “justice.” Abraham’s faith, his faithful way of being, is God’s justice. It is how God is reconnecting the world, making it a better place.

In Abraham, we catch a glimpse of the peculiar truth of Christ that the end is not achieved through some other means–for example, that peace is not achieved through violence, or that love is not bought with gifts or secured through beauty. The peculiar truth of Christ is that the end is itself the means. (Peace is achieved only through peace. Love is achieved only through the selfless commitment of love.) In other words, Christ does not announce the kingdom of God and then say, “Here are the means we need to bring it to earth: lobby the nearest senator, get Caesar on God’s side, maybe sharpen your swords, and then we can employ the wealth and force of empire to establish God’s justice on earth.” No, Christ announces the kingdom of God and then begins to live the kingdom of God. By his way of being, Christ shows us the kingdom of God. 

In the same way, at the very beginning of God’s reconciliation project, God calls Abraham: “Now be a blessing.”

Old Age: A Blessing or a Curse?

For some people, old age is a curse. The loss of control, right? 

But for others, like Abraham, old age contains an invaluable blessing. For Abraham, the loss of control becomes an invitation to trust. With a body “as good as dead” (as Paul puts it so decorously!), Abraham puts his faith in the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17). And so it is that Abraham could stand under the stars as an eighty-five-year-old and feel like a seventeen year old–except that instead of imagining all the things that could happen to him, he is now trusting in what God will do through him.

Prayer

Holy God,

Who calls into existence the things that do not exist:

Lead us in the footsteps of Abraham,

Who was honest about his feelings and his doubts;

Who let go of control;

Who trusted your insistence

That blessing spreads through our way of being.

Lead us into the life and faith of Christ,

Whom we seek to follow,

In whose kingdom we seek to live,

And in whose spirit we pray: Amen.

Lost Connection (Gen 2:4b-7, 15-17; 3:1-8)

The Loneliness Epidemic

One year ago, the United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a warning that our nation is suffering gravely from a new epidemic. Not opioids. Not vaping. Not a particular substance or behavior. Something less visible and therefore all the more insidious: loneliness.

He tells the story of a patient who won the lottery. This man “had worked for years in the food industry with a modest salary and humble lifestyle. Then he won the lottery. Overnight, his life changed. He quit his job and moved into a large house in a gated community.”

But as he sat across from his doctor, “he sadly declared, ‘Winning the lottery was one of the worst things that ever happened to me.’ Wealthy but alone, this once vivacious, social man no longer knew his neighbors and had lost touch with his former co-workers. He soon developed high blood pressure and diabetes.”

I imagine this man as having become the king of a lonely kingdom, surrounded by every comfort and convenience, plugged into an array of virtual entertainment networks, having food delivered at the click of a button. Maybe that’s an exaggeration of what actually happened, but I imagine it captures the nature of his experience. Richer materially but poorer relationally. Connected to devices but disconnected from reality. Afforded every pleasure, but sick to the soul.

Of course very few of us will ever win the lottery. The loneliness epidemic is not a matter of suddenly coming into money but rather a gradual distortion that has permeated our society. Prophets have been warning us for years. Nearly four decades ago, Neil Postman published his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), a prescient analysis of how the television was turning politics and religion into show business, transforming our social discourse into a matter of personal entertainment, where the concern is not what makes us well but me happy. Fifteen years later, Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone struck a chord with many readers. Putnam’s research revealed a steady decline in community life. Whether we were bowling or dining or working, we were doing it—more and more—alone.

It is difficult to identify a single culprit responsible for our loneliness epidemic. Is it an unrelenting working culture, where relationships are sacrificed for advancement? Is it materialism, that is, a spirit of greed that misidentifies happiness with having things instead of being in relationship? Is it technology and the lure of control, the ability to point and click on a screen and get whatever we want, so that we all become little emperors of our own lonely empires?

Original Connection

“If you want to know where you’re going, you’ve got to know where you’ve come from.” So an old saying goes. To understand our loneliness epidemic and how we might live well in its midst, it may help to remember first wherever we’ve come from.

According to the creation story of Genesis 2, we are kin. Kin to the earth. Kin to other creatures. Kin to one another. Kin to God. This is perhaps more evident in the Hebrew. The first human, adam, is formed from the earth, adamah. Thus, a more faithful translation for “human” would be “earthling.” We are made from the earth. And we are made for the earth. God puts the human in the garden “to till it and keep it,” or more literally “to serve it and protect it” (Gen 2:15). The earth is not a resource to be used and discarded, but a close relation to be cared for, even as it cares already for us.

Similarly there is a linguistic link between humanity and the animal world. Both are referred to by the same Hebrew expression, nephesh chayyah, “living being” (Gen 2:7, 19). (Interestingly, most English translation make an artificial distinction between humans and animals by translating this one phrase as “living being” for human but “living creature” for animals.)

Man and woman are ish and ishah. (You can hear the connection.) While traditional interpretation holds that man came first (and some readers have taken this interpretation further to reflect man’s superiority), the ancient rabbis point out that the specific word for man, ish, only appears after the rib has been removed from the adam. In other words, at first there is a genderless adam, and only after the divine surgery do we get ish and ishah, “man” and “woman.” (And to put to rest the other argument for man’s superiority, namely that woman is created as a “helper” and is therefore somehow secondary, one need only look elsewhere in scripture to see that the same word for “helper” is also applied to God. In this light, the word “helper” would suggest, if anything, woman’s superiority.)

Of all humanity’s connections, our kinship to God may be the most neglected, the most forgotten. When we read in the gospels that Jesus hears a voice on the banks of the Jordan, declaring, “You are my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased,” our reflex is to think that this is a proclamation that sets him apart, when in fact it is part of the very gospel, the very good news, that he has come to proclaim. We are each and every one of us beloved sons and daughters of God, his breath within us, his favor upon us.

Genesis tells us that God’s creation is good. Every day, God looks upon God’s work and sees that it is good (cf. Gen 1). But there is one thing that is not good in God’s eyes. “It is not good,” the Lord God said, “that the man should be alone” (Gen 2:18). Even though this pronouncement is pointed toward the lack of a particular connection, namely that between two flesh-and-soul bonded persons, it suggests a basic principle of God’s creation. Isolation, or disconnection, is not good. We are deprived of life to the extent that we are disconnected. Whether from God, one another, our fellow animals, or the earth.

Sin as Epidemic

If creation is good, and its goodness has to do with connection, then “the Fall” tells the tragic story of disconnection. It all starts with the craftiest of animals, the serpent, who suggests to the woman that she may eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the one tree from which God has forbidden the humans to eat. (And let it be noted that the woman’s husband is standing passively beside her, equally complicit in whatever follows.)

What exactly is the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Some readers think its fruit confers the ability to distinguish between good and evil. (To my thinking, this would be a bit odd, as it would seem to suggest the humans are otherwise incapable of making the distinction. How then could they be held responsible for doing wrong, for eating from the tree?) I find more compelling the suggestion that “knowledge of good and evil” is really just a way to say “knowledge of everything.” In other words, just as the biblical writers say “heaven and earth” to refer to the breadth of the universe (heaven and earth and everything between), so they might say “good and evil” to refer to the breadth of human experience. In this view, the tree would simply promise its eaters more knowledge. And as we like to say, knowledge is power. Thus the real lure of the tree is to be in control—or as the serpent says, “to be like God” (Gen 3:5). (As shrewd a manipulator as the serpent is, I have to wonder if he hasn’t already eaten from the tree himself.)

If the exact nature of the tree is in any doubt, the consequences of eating from it certainly aren’t. There is hiding and shame. There is finger-pointing and blame. The man accuses the woman, and the woman accuses the serpent. And then there are the consequences that God soberly outlines, not—I would suggest—as arbitrary punishments but as the natural consequences of their chosen behavior. Their shame and blaming now manifests as antagonism: between man and woman, human and creature, even humans and the earth from which they came. They are now, in a word, disconnected.

It is common today to think of sin as an individual stain on our soul, tragically inherited from our most ancient ancestors. But as it is depicted in today’s story and throughout much of the Bible, sin is not a defining mark against an individual but an event of disconnection that has a domino effect on all the world around. Sin disconnects. It is not a pollution of the soul so much as it is of the waters in which we all swim. We might call sin an epidemic.

God’s Project of Reconnection

“If you want to know where you’re going, you’ve got to know where you’ve come from.” There are endless ways we could summarize the story of where we’ve come from, which is the story of creation and “the Fall.” In the midst of our loneliness epidemic, here’s how I would summarize it. God made us intimately connected with all creation and with God as well. It is good to be connected. But our lust for control disconnected us from all the goodness of God’s creation. 

And that story continues today. We ravage the earth for its limited resources. We fight others to get our way. We reach for the skies through our advancing technologies and forget the God whose breath dwells within us. When we prioritize control, we forfeit connection. What seems good to us, “a delight to the eyes” (Gen 3:6)—whether that’s money, power, or prestige, all of which promise control—ends up separating us from what is actually good. As the Surgeon General’s lonely patient lamented, “Winning the lottery was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

Today marks the beginning of a year-long journey through the biblical story from creation to the kingdom of God, following the roadmap of the Narrative Lectionary. As we look back to where we’ve come from, we perhaps gain a clearer sense of where we’re going. Just as the story of the Fall is bigger than our individual soul, so too the story of salvation. If sin is indeed an epidemic of disconnection, then what else is salvation but a grand project of reconnection? Paul puts it like this: “Through [Christ] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross” (Col 1:19-20). The salvation of Christ is the reconciliation—or reconnection—of all things. And we who are reconciled, who can appreciate this divine project of reconnection, we are invited to join in the work. God has given us, Paul says, “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18). 

If the prospect of universal reconciliation seems daunting or unlikely to us, it is possible that we are looking at things through the faulty lens of control, thinking reconnection is a result that must be carefully engineered. But the good news that we see in Christ is the opposite. We are not in control. We are not meant to lord it over others. Instead, we are already in God’s care. All that we are invited to do is to extend that care to others. As we will see next week in Abraham, God’s way of reconciliation is not calculating or grandiose. It’s quite simple. It happens one person at a time.

Prayer

Tender God, 

Whose reconciling embrace we know in Christ,

Calibrate our hearts to be like yours, 

To value peace more than understanding,

Love more than knowledge,

Connection more than control.

Make us ambassadors of your reconciliation,

In Christ, who makes peace, bearing the cross instead of the sword: Amen.

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

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 nearly flies off its hinges 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.  Years ago, my mom opens the back door and calls out, “Dinner,” and 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 aware of our hunger.

The referee's 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 that blessed place known as “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. They all cry practically the same invitation: “Arise!” They raise us up to new life. They call us out of ourselves.

The Greatest Song Ever: Love (or “God”)

The Song of Solomon (or by its Hebrew title, “The Song of Songs,” which really means “The Greatest Song Ever”) is a scandalous song.  Not once does it mention God by name.  (“The Greatest Song Ever” doesn't even mention God!) Instead it sings shamelessly about human love.  How it ever made it into 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, 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 when we read it simply as it is.  Perhaps it need not sing God’s name when everything it sings is intimately a part of God. Didn't John say, centuries later, “God is love”? The entire song, then, is about God. Perhaps naming God – stating the obvious – robs the song of its allusive power. Perhaps just as explaining a joke ruins the punchline, stopping to theologize the experience of love kills the mood. Rather than name God, the Greatest Song Ever simply looks God in the eye and says, “You are beautiful.”

More than Romance

But is love only a matter of romance? Certainly romance is the focus of the Song of Solomon. The entire book is a back-and-forth dialogue between two lovers. In the catalogue of ancient love songs, the Song of Solomon is unique in this, in giving both participants an equal voice.

I wonder, though, whether romance is the central meaning of the song or just the vehicle for expressing the wonders of a love that is even bigger than romance. What strikes me about the song is that the two lovers are not just enamored with each other but with the world. In the six verses that we read today, all five senses are engaged. Sight – the flowers appearing on the earth. Taste – the fig tree putting forth its figs. Smell – the vines giving forth fragrance. Sound – the voice of turtledove singing in the land. Touch – the rain over and gone, fresh air awaiting the lovers outdoors.

I'm reminded of a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez, in which love is described not as a collapsing into the other person but as an opening up to all the world:

I unpetalled you, like a rose, 

to see your soul, 

and I didn’t see it. 

But everything around

 —horizons of lands and of seas—, 

everything, out to the infinite, 

was filled with a fragrance, 

enormous and alive.

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, whether the love is romance or a playground friendship or a parent-child bond or teammates sacrificing for each other?  Isn't love a call that excites us and raises us up and entices us to abandon ourselves and to go away into the world, into the infinite, which is filled with a fragrance, enormous and alive?  Isn’t it part of what is heard in that sacred recess bell or ring tone or referee's 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.  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’s smile, a gratuitous gesture of compassion.  

Here, I find some help from the church. There are three places where people at church seem most alive to me, most joy-filled, most connected. Tables. Small groups. And time shared with the needful. I suspect that in these places can be heard the same cry we hear in our scripture: “Arise…and come away” into the wide and wonderful world.

Tables, small groups, and the needful. Here is where the church encounters its calling, a deep beauty and joy.  I am not talking about the superficial kind of excitement that we might compare to a romantic crush or obsession, 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 hand and praying tearfully with someone who cares, knowing that they are not alone.  It’s the beauty of multiple voices becoming one, whether in the sharing of honest experience or the singing of songs that express what no lesson or lecture ever could.  It’s the beauty of difference, even 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.”  

I wonder where you hear the call of beauty. Where Christ calls to you, “Arise…and come away!” Having grown up in a religious environment, I sometimes have trouble hearing the call myself. Instead I hear all of the oughts and shoulds – pious expectations instead of God's unique call to my heart. I fear that following them is fruitless in the end if I'm being false to the person God has called me to be. My suspicion is that while the actual call of beauty and joy may seem to be quite trivial – maybe it's “just” toward your back garden or the dog staring up at you – it contains within it a pathway into all the world, which if followed faithfully leads us into the abundant love and life of God's kingdom. 

…And if you're still wondering where you hear the call of Christ, which is the call of beauty, and you need a clue to point you in the right direction, I would wager it's not too far from a table, or a small, honest gathering, or a person or creature 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 risky adventure of love.  Amen.