Year B Proper 17: Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away
A
Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark
Song
of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
The
Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge
When St. John of the Cross, the 16th
century poet, priest, mystic and monk was being administered last rites on his
deathbed at the tender age of 49, he interrupted the proceedings with a
hoarsely whispered request. “Please,” he begged, “read me the Song of Solomon.”
The Song of Solomon is passionate,
sensual love poem that uses the figure of the lover and the beloved to portray
the relationship between the individual soul and God. So often, in our
meritocracy-based, do-it-yourself culture, we think that the spiritual life is
just another thing we can master with a little elbow grease. If we buckle-down
and get serious, set our house in order, we think we can storm heaven by our
own efforts. In the thrall of what some people call the ‘self-improvement
industrial complex,’ we think that the spiritual life must be like everything
else—something we do to achieve an end (peace, happiness, imperturbable calm,
whatever) we have in mind.
The Song of Solomon, however, reminds
us that while this approach might work for losing a few pounds at the gym, or
learning to knit, the spiritual life is a little different. Instead of
ourselves and our efforts at the center, the Song of Solomon reminds us that
the spiritual journey is really all about what God is already doing in our
lives. I’ve been watching a strange show called Preacher recently where
the main character—a Texas preacher named Jesse Custer—is looking for God. It
turns out that the guy with the white beard who the Preacher thought was God is
actually an two-bit community theatre actor, and that nobody in heaven has seen
God for quite some time. God’s AWOL and loose in the world.
The word on the street is that God
likes jazz, so the Preacher, his reformed hitman girlfriend, and his Irish
vampire sidekick set off for New Orleans to check the clubs. Like Nietzsche’s
madman who walked through the market place with a lantern at high noon asking
everyone if they had seen God, the Preacher and his gang of misfits frequent
one dive-bar after the next asking, “Have you seen God?” only to be laughed at,
spat at, and thrown out their ear.
This, I think, is how we think of the
spiritual journey. We look for God in place after place (sometimes in bars,
sometimes in fancy cars, sometimes in beautiful faces or far away places), but
the whole time God has been right under our noses. The pearl of great price,
the treasure buried in the field, has already been gifted to us. “The implanted
word,” is what the Epistle of James calls it. It’s not so much that we
seek God, but that we are sought by Him. The journey is not so much a journey
to different place, but an arrival to a place we’ve always been seeing it as if
for the first time. “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our
exploring/Will be to arrive where started/And know the place for the first time”
as T.S. Eliot writes in “Four Quartets.”
The Song of Solomon figures this by
representing God as leaping and bounding like a stag or a gazelle over the
hills towards the speaker—rapping at the window panes and peering through the
lattice. God is always coming to us the poem wants to remind us. It’s not that
we so much need to search for Him, but allow ourselves to found by Him—found in
Him and through Him. When we stop searching outside of ourselves for happiness
on our self-fabricated terms and turn towards what has always already been the
case—God’s presence within us through the Indwelling Holy Trinity—our winter
turns to spring, the rains clear off and instead of the sound of our own
muttering we hear the song of love, the song of our belovedness cooing like a
turtledove. The illusion of our separateness from God burns off like morning
mist and we find ourselves resting like Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham.
The interesting thing, however, is
that the journey to where we already are does require us to “Arise and come
away.” If the spiritual journey is about coming home, about realizing that we
are already home, that there is nowhere to go, and the freedom that is born
from living from our belovedness and welcome into the very life of God, what
can it mean to “arise and come away?” Come away from what?
Part of the reason why St. John of the
Cross interrupted the dutiful priest administering last rites and asked for the
Song of Solomon to read on his deathbed is that, as a Doctor of the Church and
master of the interior life, he knew that the journey to where we already are
is all about leaving behind our images and stories—stepping into that bare,
open, and empty place where we might God as God is. We are narrative creatures.
We thrive on stories. They provide shape and coherence to our lives and help us
navigate the world. The trouble is, we too often take our images and stories
about ourselves, the world, and God, as simply the way things are. We mistake
the map for the territory and think that the world is simply what we think it
is.
“Don’t believe everything you think,”
the bumpersticker declares, and we chuckle to ourselves. But beneath the joke
is a profound truth—one that St. John of the Cross would agree with. When we
disidentify with thoughts, when we “arise and come away” from the prison that
over-identifying with thought builds, a whole new freedom arises. A freedom
from the stories about ourself, others, and God that keep us locked away in a
winter of discontent.
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come
away,” is a call to see our stories of separateness for what they are—thoughts
we take to be the final picture of how things are—and to open our hands and let
them go. Often getting curious and having a light touch about our stories helps
us to see their constructed nature and allows us to let them naturally
deconstruct and come unraveled. “I wonder where I got the idea that I’m a
miserable failure,” we might ask. “I wonder why I always feel like God is a
policeman and I’ve just been pulled over for doing 30 mph in a school zone.” “I
wonder how I arrived at the idea that eternal life is a reward for good
behavior that I get when I die?” After a while, begin to see the simple but
transformative reality that we have thoughts, but we are not our thoughts. You
are not your thoughts. Other people aren’t your thoughts and them. God isn’t
your thoughts about God.
Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees
contains within it the same call to “arise and come away.” By not using hand
sanitizer, Jesus and the disciples provoke the Pharisees into seeing the ways
in which their “human tradition,” their over-identification with rules and
regulations generates an exploitive system of clean and unclean, insider and
outsider that is at odds with the radical welcome and indiscriminate
hospitality of God who embraces all. The Pharisees and Scribes run around
trying to tell God how to behave while God in the Flesh tries to point out that
the God they are trying to make present through the observance of their rules
is actually already here and doesn’t much care for hand-washing!
In his Ascent of Mt. Carmel, St. John
of the Cross has a little illustration of the Mount depicting the soul’s ascent
to union with God. The curious thing is that he describes the way up the
mountain as the way of dispossession, the way of “nada”—nothing, or no-thing—and him describes
the top of the mountain as nada as well. St. John of the Cross is no nihilist,
so something else must be going here. He’s pointing out our tendency to box God
in, to box ourselves in, to box others in through believing in our stories.
Nada, nada, nada, is a gentle purgative—a way of helping us to open our
grasping hands that we might receive the gift that given in each moment, and
arrive at the place we started and discover it for the first time.
Nada, nada, nada, is the way of
openness, receptivity, and surrender that lets God be God and stops telling him
to pare his fingernails and wash up for supper. Nada, nada, nada, is the end of
all our struggle, our frantic efforts to create ourselves according to some
image or standard we’ve inherited from parents, teachers, church, or nation.
Nada, nada, nada is the permission to let ourselves simply be, to enjoy the
sheer giftedness of our being without agenda—no one special to be, nothing
special to do. Nada, nada, nada, is the bracing gospel freedom, the unending
life in Christ, that burbles up when we live without an iron-clad story. It’s
in coming to nothing that we suddenly hear the turtle doves’ song of our
belovedness cooing in the depths of the heart all along and we realize that
we’ve spent our time listening to bad talk radio with ourselves as host, guest,
and caller.
My prayer for us this week is us to
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.” My prayer is that we might come away
and find yourself already home, the illusion of separateness melting away,
welcomed by the one who bounds over the hilltops to greet you. My prayer is
that in letting go of our images and stories of ourselves, others, and God we
might realize and live from the staggering truth that we lack for nothing, that
right here, in this place, just as we are we are standing on Holy Ground.
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