God in Love

On desire and the call to "come away" | Proper 17, Year B

“Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.”

—Song of Songs

“But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers…”

—The Epistle of James

“Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

—The Gospel of Mark

Song of Songs-Last by Aharon April

In his book, Contemplative Youth Ministry,

Mark Yaconelli

tells the story of visiting a Presbyterian session to help them with their youth group. Yaconelli began by asking each member why they were part of the church. The answers were typical—family, community, faith. One man echoed the general sentiment by saying that he brought his family to church so that his kids would learn some good morals, to which Yaconelli replied, “have you considered scouting.”

I’ve always appreciated that story, because it boldly hits at one of the greatest errors of our faith. Church, and the life of discipleship are not about becoming a moral person, a good citizen, a contributing member of society. The Boy Scouts or Ethical Society can provide those. Our call, instead, is to be in love.

Perhaps this is why the Bible includes, among its many books and genres, a steamy love story replete with face flushing metaphors for anyone who takes the time to really read them. Our selection for this Sunday only includes a tiny hint of the Song of Songs, but even here, as we listen to one of the most extensive female voices in all of scripture, we get a taste of the passionate longing of any love worth having. And though I want to avoid taming this scripture through allegorization, I think that in the desire of these lovers we find a pointing to the Love behind all loves.

To be a great Christian is to be a great lover. That has been true of the saints, and many of them fumbled through the failed exploits of merely human love before they discovered the higher passion of offering themselves to God. St. Frances was a romancer of women before he proclaimed that he would be a troubadour, a poet of love, for the sake of Christ. St. Theresa was a wild youth whose “passionate, ideal nature,” as George Eliot put it, “demanded an epic life.” She had such a life, not through traditional romance, but in intense, ecstatic prayer. Each of these saints reflected that longing heart, that another romantic, Saint Augustine, said is “restless until it rests in [God].”

But love, as we know, is hard to maintain. Passion fades along with its ecstatic energies if they are not cultivated through practice. Love can grow richer and deeper, or it can fade into a regiment of technique and control. This, it seems, was the situation with the Pharisees who confronted Jesus about his disciples’ unclean hands. These Pharisees were a dedicated group of rabbis who were meant to devote themselves to the long-running love between God and his people. But that love had devolved into a jealous policing of the borders rather than a passionate seeking of the beloved.

Those borders were no small matter. To clean hands or not was a mode of resistance, a way of defining who God’s people really were against the pagan occupiers who had “defiled” the land. Washing hands became a kind of identity marker, not unlike mask wearing during the pandemic, as the pastor Doug Lee helpfully points out. While there were often prudent and good reasons to wear masks, they soon became a kind of symbol that marked a political and social identity that extended far beyond their utility, just as not wearing them also marked an identity. What was lost in the battle of these groups was the object of real concern—health.

And so it was with the Pharisees. They had become so focused on external identity markers that they had lost the real purpose of their call as the people of God. As the prophets had repeatedly warned, God cares little for the externals of sacrifice, the keeping of Sabbath, the giving of tithes, and so on if they are not rooted in an act of love. God wants hearts and it is from the heart that love comes. Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, in other words, that if they really want to be the people of God, then they should tend to their hearts, turning them toward God’s ways of mercy and love. Without that tending, cultivating the desire for God in the deepest places of our being, the heart can become an ugly thing, a source for all sorts of human misery.

The answer to this challenge, then, is not a religion focused on the externals of morality, of being an upright and decent person. We shouldn’t be part of a church as an identity marker; a dour routine by which we demonstrate that we are among the good people. Our faith is about the cultivation of the heart—a drawing forth of love. As Yaconelli told that gathering of Presbyterians: “Christian faith is about following Jesus; its about falling in love with God. It’s about becoming so transparent to the Spirit of God that you are no longer sure which actions are your own and which ones are God’s.” That is the language of a lover.

Such a reality doesn’t come from the head. It doesn’t happen by some mental ascent, or living out the expected symbols of the in-group. Just coming to church or reading your bible, don’t cut it either. There are plenty of mean, impatient, vindictive people who know the bible inside and out, and never miss a Sunday service. Instead, our hearts have to be drawn with the longing love of eros toward God, and from that longing the self-offering love of agape will flow from us into the world.

James is getting at this when he writes to the church: “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.” “Word” here is logos, that same term used by John to describe the reality of Christ. What we are called into is the dynamic flow of God’s love, a love whose river is the living water of Christ. By being doers of the Word, we are participating in that flowing life and love; we are enacting the way of Christ in the world not out of duty, but as the ready expression of the love in which we have immersed our whole being.

“Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves,” writes

James K.A. Smith

. “He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings.” How do we begin to move those wants, and loves, and longings into the flowing river of Christ’s way?

We could begin by listening to that call to the beloved in the Song of Songs: “come away.” Love requires time, it requires space, it takes stepping away from the normal rhythms of the world so that all noise fades except for the voice of the beloved. This is why one of the fundamental practices of Christian life has always been regular and deliberate times of solitude—extended times when we free ourselves from all voices except for God’s.

When I offer couples pre-marital counseling, the best advice I can give them is that they need to find daily time to sit and be together in unhurried conversation. The pastor John Mark Comer echoes that, adding that he and his wife have a household discipline of a having weekly date, and a quarterly weekend away. It is that time, daily, weekly, yearly that builds and sustains their love. And it is no different in our relationship with God. Daily we need time for unhurried conversation, weekly we need longer periods for the cultivation of our love, and at regular intervals over the year, we need retreats where we can be alone with God. It is through this coming away that love will grow and be sustained; it is through that love that we will be able to live into the dynamic offering of ourselves through God for the sake of the world. Love of God always turns us toward love of neighbor—those near ones we encounter, down in the ditches of life.

What the world needs now isn’t more morals, more enforcements of the borders of clean and unclean, in or out. What we need are lovers, people so drawn toward God that they move their lives into ever deepening communion with their beloved. It is from that loving communion that the world will finally find its healing; it is from such love that new life will be born.